9Feb

Photovoltaic nanoshell “whispering galleries” trap light for more efficient solar cells

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Photovoltaic nanoshell whispering galleries trap light for more efficient solar cells

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For those unfamiliar with the term, a “whispering gallery” is a round room designed in such a way that sound is carried around its perimeter – this allows a person standing on one side to hear words whispered by a person on the other. Now, scientists from Stanford University have developed a new type of photovoltaic material, that essentially does for sunlight what whispering galleries do for sound. Not only does the material have a structure that circulates light entering it, but it could also result in cheaper, less fragile, and less angle-sensitive solar panels.

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9Feb

Singlet Exciton Fission Solar Cells from Cambridge 44 Percent Efficient

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Singlet Exciton Fission Solar Cells from Cambridge 44 Percent Efficient

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by Ovidiu Sandru

A team of scientists at the University of Cambridge have developed a new kind of solar cell which uses a phenomenon called “singlet exciton fission” to extract two electrons with the energy of a single photon hitting the semiconductor. Currently available silicon solar cells can only extract one electron, so this would give solar cells a 25 percent boost in efficiency.

Cambridge’s new solar cell has been named “hybrid,” and its creators say it’s able to achieve a 44 percent efficiency, 10 percent higher than what the most cutting edge technology can, 34 percent.

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8Feb

Concentrated Solar Startup Sets a New Efficiency Record

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By Kevin Bullis

Semprius, a startup that makes miniscule solar cells capable of capturing concentrated sunlight without costly cooling systems, announced this week that it had made the world’s most efficient solar panel.

The company’s solar panels use tiny solar cells made of gallium arsenide—the record-breaking solar module contains hundreds of such solar cells, each about the width of a line drawn by a ball-point pen, arranged under lenses that concentrate sunlight 1,100 times.

Gallium arsenide is far better at absorbing sunlight than silicon, the material used in most solar cells, but it’s also more expensive. Furthermore, although concentrated solar modules use less semiconducting material, they usually require expensive optics, cooling systems, and tracking systems to keep them aimed at the sun. Semprius’s microscaled solar cells are inherently much better at dissipating heat, making them cheaper.

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3Feb

Stanford pioneering a wireless electric highway

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Stanford pioneering a wireless electric highway

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Stanford researches may have solved the problem of range anxiety by wireless charging technology that could one day create an electric highway.

Wireless recharging already is used by some electric vehicle charging stations to fill up batteries without cords or plugging into an outlet. MIT helped pioneer this technology and spun it off into a wireless charging startup, WiTricity. However, Stanford researchers improved on this concept and devised a way to transmit 10 kilowatts of electric power across a 6.5-foot distance with minimal energy loss. By overcoming transmitting electricity across a significant distance, researchers will make it possible to pave a highway with wireless conduits that can provide addition power to EVs and let them operate indefinitely.

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19Jan

HydroSpin uses water flow inside the pipes to generate electricity

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HydroSpin uses water flow inside the pipes to generate electricity

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There is an exponentially increasing demand for clean water especially in those places, which do not have efficient electric supply like remote locations or big, crowded cities where water pipes are running under the ground. This urgent need of online monitoring is not met by the alternatives such as solar panels and other renewable energies. Although, hydroelectricity, i.e. energy production by water has been a successful accomplishment in the past, the markets are still void of efficient products. As a solution to this problem, an Israeli company HydroSpin Monitoring Solutions Ltd. has successfully developed a micro-generator known as Hydrospin that produces energy by monitoring the water flow inside the distribution pipes.

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3Jan

Germans Trialing House that Produces Enough Spare Energy to Power a Car

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If this doesn’t sound like a dream come true, I don’t know what does. The German government is testing a new design for a low-energy home packed with renewable energy generation systems, dubbed the Efficiency House Plus. If the design works as it should, it’ll not only produce enough electricity to meet all its own needs, but it’ll produce enough spare juice to charge a family car.

The 1400-square-foot house generates all this power using a combination of solar panels and heat storage systems. At the same time, advanced energy management technology helps keep consumption down and ensures the house’s energy use is in line with what the energy of the weather provides. As SmartPlanet reports:

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21Nov

World Bank Group Co-Finances Morocco’s Ouarzazate 500 MW Solar Thermal Power Project

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World Bank Co-Finances Morocco's Ouarzazate 500 MW Concentrated Solar Thermal Power

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The World Bank approved $297 million in loans to Morocco to support construction and operation of Morocco’s 500-megawatt (MW) Ouarzazate Concentrated Solar Power (CSP) plant, one of several large scale solar power projects in various stages of planning or development across the solar energy rich Middle East-North Africa region.

Upon completion, the Ouarzazate parabolic trough CSP plant would be one of the largest CSP plants in the world. A group of seven international lenders has committed $1.435 billion dollars to build and develop the project. Ouarzazate is seen as a key milestone for Morocco’s national Solar Power Plan, which was launched in 2009 with the goal of deploying 2000 MW of solar power generation capacity by 2020.

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21Nov

World’s Lightest Material is a Metal, Could Be Used for Making Better Batteries

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A newly invented material could revolutionize many industries at once. Discovered by a collaborating team from three U.S. universities, the metal is the lightest material ever discovered – so light it can actually sit on a dandelion. The new material’s density is 0.9 milligrams/cubic centimeter, and Styrofoam, one of the lightest so far, is 100 times heavier.

The lightweight metal has been engineered at nanoscale level, so that the “micro-lattice” of interconnected hollow tubes contains 99.99 percent air, and only 0.01 percent solid. The tubes’ wall thickness is 1,000 times thinner than human hair

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19Nov

Secret to Facebook’s green data center? Water misters

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Secret to Facebook's green data center Water misters

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by Martin LaMonica

Facebook’s state-of-the-art data center houses awesome amounts of computing power, but the biggest technical challenge has been the air handlers.

The company said today that its Prineville, Ore., data center received LEED gold certification from the U.S. Green Building Council. The power usage effectiveness (PUE) rating varies between 1.06 and 1.1, making it a data center that consumes about half what a building simply built to code would use.

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19Nov

How to build a solar heater with recycled cans

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Although we have witnessed different yet not so eco friendly mediums to generate heat for the home, adopting the route to building a solar heater out of pop cans may sound even more productive. Utilizing recycled cans for the formation of an efficiently devised solar heater is not only a free source of heat for your place, but also a great way to reuse those scrap and trash materials lying around. Right from complementing the compact size of your house’s window to making it considerable enough to heat an open area, accumulating those frittered away cans may now be creatively employed for a solar heater. However, you need to know that the size of the heater basically determines how much of each component you require. Here, we are providing you with step-by-step instructions on how to build a reliable, large solar heater that’s about 6 to 7 feet tall with recycled cans.

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