MIT Researchers Find a Way To Make Solar Panels from Grass Clippings

What if generating solar energy at home required little more than mixing some grass clippings with inexpensive chemicals? That’s exactly what MIT researcher Andreas Mershinhas found to be the case. The scientist says creating a solar cell could be as easy as mixing any green organic material (grass clippings, agricultural waste) with a bag of custom chemicals and painting the mixture on a roof. Once the efficiency of Mershin’s system is improved, this type of solar technology could make cheap energy available in rural places and developing countries where people don’t have access to affordable energy. Read on to see a video of Mershin’s findings

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Stanford pioneering a wireless electric highway

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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Nissan unveils energy-efficient Nichio Maru car carrier

With large cargo freighters being a major source of CO2 emissions worldwide it’s been encouraging to see various efforts to make such vessels more efficient. In recent years we’ve seen the development of the world’s biggest container ship to cut CO2 emissions per container moved, air bubbles used to cut the friction between a ship’s hull and the ocean, and even plans to return to the use of sails to cut fuel use. Now Nissan has launched an energy efficient coastal car carrier called the Nichio Maru that employs solar panels, LED lighting, a low friction hull coating hull and an electronically controlled diesel engine to cut fuel consumption.

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A Wave Power Generator with a Twist It Generates Electricity On Dry Land

A relatively new* type of reciprocating wave-powered electricity generator called Searaser has been developed and is moving forward. Searaser, acquired by Ecotricity, is not a typical wave power plant.

The first peculiarity is that it does not generate electricity out at sea. Due to the fact that waves move up and down in the ocean, they can continuously move a float attached to a reciprocating pump that can pump water through a water-powered onshore electricity generator for the sake of keeping the electrical parts of the system out of the water.

As Damian Carrington of The Guardian notes, its is a bit like an aquatic “bicycle pump.”

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ArrayPower_x220

As solar panel manufacturers try to harvest more of the sun’s energy for less, they face increasingly diminishing returns. At roughly $1 per watt, the cost of solar modules now represents less than a third of the total cost of commercial solar installations. To cut the total cost of solar power—currently $3.00 to $3.50 per watt—bigger gains will have to come from improvements in the power electronics, wiring, and mounting systems required for solar installations.

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Solar powered homes that will compete in Solar Decathlon Europe 2012

Environmentally friendly homes can reduce inhabitants’ carbon footprints, save resources and lead the way for others to live the same way. Most of us, however, have been living in homes that are pretty standard, in that they don’t help us reduce our carbon footprints. The US Department of Energy has been trying to further green living in terms of homes and has been organizing the Solar Decathlon for a while now. The international competition is a biennial event that challenges 20 college teams to come up with conceptual homes that utilize solar energy. The teams get to work on site, detailing their prefabricated houses for 10 days in a bid to take home the Solar Decathlon title. 2012’s competition is set to begin and we’re eager to see who wins the coveted prize.

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First Solar-Powered Electric Car Charging Stations Open in Sofia, Bulgaria

This month, A1 Co., Ltd. and BIES Ltd. opened the first set of solar-powered electric car charging stations across Sofia, Bulgaria. Built as simple structures, each station simply uses solar panels to collect solar energy and a special module for electric cars to connect to the batteries. While the number of electric cars in Bulgaria are still very few, according to experts, a boom in the purchase of electric vehicles is expected this year — particularly due special incentives that will be given by the Bulgarian government.

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Electric car that that folds itself launches in Spain

Compact cars take on a new meaning when they can literally fold themselves.

Spain will begin producing an electric car next year that’s about the same size as a Smart, but can collapse itself into an even smaller footprint when parked. The Hiriko, which means “urban car” in Basque, is the brainchild of researchers at the MIT Media Lab, and is designed to meet the needs of increasingly congested and parking challenged urban centers.

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Italy France's 100 percent solar home entry for the 2012 Solar Decathlon

Italy and France have joined forces to create the “Astonyshine” 100 percent solar home concept as part of the 2012 Solar Decathlon Europe. The international competition is open to universities from around the globe and promotes research into the development of efficient housing. Astonyshine is a modern reinterpretation of the classic Mediterranean villa, and is the result of the combined efforts from Polytechnic of Bari (Italy), University of Ferrara (Italy), Ecole Nationale Superieure d’Architecture Paris-Malaquais (France) and Ecole des Ponts ParisTech (France).

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The classic Toyota 2000GT has managed to carve an everlasting image in the minds of people, thanks to its style and of course James Bond. Japanese engineers have given James Bond getaway car a new lease of life by remodeling a Toyota 2000GT for a recent car show. The car will roar like an angry beast but not by a gas-guzzling engine. It has been swapped into a 100 percent electric and solar-powered coupe under the ‘Crazy Car Project,’ which definitely shows some care for the environment.

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