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Commuter trains run by SEPTA, the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority, are becoming “virtual power generators” thanks to new technology that captures the energy from braking and feeds it back to the grid. CleanTechnica first reported on the regenerative braking system when it was in development a couple of years ago and we’re happy to pass [...]
Solar energy as cheap as grid-supplied electricity could be just a few years away, at least for large commercial facilities with flat rooftops or some acreage to spare. Six years ago the Department of Energy awarded a $42 million grant to a company called Nanosolar for the development of large-scale rooftop photovoltaic systems that cost [...]
New York City has just embarked on a new $4.6 million program to clean up its stormwater, and it could serve as a national model for other cities. To serve the goal of replacing pavement with rain-absorbing green spaces, green roofs and other porous surfaces, the program enlists 11 mainly non-commercial facilities and organizations that [...]
A team of scientists headed up by Princeton University has achieved a whopping 47 percent increase in electricity generation from flexible plastic solar cells, simply by texturing the surface to mimic the wrinkles of a typical leaf. The biomimicry approach has resulted in a low cost, elegant solution for polymer-based solar cells, which are relatively [...]
The ALEC story has been migrating from the lobbying group’s role in controversial voter ID and “Stand Your Ground” gun legislation over to CleanTechnica territory, with news that the organization has been planning to thwart renewable energy goals on the state level. That’s where things could really start to get interesting, because ALEC’s determination to [...]
A crowd-sourced solar cell research initiative at Harvard University called the Clean Energy Project is about to get a big boost: the initiative, which has relied on a network of home and office personal computers, is scheduled for a block of time on the Trestles supercomputer at the University of California, San Diego. The project [...]
Though boron is better known for the making of bleach, as a sort of metalloid cousin to silicon it also has some intriguing potential in solar energy research. Now a team of researchers at Rice University is exploring the possibility that atom-thin sheets of boron could lead to the next generation of high efficiency, low [...]
The U.S. has just launched a five-year, $125 million alternative energy research project with India, aimed partly at developing biofuels from non-food crops. The biofuel project, funded by the Department of Energy and led by the University of Florida, has the goal of managing climate change and reducing U.S. dependence on petroleum products — and [...]
