Clean Tech News & Views: Solar Energy News. Wind Energy News. EV News. & More.
Happy days for electric vehicle owners are just around the corner: the U.S. Department of Energy is revving up wireless EV charging systems with a new round of $4 million in funding through its Vehicle Technologies Program. The initial goal is to get a wireless EV charging system for parked cars into the mass market [...]
When it comes to explaining the Department of Energy’s loan program for clean energy companies, David G. Frantz, acting director of the agency’s Loan Programs Office ain’t no Shakespeare but he sure has a way with words. In a letter yesterday addressed to Senators Jeff Bingaman and Lisa Murkowski, Frantz made a passionate case for [...]
According to a new report from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, airports could become a significant source of biomass for biofuels. The key takeaway from the report, Airports Offer Unrealized Potential for Alternative Energy Production, is that the typical airport environment is already managed to include wide swaths of grasslands, and to preclude wildlife [...]
From a distance it looks like an escaped party balloon in the shape of a donut, but that new thing up in the skies over Limestone, Maine this winter was in fact the 35-foot prototype for a new helium blimp capable of harvesting wind energy at high altitudes, built by the company Altaeros. High-altitude winds [...]
The Obama Administration has just ramped up the nation’s transition to clean energy resources such as wind power with a new Great Lakes wind power initiative that joins federal agencies with Illinois, Michigan, Minnesota, New York, and Pennsylvania in a regional development plan for installing offshore wind turbines in the Great Lakes. In addition to [...]
Dry ice once gained notoriety as a fog enabler at innumerable 1970’s discotheques, and now it is being revived to hustle a 21st century breakthrough material out of the lab and into commercial use. Researchers from South Korea and Case Western Reserve University are developing a way to manufacture large quantities of graphene based on [...]
It looks like plastic bag knitters the world over are going to have to make room for a new recycler in town. Scientists from the Oak Ridge National Laboratory have figured out how to recycle plastic bags by extracting the polyethylene to make carbon fibers, which can be fabricated into new strong, lightweight components for [...]
Take some ordinary two-dimensional solar panels, stick them together to form a crazy looking three-dimensional solar tower that resembles an abstract sculpture of an accordion, and voila! If you are part of the intrepid team of researchers from MIT who dreamed up that arrangement, you have just boosted the overall efficiency of the solar panels [...]
