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 … [continued]
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 … [continued]
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 … [continued]
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 … [continued]
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 … [continued]
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 … [continued]
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 … [continued]
Distributed solar power goes wild! Geostellar has teamed its rooftop solar power analytic toolkit with the satellite imaging company GeoEye to help realize its grand plan to assess the solar energy generating potential of every rooftop in the U.S. With this tool in hand, practically anyone with a roof … [continued]
Get ready to hear a lot about pennycress biofuel this year. Pennycress sounds like a name that belongs to an unassuming little weed commonly found along roadsides – and it does – but a while back the U.S. Department of Agriculture started to investigate the use of pennycress seeds in … [continued]
The Department of Defense has just launched a new robot design competition called the Robotics Challenge, setting a $2 million cash prize to sweeten the pot with the aim of developing a humanoid robot for emergency response. The ostensible inspiration has been recent environmental mega-disasters like the Fukushima nuclear meltdown, … [continued]
