Renault’s sunny yellow logo took on a new meaning last week when the company began flipping the switch on six gigantic new photovoltaic installations, each located at the site of a Renault production facility in France. Aside from juicing the company’s already formidable green cred, the solar projects illustrate how … [continued]
Turning solar panel factories into neighborhood businesses, similar to microbreweries, is inventor Shawn Frayne’s argument as to how to make solar panels cheaper and more accessible to the masses. Frayne and co-inventor Alex Hornstein created the micro-solar panel “factory” to ease the labor cost of producing small-scale panels (solettes), … [continued]
Reposted via the website of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (screenshot of Petroleum Reduction Planning Tool added): The U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) has launched a new tool and redesigned DOE’s Alternative Fuels Data Center Web site to help fleet managers, municipalities and consumers choose … [continued]
Electric vehicles (EVs) are becoming increasingly popular, as people and cities all over the world have started recognizing their advantages and introducing initiatives to promote the use of the plug-in transport option. Although EVs are still largely considered to be somewhat “cars of the future,” there’s a rising global … [continued]
The company LightSail Energy started out a few years ago with a student’s modest idea for a compressed air scooter, and now it has just raised $37.3 million in private funding to bring utility scale, compressed air energy storage to the market. That’s a big leap not only for the … [continued]
Late night funny man (or unfunny depending on who you ask) Jay Leno in the video above tours the Proterra Ecoliner Electric Bus, which has been cruising the streets of LA for more than a year. Electric buses are become more popular with sales expected to rise 26 percent … [continued]
An enterprising New Jersey man used his Toyota Prius as a generator to run his home’s lights, laptops, and a television because he lost power due to the recent Sandy outages. For one week he used an inverter and some extension cords to produce power for his home while … [continued]
Ascent Solar Technologies was selected for the Air Force SBIR (Small Business Innovative Research) Phase 2 award to demonstrate its next flexible lightweight photovoltaic technology built upon its existing flexible, monolithically integrated, thin-film CIGS (Copper Indium Gallium Diselenide) one. The Air Force SBIR Phase 2 program is expected to … [continued]
A revolutionary new design for a concentrator solar cell has been created by researchers at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU). The new design works extremely well when it’s irradiated from the side, generating solar conversion efficiencies that are near those of the most ultra-efficient photovoltaics. The new cell … [continued]
In an eerie bit of timing, last week the U.S. Army released a major document called Sustainability Report 2012. Eerie, because the release came just as Hurricane Sandy roared into the mid-Atlantic states and brought about the most devastating coastal flooding ever seen in that region. Coming on the … [continued]
