We cover our rooftops with solar panels and encourage everyone else to do so. Australia has the highest per capita take-up of rooftop solar. However, these things have a lifespan, and there comes a time when they need to be replaced by more efficient modules. What happens to old, discarded … [continued]
Every time I write about solar vehicles, I get the same thing from people in the comments and on social media, like: “That’s a stupid gimmick that’ll add like a mile a day.” “What a joke. That can’t even run the air conditioning.” While these statements have been true for … [continued]
The big strides in electric cars happened years ago. Now, the improvements are measured in tiny advances as the EV revolution moves forward.
A trio of technology leaders in Europe — the Austrian Institute of Technology, Fraunhofer ISE in Germany, and Forster Industrietechnik in Switzerland — is working to develop a solar canopy system for highways in order to tap into the vast, under-utilized road network for clean electricity generation.
A joint study by the highly respected Karlsruhe Institute of Technology and the Fraunhofer Institute for Systems and Innovation Research finds that plug-in hybrid cars with at least 36 miles of electric-only range (think Chevy Volt) are just as good at keeping carbon emissions out of the atmosphere as pure battery electric cars (think Chevy Bolt).
Research led by the Fraunhofer Center For Sustainable Energy Systems finds that solar panels mounted above crops in an agricultural setting can raise the efficiency of the land by 60%. Further research is planned.
With its newest solar cell, German research organization Fraunhofer has managed to exceed the world record for multicrystalline silicon cells. The new cells convert an impressive 22.3% of incident solar energy into electricity, and the researchers think that the limits have not yet been reached.
If you were to walk into a solar store and purchase some of their best-selling PV panels, it is likely that their solar irradiance-to-electricity conversion efficiency would be around 17%. This is the typical efficiency (Fraunhofer ISE Photovoltaics Report, 2017) of the top-selling PV product, a multi-crystalline silicon panel. This means that for a typical panel, 17% of all incident solar energy is converted directly to usable electricity. This is quite impressive for a device that has no moving parts and can generate power at the location where the electricity is required (no transmission losses). It is no wonder that PV is already one of the cheapest power technologies available.
Fraunhofer Institute for Ceramic Technologies and Systems in Dresden, Germany, says it has developed new technology in the lab that could increase electric car range to 1,000 kilometers or more. The secret? More batteries in the same space. Ceramics play a large part in the process. In a conventional battery pack, the individual battery cells are surrounded by a separate outer casing. All those casings take up half of the space inside each battery pack. The connections to each cell are points where electrical resistance is high, reducing available power.
Fraunhofer has started an experiment with a new idea. According to Georg Küffner writing at FAZ, they built a sphere with concrete, diameter of three meters. Then they immersed that into the Bodensee lake. The idea is to have a large sphere at the bottom of some lake or ocean and use that as the lower reservoir of pumped storage
