Three new Energy Department solar projects are in the works to give the old body-slam to three obstacles standing in the path of low cost solar power, and it’s about time for solar power to get out there and show some muscle. Solar costs have been sinking like a stone … [continued]
Biomimicry run amok can be a beautiful thing, and that’s the driving force behind a new portable solar power canopy called Lotus Mobile. The brainchild of solar innovator Joseph Hui, who happens to be obsessed with flowers as well as butterflies (and solar power), Lotus Mobile is a lightweight, pole-mounted, … [continued]
Solar innovator First Solar has just announced a new word record for solar cell conversion efficiency, for its cadmium-telluride (CdTe) thin film solar cell. That’s significant because CdTe solar cells can be made more quickly and cheaply than conventional silicon solar cells, bringing down the cost of solar power. The … [continued]
The solar power industry just got a little more interesting this week, with the announcement that Solar Junction and Amonix have signed an agreement to work together on the next generation of low cost, ultra-high efficiency concentrated photovoltaic systems. If you’re expecting another long slog through the R&D phase, guess … [continued]
Researchers at the University of Michigan have come up with a low-cost way to manufacture high-grade silicon, based on a concept familiar to anyone who has tried to make rock candy at home. If the breakthrough can be translated into a commercially viable process, it would make ultra-cheap solar tech … [continued]
The U.S. Department of Energy’s SunShot program has just kicked off a new round in a $10 million solar power competition designed to lower the cost of solar power, pretty much down to where a small rooftop solar installation could be a reasonable investment for practically anyone in the country. If you’re thinking that means building a better solar cell, that’s not it. Instead, the Most Affordable Rooftop Solar Prize is aimed at encouraging the solar industry to figure out ways to lower the “soft costs” of solar power […]
Researchers from the University of Basel in Switzerland are developing low cost solar cells made with zinc, a cheap and abundant material. Zinc is an uninteresting gray in its natural state, but the team has figured out a way to use it for creating colorful dyes, which could lead to … [continued]
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]
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]
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]
