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Solar Desalination Project Quarterfinalist in Innovation Contest
Purdue University innovator and his team are among the quarterfinalists in a national solar desalination innovation contest. They received the recognition for a technology to use solar power to purify high salinity water, such... -
Battery Storage System for Agriculture and Environmentally Sensitive Areas
Energylink3 has developed a less toxic lithium battery storage system for use in agriculture and environmentally sensitive areas to store energy from farm-based and rural solar arrays. EnergyLink3 batteries will... -
3D Printed System Speeds Testing of Solar Cells from Hours to Minutes
Tests on new designs for next-generation solar cells can now be done in hours instead of days thanks to a new system built by scientists at Australia’s Monash University, incorporating 3D-printed key components. The... -
High-performance Solar Panels with Improved Environmental Profiles
Within the framework of a new European H2020 project, nine research institutes and eight industrial partners across the whole value chain are collaborating on innovative solutions to produce silicon photovoltaic (PV) modules... -
Environment-Friendly Compound Shows Promise for Solar Cell Use
A widespread transition to solar energy will depend heavily on reliable, safe, and affordable technology like batteries for energy storage and solar cells for energy conversion. At Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, researchers... -
Solar Power Plants Get Help from Satellites to Predict Cloud Cover
The output of solar energy systems is highly dependent on cloud cover. While weather forecasting can be used to predict the amount of sunlight reaching ground-based solar collectors, cloud cover is often characterized in simple... -
Photosensitizer May Improve Efficiency of Solar Panels and Other Devices
A new chemical compound created by researchers at West Virginia University is lighting the way for renewable energy. The compound is a photosensitizer, meaning it promotes chemical reactions in the presence of light....
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Non-Traditional Uses of Photovoltaics
The technology behind silicon solar cells hasn’t changed much in decades, although efficiencies have been boosted with incremental improvements, such as a new coating developed at the University of Texas. Pervoskites, however, are one of the... -
Perovskites Move Beyond Solar Cells
Perovskites are mainly known for what they bring to the field of solar cells. Researchers from IMO-IMOMEC, an associated laboratory of imec at the University of Hasselt, and colleagues from KU Leuven, UGent and UAntwerpen, are tuning... -
Innovation in the Solar Tracker Industry
Product and industry continually advance through phases of innovation brought on by a desire for ease of use, either to address challenges within a market or to improve cost and accessibility. Solar trackers have been around for years; however,... -
Solar Preserves Farmland, Increases Revenue
At a time when per acre farm revenue is down, development pressure on farmland is up and hundreds of family farms are lost each year, a growing number of farmers and rural communities are discovering that solar provides a surprising and welcome... -
Research Advances Solar Technology
Recent solar research is bringing down the cost of solar as well as increasing efficiencies. It is also expanding the use of solar in ways that can help solve environmental problems, like the need for clean drinking water. Here we present the... -
Addressing Long-Term PV Module Reliability & Performance
Most solar project developers and equipment buyers require two key certifications for solar PV modules – IEC 61215 and IEC 61730 or UL 1703. They demonstrate that PV modules are safe. None of these test standards address long-term PV module... -
Making the Grid Smarter
It isn’t news that more American homes, businesses and communities are adopting clean energy technologies – solar, wind, energy storage and electric vehicles – as they recognize the environmental, economic, resiliency and public...
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Colorful Perovskites: NREL advances thermochromic window technologies
Heat generated by sunlight shining through windows is the single largest contributor to the need for air conditioning and cooling in buildings. Because residential and commercial buildings use 74% of all electricity and 39% of all energy in... -
Development of Technologies for Manufacturing of Organic PV
Under the direction of the Fraunhofer Institute for Laser Technology ILT in Aachen, five project partners from industry and research are developing technologies for the roll-to-roll production of organic photovoltaics in the EffiLayers project.... -
Iron Molecule Could Replace Rare Metals in Solar Cells
For the first time, researchers at Lund University in Sweden have used advanced molecule design to create an iron molecule that can function as a photocatalyst to produce fuels as well as in solar cells to produce electricity. The... -
Light Management Foil Pushes Perovskite Solar to 25.5% Conversion Efficiency
Researchers at the Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin (HZB) in Germany have achieved a record 25.5% conversion efficiency in a perovskite-silicon tandem solar cell after adding a microstructured foil over the perovskite layer to optimize the light... -
Ultra-Thin Silver Film Fabrication May Boost Solar Cell Efficiency
Researchers at Ruhr-Universität Bochum (RUB) and the University of Wuppertal, both in Germany, have developed a new atomic layer deposition (ALD) process for transparent ultra-thin silver films that overcomes the challenges of traditional... -
Flexible Photovoltaic Cell Could be Incorporated into Textiles
Scientists at the RIKEN Center for Emergent Matter Science in Japan have developed a solar-powered, ultraflexible organic sensor that can act as an autonomously powered heart monitor taped to the skin. The technology could also catalyze... -
Gold-Nanoparticle-Spiked Photodiode Harvests 85% of Visible Light
A photoelectrode developed by researchers at Hokkaido University, Japan, can harvest more than a surprising 85% of visible light across a wide spectral range by using a 30-nanometer titanium dioxide (TiO2) thin-film semiconductor sandwiched...
