Tagged With: solar
Solar powered boat completes round the world journey
I have mixed feelings about this one. PlanetSolar is less than one day from completing a circumnavigation using a boat powered only by the sun; it’s taken them about 600 days to do this. I’m not quite sure what they’re trying to prove here. If you want to go ‘green’ on your trip around the … Continue reading
Advances in Solar Panel Technology
Solar energy technology is advancing fast enough that I’ve decide to lump together several updates into single posts now and then. To start with, the Frauenhofer Institute has showed off some highly flexible solar panels, placing them on a ski helmet. This may not sound like a big deal, flexible panels have been around for … Continue reading
Solar power…from grass?
Can we generate solar power from grass? Researchers at MIT think this might be a possibility. While efficiency is low, the real metric to look at is energy per unit cost. Watch the video below for some really interesting information on this.
Solar Power in the Developing World
Watching the propagation of technology throughout our global society can be fascinating. Case in point, the telephone. First world telephone users started with hard wired phones, which transitioned to cordless phones (still using the wired infrastructure), and are only recently transitioning en mass to cell phones. In developing countries, the infrastructure for a wired phone … Continue reading
Solar Panel Efficiency Gains
North Carolina based Semprius has set a new standard for solar panel efficiency at 33.9 percent! While only a small gain over the previous record of 32%, it’s nice to see this trend continue, as improved efficiency helps increase solar’s competitiveness in the marketplace. They accomplish this through the use of lenses and mirrors to … Continue reading
Hyperion Solar Updraft Tower
Hyperion Energy is looking to build a gigantic, kilometer tall tower in Australia. Where it really gets interesting is the ‘why’. The base of the two has holes in it. The land around it, for almost fourteen square miles, would be covered, creating an air gap between the ground and the cover. The sun would … Continue reading
Community Solar Garden
SunShare is doing something cool in Colorado Springs…they’re making it really easy for individual homeowners to reap the benefits of solar panels, without having to install solar panels on their own homes. SunShare is building a ‘solar garden’, where individuals can lease a minimum of two solar panels. The electricity from those panels is fed … Continue reading