Industry news

A few months ago, we posted a video of the great Bruce Meyers driving one of Zelectric’s electric Volkswagen Beetles. Bruce was mostly positive about the experience, but stopped just short of endorsing the product – and now we know why: the Bruce Meyers Manx V is out, and it’s 100% electric. Dubbed “New Red”, this electric dune buggy can

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Lithium-ion batteries that last 3 times longer between charges than is the current industry standard are now a reality thanks to new research from the University of California, Riverside Bourns College of Engineering. The new way of making lithium-ion batteries — which, humorously, utilizes surgical tubing and one of the key constituents of Silly Putty to great effect — has

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Midsummer’s CIGS solar cells have recently seen their efficiency improved to an impressive 16.2% — up from a previous high of 15% efficiency. The new, higher efficiency solar cell was manufactured in a normal production run, and the process has already been implemented into the production line. “Considering that the solar cell is made on stainless steel, contains no cadmium

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The topic of discussion above is the challenges of building a solar airplane, as well as some highlights of the Unified Engineering Flight Competition that took place last week at MIT. The theme for the MIT 2014 competition was Green Aviation Inspired by Solar Impulse. André tells us in the video that the objective for the Solar Impulse team was

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Power Japan Plus today launched a new battery technology – the Ryden dual-carbon battery. This unique battery offers energy density comparable to a lithium-ion battery, but over a much longer functional lifetime with drastically improved safety and cradle-to-cradle sustainability. The Ryden battery makes use of a completely unique chemistry, with both the anode and the cathode made of carbon. Power

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Infineon Technologies AG has extended the latest generation of reverse conducting IGBTs for resonant applications with a new 650V component including a monolithically integrated RC diode. This means the high-performance RC-H5 family of products can now be used in a significantly broader range of applications: the new discrete RC-H5 650V power semiconductor is the perfect choice for use in multi-hob

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The STLUX™ development environment, consisting of demonstration boards, a graphical configurator, software libraries, and compiler, provides everything needed to start designing high-performance LED lighting with STLUX385A, the first in a new family of lighting controllers claiming a breakthrough digital control technique from STMicroelectronics NV. ST will unveil the STLUX development environment at PCIM Europe 2014 in Nuremberg with a plug-and-play

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Called the Little Box Challenge, Google announced recently that it will be offering a $1 million prize for inventing much smaller solar power inverters. The challenge will be launched this summer, so currently few details have been released to the public. Note that Google Ventures is an investor in Transphorm, a company that doesn’t make solar inverters but is trying

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The Middle East and Africa (MEA) region is set to see massive growth in solar photovoltaic (PV) demand in the coming years, according to recent findings in the latest NPD Solarbuzz Emerging PV Markets Report: Middle East and Africa. Year-on-year growth in the market in 2014 is expected to be as high as 50%. And, between the years of 2014

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Mosaic (formerly “Solar Mosaic”) is well known in the solar industry for pioneering what one might call “crowd-investing.” It has allowed common Americans to invest in large solar power projects for less than $30… or much more if they prefer. That has been a big and exciting story within the solar industry over the past few years, but Mosaic’s latest

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