It may come as a surprise to some, but David Owens, executive VP of the Edison Electric Institute, and Ralph Cavanagh, co-director of the Natural Resources Defense Council’s energy program, seem to have a lot in common. Owens leads the trade group representing the nation’s investor-owned utilities; Cavanagh is an attorney with an environmental organization that heavily influenced the new
Grid-scale energy storage is slowly moving from its pilot-program phase to its early commercialization phase. And the slow road to commercialization at U.S. utilities comes in the form of requests for quotation and solicitations like the one just issued by the New Jersey Board of Public Utilities, which approved a modest $3 million competitive solicitation “aimed at encouraging the development
It seems like only yesterday that the German solar company SolarWorld was leading the charge to pound China and Taiwan with solar tariffs for allegedly dumping cheap, government-subsidized solar cells on the US market. That action has touched off a slugfest among competing interests in the US solar industry, but apparently the Energy Department has stayed out of the fray.
Georgia has not done the best of the US states in adopting solar power. At the same time, it has installed about 138 MW, so it ranks 15th nationally. The state’s utility, Georgia Power, has not been very open to renewable energy, even though Georgia has very strong solar potential. Up until now, it seems most of this potential has
When you think Las Vegas you might not think about sustainability, but that’s all starting to change – in a big way. MGM Resorts announced that it has installed the largest rooftop solar array in the US – the second biggest in the entire world – on top of the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino. Now, before you get too
The blazing Sahara sun may power homes a world away by 2018. The people behind a new $13 million project called TuNur farm propose to build a massive 100-square-kilometer solar farm in Tunisia. The farm would then connect directly to the UK, pumping energy through a 280-mile-long underwater cable. The mega solar farm would be made up of thousands of
Scientists at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory have discovered exceptional properties in a garnet material that could enable development of higher-energy battery designs. The ORNL-led team used scanning transmission electron microscopy to take an atomic-level look at a cubic garnet material called LLZO. The researchers found the material to be highly stable in a range of aqueous
New world record: Scientists at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) increased the manufacturing speed of electrode foils coated batch-wise by a factor of three — to 100 meters per minute. This was achieved by a flexible slot die process that enables production of any pattern with high precision and at high speeds. Thanks to the patented new technology, electrode
Researchers at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) have developed a commonsense way to lower the cost of solar panels, focusing on their most expensive component: silicon. “We’re using less expensive raw materials and smaller amounts of them [and] we have fewer production steps and our total energy consumption is potentially lower,” Fredrik Martinsen and Ursula Gibson of
China’s electric vehicle industry is looking to make itself competitive by creating vehicles that can appeal to both low-end and high-end buyers alike as the country attempts to reduce pollution levels, reports the Guangzhou-based Time Weekly. There are three factors affecting the successful promotion of electric cars: quality products, good complementary accessories and having smart business models, an industry expert