Tag: battery industry

The newsreel is just 90 seconds long. It is incredibly — and, to me, endearingly — crude, ragged, and inept. Against a background of loud, out-of-tune orchestral music, a narrator speaks of harnessing the power of the sun, as the camera shows us (a-ha!) the setting sun, a shot lasting a full thirty seconds. This leads to a shot of

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1. What are the benefits of integrating renewable energy with microgrids? The obvious first benefit is related to cost of generation reduction. With the increasing costs of traditional fossil fuel based generation, such as diesel, and the reduction in dollar-per-watt cost for renewables such as wind, the tipping point for renewables in remote microgrids has been passed. For remote and

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Today, the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC) launched its new online data visualization resource that highlights real-time green building data for each state in the U.S. and Washington, D.C. The enhanced state market briefs — highlighting LEED projects, LEED-credentialed professionals and USGBC membership in each state — provide green building advocates and the general public a look into LEED’s impact

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Most of us are probably familiar with differences between American electrical standards and those used in most of the rest of the world through personal electronics. Today’s laptop computers and phone chargers can accept either 110v or 220v so all you need to travel between regions is an adaptor for the plug. But it was not always so, and many

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Toyota recently issued the world’s first “green bond” of asset-backed securities in the auto industry. The $1.75 billion bond’s net proceeds will be used to acquire retail installment sale contracts and lease contracts to finance new Toyota and Lexus gas-electric hybrid or alternative fuel powertrain vehicles. The bond has multiple tranches, each at a different (Moody) ratings levels: A2 tranche,

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Weren’t we just saying that perovskite solar cells are the next big thing? Well, make that tin perovskite solar cells. Tin perovskite solar cells are suddenly a thing this week, with not one but two major new research announcements coming out of the US and the UK. The significance is not so much in the tin perovskite cells’ conversion efficiency,

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On Thursday, the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress (NPC), China’s top legislature, approved major amendments to the country’s Environmental Protection Law (EPL), the first since the law was enacted 25 years ago. These amendments are a game changer. The original EPL entered into force shortly before I moved to Beijing in 1990. I recently found a journal entry

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In a series of discussions on Earth Day, I found myself returning to two 1970s reports by the Club of Rome: The Limits to Growth and Mankind at the Turning Point. While those analyses were weak on policy design, they did a thorough job of describing the interconnected set of problems that remain at the heart of the world’s environmental

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While many people associate cooperatives with a place for hippies to buy organic food, the cooperative movement has actually grown far and wide, creating sustainable enterprises that generate jobs and strengthen local economies. Today, there are nearly 30,000 cooperatives in the United States, with more than 100 million members. From day care centers to hardware stores, cooperatives seem to be

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Researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign use a printing process to assemble tiny cells into multilayer stacks for extraordinary levels of photovoltaic conversion efficiency. As an energy source, the Sun has always been a dependable provider. Although it freely shines on everyone, the ability to capture and convert the Sun’s abundant energy is anything but free. However, new

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