Tag: industry news

The Face Companies® are the Diamond Sponsor the 2014 edition of Darnell’s Energy Summit (DES ’14). The Face® Companies are a Norfolk, Virginia based group of family-controlled businesses that offers new classes of very-rugged and high-energy piezoelectric actuators, generators and transformers – and self-powered wireless controls that use a Face piezoelectric generator enabling the controls to be battery-less. Two of

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US Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack announced $68 million in funding Thursday for 540 US renewable energy and energy efficiency projects in the nation’s rural communities. This legislation is part of the “Swiss Army knife” of tools for jobs, innovation, infrastructure, research, and conservation President Obama has been talking about. Of these projects, almost half are solar investments. The funding comes

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If you’re ready for another glimpse into what the U.S. Department of Energy Solar Decathlon 2015 teams are up to, check out the updated 2015 team pages, reports Carol Laurie for Solar Decathlon. They now include links to the teams’ own websites! As part of the Communications Contest, teams create websites to share information about their projects and their progress.

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Novatec Solar – a company majority owned by Australia’s Transfield Holdings – has commissioned a solar thermal energy demonstration plant in Spain that is based on a new type of molten salt storage technology. The Germany-based Novatec Solar says the new plant uses a process called direct molten salt or DMS technology – where inorganic salts are used as a

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Electric cars are much, much greener than gas cars (“gasmobiles,” as I like to call them). Even in the state with the dirtiest electricity grid (Colorado), electric cars charging from the grid have a miles per gallon equivalency of 34. The average new gasoline-powered compact car has a fuel economy rating of 28 mpg. (In the cleanest state, New York,

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Solar power systems are ideal for buildings with large, flat roofs. That type of building is universal in public schools in the US. Thus, public and private schools offer huge, mostly untapped potential to increase solar energy use in the US. Installing rooftop solar photovoltaic (PV) and solar thermal systems on US schools just makes so much sense. Initiating progress

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Editor’s Note: I remember seeing a presentation at EVS27 in Barcelona last year that also found rapidly recharging lithium-ion batteries wasn’t as harmful to the batteries’ capacities as was widely assumed. With another study coming to the same conclusion, combined with some stories of Teslas traveling tens of thousands of miles and just losing a little bit of their range,

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By examining how tiny particles in a lithium ion battery electrode behave the researchers have shown that rapid-charging the battery and using it to do high-power, rapidly draining work may not be as damaging as had been thought and that the benefits of slow draining and charging may have been overestimated. The findings also suggest that scientists may be able

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TUV Rheinland recently issued its first Potential Induced Degradation (PID) test certificate in Greater China. New Duo-Max module (the PEG14 and PDG14 series) from Trina Solar Limited (TSL) successfully passed the most stringent PID test and received the quality certification. This is a significant achievement, as it is the first PID certificate issued by TUV Rheinland in Greater China, and

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A new study investigating wind power and grid resiliency by GE’s Energy Consulting business in late-August found that wind power can substantially enhance grid resiliency when coupled with appropriate modern plant controls. Scenarios where the US electrical grid suffered large-scale interruptions, such as multiple power plants tripping offline, were the catalyst for GE’s research. GE’s study explored how the US

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