French energy company EDF is joining forces with wind turbine firm Vestas to create the world’s first ‘stealth’ wind farm, which is designed to minimize interference to radar systems. The site, called the “Ensemble Eolien Catalan” wind farm, will be built near Perpignan and it will produce 96 megawatts, making it the biggest wind farm in France. “It is a
A consortium from Australia’s CSIRO and Melbourne and Monash Universities just announced that its printable solar cells are on the verge of commercialization. The technology uses a specially developed ‘solar ink’ that can be printed onto plastic film using existing printers in a similar way to printing plastic bank notes. The team envisions its printed solar cells being used
Power Integrations, Inc. announced that its CAPZero™ family of innovative, two-terminal, automatic X-capacitor discharge ICs has been certified to meet IEC 62368, the new over-arching safety standard covering TVs and IT equipment. The CAPZero family eliminates power losses while allowing power supplies to comply with safety standards. The new standard replaces IEC 60950 and IEC 60065 and will become mandatory.
Talk about irony! Solar power being used to boost fossil fuel production. The idea may sound pretty weird to some, but to Shell, this is an idea worth investing millions. Royal Dutch Shell has teamed with a sovereign investment fund from Oman to invest $53 million in a company that manufactures solar power equipment designed for increasing oil production. Glasspoint
Editor’s Note: If you caught Elon Musk and JB Straubel’s Norway town hall in February, you might recall Elon stating that it was “likely” Tesla would bring the first autonomous car to market. That was before Google unveiled a fully autonomous prototype electric car, of which it is building approximately 100 for testing. It seems from other statement that Elon
The solar industry has been subjected to an intense period of growth and maturation over the past 24 months, as a result of China’s impressive manufacturing capabilities and worldwide demand for one of the two major renewable energy technologies. By the end of 2011 China had emerged as the leading supplier of the crystalline silicon (c-Si) PV production chain, flooding
Austin, Texas, may be currently known as the “Live Music Capital of the World,” but in coming years, it may also come to be known as the solar capital of Texas, thanks to the city’s recent resolution to make solar power the default generation resource through the year 2024. As part of the city’s climate change goals, the Austin City
Indian solar energy companies are fast delivering world-class solar power projects as the market expands based on favorable regulatory and policy outlooks. India’s largest engineering, procurement and construction (EPC) company in the solar power market has just commissioned the world’s largest single rooftop solar photovoltaic power project. The 7.52 MW solar power plant has been commissioned in the northern state
An interdisciplinary team of engineers from the University of Pennsylvania has made a discovery regarding the surface properties of graphene, the Nobel-prize winning material that consists of an atomically thin sheet of carbon atoms. On the macroscale, adding fluorine atoms to carbon-based materials makes for water-repellant, non-stick surfaces, such as Teflon. However, on the nanoscale, adding fluorine to graphene had
Researchers have been trying to increase the efficiency of solid oxide fuel cells by lowering the temperatures at which they run. More efficient fuel cells might gain wider use in vehicles or as quiet, pollution-free, neighborhood electricity generating stations. A serendipitous finding has resulted in a semiconducting material that could enable fuel cells to operate at temperatures two-thirds lower than