While the UK’s iconic phone booths are still considered national icons, cellphones have largely rendered the big red boxes obsolete over the years. Solarbox London plans to change that by transforming phone booths into free solar-powered phone charging stations. The company’s retrofitted phone booth chargers are painted bright green, and they now bring solar energy to the selfie-addicted masses. Kirsty
The Tehachapi Energy Storage Project — the biggest battery energy storage project to date in North America — has now opened. The 32 MWh battery energy storage system built by Southern California Edison (SCE) comprises lithium-ion batteries from LG Chem stationed in a special 6,300 square-foot facility at SCE’s Monolith substation in Tehachapi, California. The project was built in that
Tesla is continuing its Chinese expansion, this time opening a Supercharging station in Chengdu, China. Festivities were held on site at the Chengdu Yingtai Centre, where six Supercharging stations opened, according to Teslarati. Commercial real estate developer Yintai Holdings, known for its luxurious Chinese shopping malls, helped complete the deal. This is Tesla’s breakthrough into western China. The company already
A 3-year, $6.3 million dollar project to improve every aspect of the American wind turbine production process/industry was recently begun via a partnership between Sandia National Laboratories, Iowa State University, and TPI Composites (an operator of a wind turbine blade factory). The project — the Advanced Manufacturing Innovation Initiative — aims, specifically, to improve the labor productivity of blade fabrication
Blue OLEDs are one of a trio of colors used in OLED displays such as smartphone screens and high-end TVs. The improvement means that the efficiencies of blue OLEDs in these devices could jump from about five to 20% or better in the near future. Phosphorescent OLEDs or PHOLEDs produce light through a mechanism that is four times more efficient
Toshiba Mitsubishi-Electric Industrial Systems Corporation (TMEIC, Tokyo, Japan) has formed a new manufacturing subsidiary in North America, TMEIC Power Electronics Products Corporation, to manufacture solar photovoltaic (PV) inverters in North America. Fabrication of PV inverters will commence in the fall of 2014 at the Houston, Texas based facility. The factory’s production will start with “Solar Ware” UL certified PV Inverters,
MeshPower Ltd. is seeking 10,000 customers in rural Africa and India for its solar power micro-grids to replace more costly kerosene-fueled lighting by 2016. The company now has about 250 customers in Rwanda and India and has the funds to increase this four-fold by the end of the year, co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Lukas Lukoschek said in an interview
Global Business Resources, a consortium of international investors from the United States, are in Nigeria for discussion with officials of the Federal Government for the construction of two solar-powered electricity plants of 50 megawatts capacity each in Nigeria. A statement issued in Abuja on Wednesday by the Deputy Director, Press, Ministry of Power, Mr. Timothy Oyedeji, said the two plants
A new CIGS thin-film solar cell conversion efficiency record was recently achieved by researchers at the Center for Solar Energy and Hydrogen Research (ZSW) in Stuttgart. The new conversion efficiency record of 21.7% beats the previous record of 21% — that was set earlier this year by the Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems — pretty substantially, and represents a
The first (as far as we know) Tesla Model S convertible was recently spotted on the streets of San Francisco. And now, thanks to a perhaps-a-bit-nosy someone, we can take a gander at it too (thanks to the photos they took). 🙂 Hard to know what to make of the vehicle, especially when you consider the money that went into