Renewables

Glimpses of blue sky are becoming a rare sight in Delhi, India's capital, particularly in wintertime, when a thick white haze smothers the city. David Hagan, an MIT PhD candidate studying atmospheric chemistry and a Fellow in the MIT Tata Center for Technology and Design, says that the city's air quality is now quantifiably among the worst in the world. "Beijing has bad episodes, but Delhi is worse because of the meteorology," says Hagan.

  A research team in Japan discovered through numerical calculations that nanoparticles of transition metal nitrides and carbides absorb sunlight very efficiently, and confirmed experimentally that nitride nanoparticles, when dispersed in water, quickly raise water temperature.

A farming technique practised for centuries by villagers in West Africa, which converts nutrient-poor rainforest soil into fertile farmland, could be the answer to mitigating climate change and revolutionising farming across Africa. A global study, led by the University of Sussex, which included anthropologists and soil scientists from Cornell, Accra, and Aarhus Universities and the Institute of Development Studies, has for the first-time id...

University of Iowa researchers are working with a California-based startup company to make clean energy from sunlight and any source of water. The university recently renewed a one-year research agreement to further develop the technology with HyperSolar, a company that aims to commercialise low-cost renewable hydrogen. Hydrogen power is arguably one of the cleanest and greenest energy sources because when it produces energy, the final byproduct ...

Designed to meet solar inverter and other application requirements for the PV industry, ZETTLER Electronics has announced a single pole 80A solar relay. The AZSR180 was developed for PV applications of up to 20/55kVA (single-/three-phase), is suited for medium sized to larger roof top-based as well as commercial systems, deployable up to 4km above sea level.

Researchers from the Universities of Bristol and Exeter are one step closer to developing next-gen low-cost, high-efficiency solar cells. The structure is one of the world's first examples of a tri-layer metasurface absorber using a carbon interlayer. The system, developed by Chenglong Wang a PhD student in Professor Martin Cryan's research group, uses amorphous carbon as an inter-layer between thin gold films with the upper film patterned w...

Utility companies or others planning to install renewable energy systems such as solar and wind farms have to decide whether to include large-scale energy storage systems that can capture power when it’s available and release it on demand. This decision may be critical to the future growth of renewable energy.

HARTING has announced a range of current transformers developed in close collaboration with key the companies in wind energy plant construction to specifically meet key ‘alternative energy industry’ requirements. The product development has been focused on good functional reliability and high mechanical stability. The result is accurate feed control with high levels of precision.

Home storage systems for electricity produced by photovoltaics facilities are gaining attractiveness, as their costs are declining. However, standardised, verifiable criteria for the end client to assess their performance are still lacking. Now, scientists have launched the largest German study so far to analyse commercial systems with respect to safety, quality, and grid suitability and to derive recommendations for manufacturers, standardisatio...

An interdisciplinary project at Chalmers has found that a special class of material – high-entropy alloys – can open the door to efficient heat recycling. Boosting energy efficiency is an important element of the transition to a sustainable energy system. There are big savings to be made. For example, less than half the energy content of diesel is actually used to power a diesel truck. The rest is lost, mostly in the form of heat...