Energy

Transparent Concentrator: Solar Energy That Won't Block Your View

Researchers have developed a way to use windows for solar energy- without ruining your view. The new technology is a solar concentrator, called a transparent luminescent solar concentrator, that is placed over the window and creates solar energy while sti ...

Article - News Staff - Aug 20 2014 - 8:31am

Where The River Meets The Sea, Renewable Energy Happens

Where the river meets the sea, there is the potential to harness a significant amount of renewable energy, according to a team of mechanical engineers at MIT who evaluated the method of power generation called pressure retarded osmosis (PRO), in which two ...

Article - News Staff - Aug 20 2014 - 8:56am

Hydrogen: Figuring Out The Water And Sunlight Formula For Sustainable Fuel

Water is abundant and so is sunlight, and using them to create hydrogen makes sense for a cleaner energy future, where biological systems powered by sunlight can manufacture hydrogen to use as fuel. The way that plants produce hydrogen by splitting water ...

Article - News Staff - Aug 23 2014 - 10:30am

Hydrogen Fuel From Water, Using An Ordinary AAA Battery

Next year, American consumers will finally be able to purchase fuel cell cars and they are zero-emissions vehicles but, like current electric cars, not really, since the cars will run on hydrogen made from natural gas. ...

Article - News Staff - Aug 23 2014 - 5:07pm

Ross Garnaut: China To Reach 'Peak Coal' For Electricity By 2015

As early as 2015 China’s use of thermal coal for electricity could peak. Bret Arnett/Flickr, CC BY-NC-SA By James Whitmore, The Conversation ...

Article - The Conversation - Aug 27 2014 - 3:30am

Nitrogen-Transforming Bacteria: Now Powered By Hydrogen

Nitrite-oxidizing bacteria are key players in the natural nitrogen cycle on Earth and in biological wastewater treatment plants but scientists have learned something new about how they are powered.  For decades, these specialist bacteria were thought to d ...

Article - News Staff - Aug 29 2014 - 2:30pm

Generating Energy From Coffee Wastewater

A four-year project on coffee wastewater treatment, The Energy from Coffee Wastewater project by UTZ Certified, has found that is possible to generate energy and protect water resources by treating discharges from coffee mills- maybe it will even tackle cl ...

Article - News Staff - Sep 2 2014 - 7:30am

Created: Renewable Propane Using E.coli

Researchers have engineered the bacteria E. coli to generate renewable propane, which would open a path to a cleaner alternative to fossil fuels. Propane is an appealing source of cleaner fuel because it has an existing global market. It is already produc ...

Article - News Staff - Sep 2 2014 - 2:00pm

Organic Photovoltaic Technology May Be Solar Panels Of The Future

Conventional photovoltaic technology uses large, heavy, opaque, dark silicon panels while  organic photovoltaic technology enables more translucent and more flexible solar panels in a range of colors to be manufactured. But even silicon solar panels are no ...

Article - News Staff - Sep 3 2014 - 9:01am

Copper Catalyst Could Make Solar Cells Cheaper

Solar cells are the future but for now they are resource-intensive, expensive and not very efficient- but the researchers in a new study can help with those first two. To make a solar cell, machines etch nanoscale spikes into a silicon wafer in order to ma ...

Article - News Staff - Sep 8 2014 - 8:00am