Tag Archive

Sunshine is free, so can photovoltaics be cheap?

Image via CrunchBase

Here’s how to make a solar cell from silicon: take one solid block of doped silicon, saw it into thin wafers, layer said semiconductors beneath a panel of transparent glass, connect them to a metal electrode that can channel away the electrons knocked loose by incoming photons and turn [...]

Photovoltaic Breakthroughs Brighten Outlook for Cheap Solar Power

Enough sunlight bathes Earth’s daytime half in an hour to meet all human energy needs for a year.
Sadly, there are several problems with meeting human energy demands by tapping such abundant, free solar power—not least of which is the cost of making semiconducting material that can cheaply harvest the power [...]

Rooftop Rentals Soar With Generous Canadian Feed-in Tariff

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

Since September, when the Ontario Power Authority began its generous payment for rooftop solar power, Toronto’s commercial roof acreage has become the site of a new renewable energy gold rush by solar developers now able to earn a steady income farming solar power to local utilities for 20 years.
Just as [...]

The Year in Energy

Image via Wikipedia

Liquid batteries, giant lasers, and vast new reserves of natural gas highlight the fundamental energy advances of the past 12 months.
With many renewable energy companies facing hard financial times (“Weeding Out Solar Companies“), a lot of the big energy news this year was coming out of Washington, DC, with massive federal stimulus funding [...]

Mobile MaxPure solar filters bring pure water to refugees

Image via Wikipedia

Recently, we reported on Marines and their deployment of GREENS solar-power for technological devices on the battlefield. Soon after publishing that article, Gizmag was contacted by World Water and Solar Technologies (WWST) and told us about the company’s placement of solar-powered water purification units throughout the world, but in particular, in war-torn Darfur, [...]