Energy & Green Tech
Officials with battery maker Form Energy have announced the development of the Iron-Air 100-hour storage battery—a battery meant to store electricity created from renewable sources such as solar and wind. As part of their ...
Engineering
A group of Dutch students has reimagined van life and is hitting the road to Portugal. Just don't call their groundbreaking new solar-powered vehicle a campervan.
Sep 25, 2021
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Energy & Green Tech
Lithium-ion batteries are currently the preferred technology to power electric vehicles, but they're too expensive for long-duration grid-scale energy storage systems, and lithium itself is becoming more challenging to access.
May 31, 2022
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Energy & Green Tech
"It is the first domestic commercial unit with zero direct and indirect emissions. Currently, there are already units that use the same technology as ours, which is aerothermal energy, but they do not use a natural fluid ...
Apr 6, 2022
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Energy & Green Tech
In the first evaluation of evaporation as a renewable energy source, researchers at Columbia University find that U.S. lakes and reservoirs could generate 325 gigawatts of power, nearly 70 percent of what the United States ...
Sep 26, 2017
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Energy & Green Tech
A nagging question as the year gets closer to the very end. The wind is there. The water is there. The sun is there. How is it that we are still so far off in fossil-fuel land? Farms, plants, rigs later, those in the renewables ...
Energy & Green Tech
The dramatic drop in the cost of solar photovoltaic (PV) modules, which has fallen by 99 percent over the last four decades, is often touted as a major success story for renewable energy technology. But one question has never ...
Nov 20, 2018
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Energy & Green Tech
The quest to find new ways to harness solar power has taken a step forward after researchers successfully split water into hydrogen and oxygen by altering the photosynthetic machinery in plants.
Sep 3, 2018
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Energy & Green Tech
Hydrogen is viewed as a promising alternative to fossil fuel, but the methods used to make it either generate too much carbon dioxide or are too expensive. Rice University researchers have found a way to harvest hydrogen ...
Sep 14, 2023
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Energy & Green Tech
If countries want to lower emissions as substantially, rapidly and cost-effectively as possible, they should prioritize support for renewables, rather than nuclear power.
Oct 5, 2020
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Renewable energy is energy generated from natural resources—such as sunlight, wind, rain, tides, and geothermal heat—which are renewable (naturally replenished). In 2006, about 18% of global final energy consumption came from renewables, with 13% coming from traditional biomass, such as wood-burning. Hydroelectricity was the next largest renewable source, providing 3% of global energy consumption and 15% of global electricity generation.
Wind power is growing at the rate of 30 percent annually, with a worldwide installed capacity of 121,000 megawatts (MW) in 2008, and is widely used in European countries and the United States. The annual manufacturing output of the photovoltaics industry reached 6,900 MW in 2008, and photovoltaic (PV) power stations are popular in Germany and Spain. Solar thermal power stations operate in the USA and Spain, and the largest of these is the 354 MW SEGS power plant in the Mojave Desert. The world's largest geothermal power installation is The Geysers in California, with a rated capacity of 750 MW. Brazil has one of the largest renewable energy programs in the world, involving production of ethanol fuel from sugar cane, and ethanol now provides 18 percent of the country's automotive fuel. Ethanol fuel is also widely available in the USA. While most renewable energy projects and production is large-scale, renewable technologies are also suited to small off-grid applications, sometimes in rural and remote areas, where energy is often crucial in human development. Kenya has the world's highest household solar ownership rate with roughly 30,000 small (20–100 watt) solar power systems sold per year.
Some renewable energy technologies are criticised for being intermittent or unsightly, yet the renewable energy market continues to grow. Climate change concerns coupled with high oil prices, peak oil and increasing government support are driving increasing renewable energy legislation, incentives and commercialization. New government spending, regulation, and policies should help the industry weather the 2009 economic crisis better than many other sectors.
This text uses material from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA
