Turning homes into power stations could cut household fuel bills by more than 60 percent

Sonder Agency

Energy bills could be cut by more than 60 percent -- saving the average household over £600 a year -- if homes were designed to generate, store and release their own solar energy, a report has revealed. The concept has already been proven and is operating successfully on a building in the UK. Read more

Controlled manipulation of carbon nanostructures

Sonder Agency

Researchers around the world are looking at how they can manipulate the properties of carbon nanostructures to customize them for specific purposes; the idea is to make the promising mini-format materials commercially viable. A research team has now managed to selectively influence the properties of hybrid systems consisting of carbon nanostructures and a dye. Read more

Distributed wind power keeps spinning, growing

Sonder Agency

America's use of distributed wind -- which is wind power generated near where it will be used -- continues to grow, according to the 2016 Distributed Wind Market Report. Read more

Dual-surface graphene electrode splits water into hydrogen and oxygen

Sonder Agency

Scientists have turned laser-induced graphene into a two-sided electrocatalyst that efficiently splits water into oxygen and hydrogen. Read more

Solar glasses generate solar power

Sonder Agency

Organic solar cells are flexible, transparent, and light-weight -- and can be manufactured in arbitrary shapes or colors. Thus, they are suitable for a variety of applications that cannot be realized with conventional silicon solar cells. Researchers now present sunglasses with colored, semitransparent solar cells applied onto lenses that supply a microprocessor and two displays… Read more

Solar scientists rough up silicon panels to boost light capture

Sonder Agency

Scientists enhance conversion efficiency of crystalline Si solar cells by effectively preventing reflection loss, passivating a submicron silicon structure, and adding a rough nanoscale surface texture using simple and inexpensive processes. Read more

New world efficiency record with perovskite solar cells

Sonder Agency

Scientists have developed a new cost-efficient way to produce inorganic-organic hybrid perovskite solar cells (PSCs) which sets a new world-record efficiency performance of 22.1 percent Read more

A new optimization model could bring higher solar-power integration

Sonder Agency

With numerous installations of solar power systems for residential homes, there is a challenge to balance supply and demand to make these intermittent energy sources reliable. Demand response is one promising way to increase operational flexibility and energy efficiency, and researchers have incorporated scenarios in case studies based on 100 urban low-voltage network samples to… Read more

India can integrate 175 GW of renewable energy into its electricity grid

Sonder Agency

The US Department of Energy's National Renewable Energy Laboratory has confirmed the technical and economic viability of integrating 175 gigawatts (GW) of renewable energy into India's grid by 2022. Read more

Climate change poses threat to European electricity production

Sonder Agency

The vulnerability of the European electricity sector to changes in water resources is set to worsen by 2030 as a consequence of climate change, conclude researchers. Read more