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On a perfect New Mexico winter day — with the sky almost 10 percent brighter than usual — Sandia National Laboratories and Stirling Energy Systems (SES) set a new solar-to-grid system conversion efficiency record by achieving a 31.25 percent net efficiency rate. The old 1984 record of 29.4 percent was toppled Jan. 31 on SES’s “Serial #3” solar dish Stirling system at Sandia’s National Solar Thermal Test Facility.

Latin American nations could become important suppliers of ethanol for world markets in coming decades, according to an Oak Ridge National Laboratory study.

Xcel Energy, (NYSE: XEL)in partnership with the University of Minnesota, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory and the Great Plains Institute, will soon begin testing a one-megawatt sodium-sulfur battery storage system to demonstrate its ability to store wind energy and dispatch it to the electricity grid when needed.

Shedding Light on Thin-film Solar Cell Efficiency Research

Recently, researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy's National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) announced that they have moved closer to creating a thin-film solar cell that can compete with the efficiency of the more common silicon-based solar cell. The Copper Indium Gallium Diselenide (CIGS) thin-film solar cell recently reached 19.9% efficiency in testing at the lab, setting a new world record, according to NREL.

According to a new report, "Renewables Portfolio Standards in the United States: A Status Report with Data through 2007," released by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, a growing number of states are supporting renewable electricity through the creation of renewable portfolio standards (RPS). The report provides a comprehensive overview of early experience with these state-level RPS policies.

7 January 2008—At first blush, you might lump claims about a machine that supposedly turns sunshine, air, and water into fuel in the same category as e-mails insisting that someone in Nigeria will pay you handsomely to help free up a large sum of money. But researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Sandia National Laboratories, in Albuquerque, say they have created a device that can break water into hydrogen and oxygen using sunlight, or in a another reaction convert carbon dioxide, to carbon monoxide that combines with hydrogen to make hydrocarbons such as methanol, ethanol, and even gasoline or diesel fuel. The technology holds the promise of using the same resources as biomass-to-fuel schemes but with potentially greater efficiency, according to the researchers.

A new magnetic alloy from DOE Ames may meet one car company criterion for a more cost-effective and energy-efficient electric drive. Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy's Ames Laboratory appear to have developed a permanent magnet alloy that meets car manufacturer high-temperature performance requirements.

For computer experts focused solely on performance, June and November mark the twice-yearly release of the TOP500 list, which ranks the world's supercomputers in terms of "teraflops," or trillions of calculations per second (the "flop" comes from "floating-point operations," a technical term for computer calculations). That list is currently led by a supercomputer at DOE's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) that has a peak speed of more than 596 teraflops. But the November 2007 list of supercomputing speed freaks was accompanied by a newcomer, the Green500 list, which reworks the TOP500 list in terms of energy efficiency. The Green500 list ranks the 500 fastest supercomputers by megaflops per watt, that is, by how many thousands of calculations are performed per watt of energy consumed.