Group items tagged

"Sunlight in one hour could power the world for a year, but we don't tap into it for either electricity or for making solar fuels," Detty said, explaining the importance of his work. "Plants use sunlight to make their own fuels. Humans don't. We use oil. So if we want to have energy independence, it will come from solar."

That's an important discovery for looking further into earth-abundant, non-toxic materials that could help make solar cells inexpensive and absorb sunlight more efficiently than silicon, Prieto said.

In a boon for the local solar industry, a team of researchers from Swinburne University of Technology and Suntech Power Holdings have developed the world's most efficient broadband nanoplasmonic solar cells with an absolute efficiency of 8.1 per cent.

The researchers envision energy-producing photoconversion systems similar to photovoltaic cells that generate hydrogen fuel, comparable to the way plants and other photosynthetic organisms convert light to energy.

"When sunlight is converted into electricity, it is known as solar power. Photovoltaic panels are used to generate and supply electricity"

With the increase in the cost of the fuel charges nowadays people adapt to use the solar technology in which the energy is generated through the sunlight.

For cell phone charging, the Emerald has USB and cell phone ports and will come with a bag of adapters. It can fully charge a smartphone in the same time it would take at an outlet, developers say. It recharges in full sunlight in three hours.

The device is made entirely of earth-abundant, inexpensive materials - mostly silicon, cobalt and nickel - and works in ordinary water.

From concentrated solar power to floating wind turbines and from printable organic solar cells to biomass gasification, power-technology.com picks six of the most promising new green power technologies. Concentrating solar power technology Concentrating Solar Power (CSP) technology involving the use of mirrors to focus sunlight onto a receiver that captures and converts the solar energy into heat for electricity generation has been in use since 1980s.