Small wind turbines, or SWTs, have struggled to get off the ground. Not only is siting more difficult for SWTs, but their low efficiencies rarely justify their high costs. They also have to contend with the same kinds of considerations that your typical turbine does, like noise, vibration, environmental impacts,
This is the Dinglun Flywheel Energy Storage Power Station. At 30 MW, this is likely the biggest Flywheel Energy Storage System on the planet. Don’t let that spin you around though. While its sheer size is unrivaled, It’s not alone. More and more people are turning to mechanical
So, it’s been a full year since I installed these solar panels and a large home battery on my new house … and I’ve got some news. They say solar power can save you thousands on energy bills, but what actually happened. This past year was a bit of
I talk about heat pumps a lot. They really are the most energy efficient way to heat and cool things, but they’re not the only way. There’s another form of cooling that’s been getting a lot of attention in recent years that might just lie in these
The US military just approved funding for a new silicon-based battery, charging forward into commercialization. But why the push? NanoGraf’s silicon oxide-graphene (SOG) batteries aren’t just an upgrade to lithium—they’re versatile enough for everything from phones and backup storage to EVs. The DOD recently signed a
Oh hydrogen, that clean, green fuel that would solve so many emissions problems — if only it didn’t come with a few emissions problems of its own. If you’ve written off hydrogen as the fabled emissions free fuel panacea that’s never gonna live up to its promise (as
Recently, some pretty strange solar tech has caught my eye. Before you lies three new contraptions for every kind of conjurer: a coating that could someday transform objects into miniature solar panels, a memory alloy that can shift panels into different shapes, and a dye that can transmute a solar
Solar panels are typically made with silicon as their semiconducting material. But you know what they say: The grass is always greener with cadmium telluride … wait, what do you mean you’ve never heard of that? Well, I don’t blame you. Cadmium telluride-based photovoltaics (or CdTe for short) are
The U.S. wind industry kinda blows. Okay, that might be a bit harsh, but the past few years haven’t been great for turbines in the States. 2023 was particularly nasty. The weather got us off to a bad start with less resources to work with in the first
If you’ve been following my channel for a while, you’ll know that I built my forever home with the goal of reaching net zero energy status. In other words, I wanted my home designed so that I produce as much energy as I use over the course of
It’s already difficult to conceptualize the scale of wind turbines themselves. It can be even harder to wrap your head around how much energy they can supply. Just one gigawatt is enough energy to power between 750,000 to a million US homes.1 Here in the United States,
We can’t control the weather (yet). But we can control how we store weather-dependent renewable energy. So how do we snatch up our lightning in a bottle? Lithium-ion batteries can only go so far…and our historical large-scale go-to, pumped storage hydropower, only works in certain locations. What if