Jon Okun (he/him) is a writer and researcher based in Seattle, Washington. He's previously worked for the Middle East Institute and the CleanTech Alliance, as well NBC's The End is Nye. He enjoys birdwatching with his partner.
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
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,
Nothing lasts forever, and batteries are no exception. So as popular as lithium-ion tech may be for energy storage, it’s not without its weaknesses. Chief amongst them is degradation. You can’t expect lithium-ion to operate at peak performance for very long. But what if we could somehow create
Algae. It’s gross green goo that collects in still water…and can possibly make our future greener, too. Researchers are finding weird and unique ways to turn living algae into solar panels and hydrogen farms. So how exactly can algae do all this? And will they end up on
Developing reliable energy storage is just as, if not more, important as improving methods of obtaining the energy itself. But among the slew of new batteries and energy storage systems, how can you tell which tech is worthy and which is just hype? Well, let's break down what
Ever heard of a quantum dot? What about an artificial atom? Though it might sound like technobabble from Star Trek (which of course I’m a fan of), this is a real piece of nano-technology that has the potential to revolutionize fields like medicine, consumer electronics, and especially solar energy.
This is the biggest solar plant in the United States, located in Kern, California. The Solar Star Plant is over 8 square miles and has a generation capacity of 579 megawatts, powering around 255,000 homes.1 This is impressive, but about 6,500 miles away, in this remote desert,
3D printing rocket engines? It seems like these days you can 3D print just about anything. Just on this channel, we’ve talked about 3D printed next-gen perovskite solar panels, houses, and the development of advanced toroidal propellers for boats and drones. So you probably shouldn’t be surprised to
How can CO2 actually help us keep the planet cooler? When it's the refrigerant in a heat pump! And these heat pumps can warm your house while they heat your water. All while being more than twice as energy efficient as their competitors, at least according to some
Wave Energy Converters have been making a lot of, um, waves in the energy sector lately thanks in part to China’s brand new, megawatt-scale, wave energy device. This device isn’t the first of its kind, but its sheer size represents a breakthrough for this underutilized but potent branch
What do you do if a satellite runs out of batteries? It’s prohibitively expensive to send a team into orbit and pop in some new AAs, and as a result many satellites use very efficient, reliable and long-lived nickel-hydrogen batteries. We’re talking about batteries that may last decades.