For over 200 years, we’ve been generating electricity essentially the same way: by boiling water. And it’s worked! Today, steam turbines power the vast majority of the world’s electricity. But this technology, which has powered us since the industrial revolution, might not be up to supplying us
In April 2025, most of Spain and Portugal went dark. A cascading failure knocked out the Iberian peninsula’s grid in seconds. Just four years earlier, Texas came within 4 minutes and 37 seconds of its own total collapse.1 Not a temporary blackout. A full shutdown. What engineers call
Perovskite solar cells could hit 35% efficiency and cost half as much as silicon, but they’re still years away from your roof. Meanwhile, silicon panels just lost their 30% federal tax credit in the US, making them suddenly more expensive. So here’s the $20,000 question: what’s
Perovskite solar cells are smashing efficiency records and starting to hit the market, but what if the real future of solar is a material you’ve probably never heard of? It’s called kesterite, and new research suggests it could match perovskites’ efficiency without any toxic lead in the stack.
What if you could power cities just by mixing river water with seawater? Around 15,000 TWh of energy pours into the oceans each year as freshwater blends with saltwater at river mouths. That amounts to roughly half the energy the world consumes in electricity every year.12 And we
What if solar panels could generate twice the power for a fraction of the cost, making them cheap enough that you’d actually want them on your roof? Researchers in Australia may have just pulled it off. This is a solar cell made with both perovskites and graphene, the record-breaking
Why are the world’s most efficient solar panels learning to sweat? When it comes to solar, you’d assume more sun equals more power, but the truth is that solar panels actually hate being hot. In fact, for every single degree the temperature rises, these panels lose up to
What if I told you there’s a way to get up to 30% more power from the same solar panel footprint? No breakthrough chemistry. No quantum physics. Just one simple change that’s finally starting to catch on. They’re finally putting solar cells on both sides of the
Every time a subway screeches to a stop, we usually chalk it up to another moment in the daily grind … if we even notice it. Commuters pour out, new riders pile in. Just another day on the rails. But what if that screech, that everyday chaos, could do more than
Thorium reactors are like the solid-state batteries of nuclear power: vastly superior, yet forever on the horizon. But now, a Danish company is closer than ever to turning them into a reality. Its reactors are designed to deliver on thorium’s decades-old promise: a self-sustaining chain reaction that breeds fresh
Every crashing wave delivers a pulse of power. Add them all up, and the ocean carries more energy than the roughly 30,000 TWh of electricity generated globally in 2023.12 But for decades, wave power has been a sea of broken dreams — sunk prototypes, busted budgets, and forgotten startups.
Heat from ice? It sounds like a joke—or maybe a paradox. But what if the future of warm, cozy homes lies in freezing water? As outlandish as it seems, an English research team is working on a heat pump that runs off actual ice … well, more like slushies. It’