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’
Believe it or not, the long-promised next generation of solar panels are here. A tandem perovskite solar panel with higher efficiency than silicon alone has just arrived on the market. The first batch has already been purchased by an undisclosed U.S. customer, which will soon install them in a
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
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
Growing the world’s renewable energy capacity has always been a delicate balancing act, and one of the many plates we have to spin during that act is land use. Utility-scale solar and wind parks are rapidly expanding in size and prevalence all over the world, including right near my
I know, I know. I talk a lot about heat pumps, but there’s a good reason for it. It’s a fantastic technology that uses a little physics exploit to get more heat energy out than energy you put in. The problem is that most of the time, the
Where I live in New England in the winter it can get as low as -13 F (-25 C). During summer heatwaves, it can reach over 100 F (40 C). Many of our houses and homes weren’t built for that, and in the United States, we aren’t exactly
Perovskites are often hailed as the next big thing for solar panels. They’re more efficient than silicon PVs could ever be, and they have higher yields. However, their fragility and short lifespans have relegated them to the lab...so far. But 2024 is looking to be the year of
You’re probably used to solar installations that look like this - solar panels facing up towards the sky, which makes sense. You want a wider area to catch more of that sweet solar energy, right? However, bifacial vertical solar panels have started to gain traction recently. Their more flexible-footprint
Wind turbines have a “big” problem. As in, they’re really big: bigger than you might think. One of the latest turbine designs sports a swept area of about 10 American football fields.1 This is generally desirable, especially for offshore turbines. But as you can probably imagine, this makes