Renewable Energy

Exploring everything within renewable energy like solar panels, wind turbines, hydro, geothermal energy, battery technology, and more.

Why Solar Panels Aren’t Unfair or a Scam

There’s concerns that homes with solar panels are reducing their utility bills at the expense of their neighbors without solar panels. The phenomenon is referred to as “cost shifting”: the idea that the credits utilities pay to solar homes for the energy they produce ultimately results in higher bills

How Dead EV Batteries are Perfect for Energy Storage

It’s been nice to see the growing popularity of electric vehicles these last few years, but EVs need batteries and batteries don’t last forever. In fact, the first generation of EV batteries are already dying, and there's an absolute dead battery typhoon coming. Lithium battery recycling

Top 5 Solar Energy Advances Using Perovskites

For years, special kinds of semiconductors called perovskites have promised revolutionary improvements compared to traditional silicon solar cells. Perovskites could hold the key to higher efficiency at lower costs. In some cases perovskites have been shown to offer a 250% performance boost. But scientists have been working on this tech

Why Salt Water may be the Future of Batteries

There’s no shortage of potential solutions to the world’s critical need for renewable energy storage. But there is a shortage of accessible and cheap resources to use for those solutions. With the limitations of materials like lithium and vanadium in mind, it’s logical to look for alternatives

Why Are Floating Wind Turbines So Huge?

With the recent news of China producing one of the largest wind turbines yet, with a rotor diameter of 260 meters (853 feet) and a rating of 18MW, it got me wondering why they’re so big. They’re almost defying imagination at this point. Bigger is always better in

Fixing Solar Panels Fatal Flaw

The solar industry has a potentially fatal flaw: its reliance on silver. As a precious metal, silver is costly and difficult to come by, yet critical to pretty much every kind of solar panel.1 Worldwide solar capacity has officially crossed into terawatt territory and silver is putting that continued

Are Carbon Offsets Real?

by Elizabeth Sarley

Carbon offsets are everywhere these days. You might see them in little disclaimers on your favorite sneaker brand’s site, or you can buy them to help offset your next cross-country flight. They may be ubiquitous, but what really are carbon offsets and what should you know before buying into