Solar Power World

New Way To Store Sun’s Heat

A novel application of carbon nanotubes, developed by MIT researchers, shows promise as an innovative approach to storing solar energy for use whenever it’s needed. Storing the sun’s heat in chemical form — rather than converting it to electricity or storing the heat itself in a heavily insulated container — has significant advantages, since in principle the chemical material can be stored for long periods of time without losing any of its stored energy. The problem with... Read More

MIT researchers use virus to improve solar cell efficiency by a third

Image: Matt Klug, Biomolecular Materials Group Researchers at MIT have found a way to make significant improvements to the power-conversion efficiency of solar cells by enlisting the services of tiny viruses to perform detailed assembly work at the microscopic level, according to MIT News. In a solar cell, sunlight hits a light-harvesting material, causing it to release electrons that can be harnessed to produce an electric current. The new research, published online in the journal... Read More

MIT researchers use thermo-chemical solar power

A molecule of fulvalene diruthenium, seen in diagram, changes its configuration when it absorbs heat, and later releases heat when it snaps back to its original shape. Image: Jeffrey Grossman Broadly speaking, there have been two approaches to capturing the sun’s energy: photovoltaics, which turn the sunlight into electricity, or solar-thermal systems, which concentrate the sun’s heat and use it to boil water to turn a turbine, or use the heat directly for hot water or home... Read More

Carbon nanotubes focus sun 100 fold

This filament containing about 30 million carbon nanotubes absorbs energy from the sun as photons and then re-emits photons of lower energy, creating the fluorescence seen here. The red regions indicate highest energy intensity, and green and blue are lower intensity. Using carbon nanotubes (hollow tubes of carbon atoms), MIT chemical engineers have found a way to concentrate solar energy 100 fold over a regular (nonconcentrated) photovoltaic cell. Such nanotubes could form... Read More

Self-assembling solar cells recycle themselves repeatedly

Plants are good at doing what scientists and engineers have been struggling to do for decades: converting sunlight into stored energy, and doing so reliably day after day, year after year. Now MIT scientists have succeeded in mimicking a key aspect of that process. One of the problems with harvesting sunlight is that the sun’s rays can be highly destructive to many materials. Sunlight leads to a gradual degradation of many systems developed to harness it. But plants... Read More

Researchers Cool Silicon Until It Melts

Like an ice cube on a warm day, most materials melt — that is, change from a solid to a liquid state — as they get warmer. But a few oddball materials do the reverse: They melt as they get cooler. Now a team of researchers at MIT has found that silicon, the most widely used material for computer chips and solar cells, can exhibit this strange property of “retrograde melting” when it contains high concentrations of certain metals dissolved in it.The... Read More

NREL Establishes Global Institute To Facilitate Sustainable Energy Expansion

The U.S. Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) has established a new global institute dedicated to analyzing, speeding and smoothing the transition to sustainable energy worldwide. NREL Senior Scientist Doug Arent has been named executive director of the new Joint Institute for Strategic Energy Analysis (JISEA) by its institutional partners, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Stanford University, the University of Colorado, Colorado... Read More