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.
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:
When Spain's power grid failed on April 28th, 2025, it quickly became a very serious issue. Not only for the economic impacts, but life-or-death serious due to multiple, indirect deaths associated to the blackout. Emergency services, transportation, communication and other vital services were halted during this power outage.
NOTE: An earlier version of this story incorrectly associated the failure of Northvolt to their sodium ion battery production issues, but their challenges weren't chemistry specific. That section has been removed. I’ve got sodium batteries right here in my hands, but three sodium battery companies went bankrupt
What if your phone battery charged in seconds instead of hours? What if buildings could cut their carbon emissions in half? What if medical sensors could detect diseases years earlier than they do today? Graphene was supposed to deliver all of this and more. Since 2004, researchers called it a
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
If you've been following battery tech for the past decade, you've heard the solid state battery story before. Toyota promised them by 2025. Samsung said they were just around the corner. QuantumScape's stock soared on promises of revolutionary batteries. And yet here we are,
This kite isn’t just soaring gracefully … it’s also generating energy from the wind. If you’re like me, you’re probably thinking: “Neat, but don’t we already have an effective and reliable way to capture wind energy?” And yeah, wind turbines have been been big ol’ work
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
If you or someone you love has ever undergone chemotherapy, you know how brutal it can be. The drugs attack both cancer cells and healthy ones, too, leaving patients sick, weak, and exhausted. Or think about a stroke. Every minute a blood clot blocks blood flow, brain cells are dying.
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
What if I told you the world's largest battery company just announced batteries that cost as low as $10 per kilowatt hour? Not $100. Ten. That's like going from paying for a luxury car to buying a bicycle. And the kicker? They're not using
Google just built a computer that solved a problem in 5 minutes that would take our best supercomputers 10 septillion years … that's not a typo. That's a 10 with 24 zeros after it. The universe is only 13.8 billion years old, so we're