Exploring everything within renewable energy like solar panels, wind turbines, hydro, geothermal energy, battery technology, and more.
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
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.
I called 2024 the year of perovskites. We got our first commercial shipments and some record-breaking efficiencies. But 2025? This was the year perovskites went from "interesting lab tech" to "you can actually buy these." Oxford PV shipped the first commercial batch to a US solar
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
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,
I’ve had my geothermal heat pump for the past two years now. So far, it’s been helping me to reach my net zero energy goals in my new house (or maybe I should say my “not so new” house now). But getting it installed meant drilling a 400-foot-deep
We've been told for years that fast-charging kills batteries. The typical warning is that if you spring for too much current too quickly, you'll cook the lifespan. But what if that rule is wrong? A team at the Georgia Institute of Technology just flipped the script.
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
Thanks to reusable rockets that fly, land, and fly again, launch costs are coming back down to Earth. And that’s revived a ‘70s dream to beam clean solar energy from orbit. Space agencies around the world are revamping blueprints for giant solar farms capturing sunlight 24/7 and wirelessly
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
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