Tag Archives: Renewable Energy

Futurists have long seen the sun as the cleanest and most convenient solution to humanity’s skyrocketing energy needs. Building something like a Dyson Sphere may be beyond our reach for another thousand years, but the advent of flexible and even printable solar panels means that soon nearly any surface could become an instrument for harnessing solar energy. In the meantime, residential and commercial solar installations …

Where ambition finds a home World leaders and participants from around the world are gathering this week in San Francisco for the Global Climate Action Summit. The goal of the summit is to “take ambition to the next level.” Since agreed to in Paris in December 2015 and signed on Earth Day the following year, the Paris Agreement has looked to “ratcheting of ambition” …

Geothermal systems offer an efficient, low-carbon way to generate electricity and provide heating and cooling for homes. They use the naturally occurring heat in the rock and fluids in the Earth to accomplish their objective. Today, we have numerous technologies that enable us to access geothermal energy. We have geothermal power plants and geothermal heat pumps. We also use the hot water in the …

A global energy transformation is required in order to hold global mean temperature rise below the 2 degrees C climate tipping point, according to IRENA.

Solar energy is everywhere. Solar-powered sunglasses can be used to charge your cell phone, you can get solar powered book bags, lights on roads are solar powered, and even showers now can get their power from the sun. The rise in both the portability and the availability of solar has helped the price to drop pretty sharply. The price drop makes solar available to …

The solar energy industry recently received a blow from the Trump administration. President Trump imposed a 30 percent tariff on imported solar cells and modules. The tariff will decrease to 25 percent for the second year, 20 percent for the third year and 15 percent for the fourth year. In April, Suniva, Inc., a Chinese owned U.S. based manufacturer of solar panels, filed a …

Since the release of the first commercial lithium ion battery (LIB) in 1991, this technology has expanded at a rapid rate. So rapid, in fact, that concerns are beginning to be raised about a state of “peak lithium” beyond which we won’t have enough to fuel our bottomless thirst for electronics. But is peak lithium a real concern? Or just another over-hyped disaster scenario? …