A lot of effort has gone into developing transparent solar cells lately, since they could be attached to windows easily with no loss of light. But CSEM, a Swiss non-profit technology company, has now developed white solar cells, which can easily be integrated into a building’s walls.
Researchers at the University of Toronto have come up with a new kind of spray-on colloidal quantum dots (CQD), which is a breakthrough in the field as it doesn’t bind with oxygen atoms. The later is a problem with CQD as it causes some dots to forgo their electrons and become useless. Tests of this new method revealed a solar efficiency of eight percent, which may be low compared to other technologies, but the researchers are still hopeful their method will prove very useful.
A team of researchers at the Ohio State University (OSU) successfully produced a dye-sensitized solar cell, which can store power by using air to decompose and re-form lithium peroxide. This device combines a solar cell and battery into one, and it is the first device of its kind. The adoption of this technology could also considerably lower the costs of solar cells.
Making a home water efficient often comes down to they type of showerheads that are installed. To combat water waste when showering, a California-based company has come up with an innovative showerhead called Eva. This is a Bluetooth-connected showerhead, which works with any sized shower attachment, and the makers say it has the capability of cutting a home’s water consumption in half.
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Discarded rubber tires may soon find a new use. A team of researchers from the US Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory have come up with a method of harvesting the carbon black from them, which can then be used to create anodes for lithium-ion batteries that provide power to plug-in electric vehicles and store energy produced by solar panels and wind turbines. According to the researchers, the new batteries will perform even better than the ones we use today.
The more widespread adoption of renewable sources of energy is at least in part hampered by our poor ability to store energy. But a team of MIT researchers has recently a made a breakthrough in developing a new battery system. This all-liquid battery system is more efficient at storing energy, and costs less to produce, than currently available solutions. The further development of this system and use could make solar and wind energy more attractive and therefore facilitate its wide scale adoption.
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