Researchers Create Highly Transparent Solar Cells for Windows that Generate Electricity — UCLA Engineering. By Jennifer Marcus | July 20, 2012 Transparent Solar Cells UCLA researchers have developed a new transparent solar cell that is an advance toward giving windows in homes and other buildings the ability to generate electricity while still allowing people to see outside. Their study appears in the journal ACS Nano.
The UCLA team describes a new kind of polymer solar cell (PSC) that produces energy by absorbing mainly infrared light, not visible light, making the cells nearly 70% transparent to the human eye. They made the device from a photoactive plastic that converts infrared light into an electrical current. Yang added that there has been intense world-wide interest in so-called polymer solar cells. Polymer solar cells have attracted great attention due to their advantages over competing solar cell technologies. Previously, many attempts have been made toward demonstrating visibly transparent or semitransparent PSCs. Rio+20 - United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development.
China Is Developing a Grid Better for Coal Than Renewables. China will fail to meet its carbon and energy intensity targets unless it makes dramatic changes to its electricity grid, a groundbreaking new report finds.
The study, two years in the making, finds that China's grid is its "Achilles' heel," said lead author and Energy Transition Research Institute Research Director William Chandler. While newer and in many ways more technologically advanced than the U.S. grid, China's system is nevertheless being built to perpetuate the use of coal and large hydropower projects.
"The most important thing in the world for meeting carbon goals is what China does in its overall energy policy in the next 10 years. And the big hole in meeting those targets is in the electric power system," Chandler said in an exclusive interview with ClimateWire. "They are in serious danger of losing the battle to meet their carbon and energy-intensity goals," he said. A $63B failure to communicate? 'They have the goals and the targets, but ...' 2nd US Military and Renewable Energy Industry Forum to Focus on Overcoming DoD Procurement Process : Greentech Media. American Council On Renewable Energy (ACORE) and Advanced Energy Economy (AEE) Forum Series Convenes DoD and Industry to Streamline Military Deployment of Renewable Energy Systems WASHINGTON, May 9, 2012 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/— Top military officials and renewable energy businesses and organizations met today at the second forum in the multi-part series hosted by the American Council On Renewable Energy (ACORE) and Advanced Energy Economy (AEE), in order to clarify the Department of Defense’s (DoD) renewable energy priorities, and overcome roadblocks to achieving the military’s goals.
The forum series, being held throughout 2012 in collaboration with the DoD seeks to increase U.S. military effectiveness through the integration and deployment of renewable energy solutions on base and in the battlefield. The Department of Defense is the biggest single energy user in the U.S. and is expected to spend $150 billion on fuel and electricity over the next decade.
Col. Peter A. About ACORE.
Sea and Ocean energy. Wind energy. Geothermal. Energy and Space. Solar energy. Using physics and estimation to assess energy, growth, options—by Tom Murphy. It’s a bit off-topic for the series, but I can’t even go to Google now without being reminded of the World Cup and soccer this, soccer that.
(Apologies to non-Americans who know the sport as football—but don’t get me started on football!) I have often wondered: given characteristic low score values, is soccer anything more than Poisson noise? When discussing this with colleagues, one pointed me to this XKCD comic, reproduced at right. Any random process that produces discrete events in some time interval, with uniform probability per unit time follows a Poisson distribution. When the number of events becomes large, the distribution tends toward a Gaussian (normal) distribution.
My thesis is that soccer is an amalgam of random processes whose net effect produces rare events—those more-or-less unpredictable events spread more-or-less uniformly in time. Normally I allow comments on Do the Math for ten days after each post. Continue reading.