The Green Optimistic

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While the most high performance classic solar cells only use up to 20% of the solar power falling onto them, researchers from DoE, the laboratory from Idaho, found out a way to capture much more energy from the Sun’s energy, from the invisible spectrum, even at night.

A team of scientists from the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute has been developing a brand new solar energy technology that is about to revolutionize the way we collect and distribute solar energy.

Nanosolar has created a thin film solar battery, much more efficient than anything existing on the market nowadays.
Its thin film technology transfers the sun light in a very efficient way. The Nanosolar power plant will begin producing energy in 2008 and will cover 430 megawatts/year. That’s more than all the capacity of the currently installed [...]

Most moth eyes are made up of adjacent hexagonal sectors. Each sector is filled with thousands of orderly rows of miniscule bumps, or nipple-like protrusions. Though formed so perfectly they appear almost manufactured, each protrusion measures less than 300 nanometers, or 300 billionths of a meter - a size that renders them invisible to [...]

BSWT is a vertical wind turbine based on sailing engineering. The wind rotor is rotated by two spiral-formed vanes. For best performance, these vanes are covered in solar cells, so that sun and wind produce electricity as one element. The BSWT installation costs relatively little, produces no noise or significant shadowing, can be easily maintained [...]

Parabolic dish concentrating systems use parabolic dish shaped mirrors to focus the incoming solar radiation onto a receiver that is positioned at the focal point of the dish, like it’s illustrated in the image below:

The fluid in the receiver is heated to very high temperatures of about 750oC. This fluid is then used to [...]

 I found out the ingenuity of some people exceeds “common sense” and their inventions are really helpful to humanity. Not on large scale, but for those tech-guys who do nothing but sit all day long in their garages and invent crazy things nobody would have imagined. Most of these inventions stay there, in the respective [...]

Would you like going on your nearest river or sea or ocean in a summer day? Would you like cruising all day powered only by a solar battery? Well, for 10,500$ you could. Hammacher Schlemmer has built a small solar powered boat for two person.
Because the batteries hold up to a 6-hour charge, the boat [...]