Real hot: the Ivanpah solar power plant and others like it use mirrors to produce heat to make steam and drive an electricity turbine.
BrightSource Energy
The massive Ivanpah solar power plant uses natural gas – even more than it expected last year. It’s not ideal, but solar power and natural gas are a powerful, and relatively ‘green,’ combination.
Rooftop solar panels: will they kill power companies or can they help them?
kincuri/flickr
Many utilities see rooftop solar as a threat, but solar power can actually lower the cost of power they – and their consumers – need to pay during hours of high demand.
Renewable energy developers choose sunny locations, which can be near protected lands.
jsmoorman/flickr
New funding for large-scale solar could be backing a winner, but only with the right leadership.
To no one’s surprise, a US study found that solar panel cells produce infrasound and low frequency noise which is way below audibility.
AAP/Dean Lewins
Internoise is the world’s premier research conference for acousticians. The 2015 meeting is being held right now in San Francisco. Buried among the hundreds of papers is one that you could easily take…
Will alternate solar technologies get a boost if solar overall grows?
Walmartcorporate/flickr
Environment minister Greg Hunt wants the Clean Energy Finance Corporation to focus on new technologies, not wind and solar. But that’s not what it was set up to do, and Australia already has an agency for that.
Rwanda faces energy isues and renewable energy in rural parts of the country is vital for healthcare.
George Baryamwisaki/EPA
Tough Tory manifesto commitments and hatred of wind farms from the right will make it hard for the new government to meet its EU renewables commitments. Scotland might be able to help.
South Australia’s wind farms have coped without baseload power before - they can do it again.
Fairv8/Wikimedia Commons
Coal closures announced this week in South Australia will cause employment pain, but could also help pave the way for the state to go 100% renewable - something that modelling suggests is eminently possible.
A tandem solar cell made from silicon and metal-halide perovskite.
Rongrong Cheacharoen
Electric utilities want to quash distributed solar because they don’t want the competition, right? Perhaps, but if you rely at all on the grid, you have a stake in this fight, too.