Window gazers of the future may soon find themselves looking right through an energy-producing transparent glass solar panel, if the folks at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory are on the right track. Working with the company New Energy Technologies, Inc., the lab has produced a transparent photovoltaic module that is 14 times bigger than its last attempt. Windows that double as solar panels At 170 square centimeters (about 26 square inches), the new module is about the size of a small window. If the technology can be ramped up to a more useful scale, practically any glass window could double as a clean energy generator, with the embedded photovoltaic cell all but invisible. The largest device of its kind produced at NREL, the new module represents a breakthrough in ...

A hydrokinetic turbine company, Hydrovolts, has been getting into the news recently for innovative new hydrokinetic turbines that will go where no hydrokinetic turbine has gone before.

Hydrovolts turbine for clean energy generation, designed with the help of Autodesk software. (Photo: Business Wire)

“Clean technology innovator Hydrovolts is using software from Autodesk, Inc. (NASDAQ: ADSK) to create unique hydrokinetic turbines that are more easily installed in rivers, canals and other waterways for faster generation of renewable energy. The company’s smaller turbines can be quickly installed and generating power in less than an hour,” Business Wire reports. As stated above, they can be installed many places, but the company is most focused on getting them installed in wastewater treatment plants. Hydrovolts has been in talks with Veolia Environmental Solutions, one of the biggest wastewater treatment processors in ...

Clearly undeterred by the GOP’s ongoing effort to cut federal support for clean energy, the Obama Administration has just announced a new $150 million round of funding for cutting-edge research into solar, wind, geothermal, bio-based energy and ocean power along with dozens of other categories related to renewable energy and energy efficiency. The funds are coming through the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E), an agency modeled after DARPA, the legendary Department of Defense research program that developed the Internet. If ARPA-E can come anywhere near that accomplishment, it looks like the U.S. is in for more than a little change in the fossil fuel status quo. New clean energy tech trumps fossil fuel era ARPA-E’s funding announcement is still in the draft stage but ...

Research and analysis of solar PV manufacturing costs and international trade flows shows that Chinese silicon solar PV manufacturers have only a slight cost advantage on their US counterparts, and that excludes transportation costs, the effect of inflation rate differentials, and other factors. Furthermore, the extraordinary rise in Chinese exports of silicon solar PV cells and panels to the US could only be sustained with the support of massive government subsidies, according to a US DOE National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) presentation. The results provide additional evidence in support of SolarWorld America’s and the Coalition for American Solar Manufacturing’s (CASM) international trade petitions against Chinese silicon solar PV manufacturers and Chinese government subsidies, asserts SolarWorld America’s president Gordon Brinser. “This analysis from the renewable-energy research arm of the U.S. government corroborates our view that an export drive sponsored by ...

Yesterday, I focused a bit small-scale or medium-scale solar (in the US & UK) here on CleanTechnica. On the flip side, news today from Solarbuzz is that utility-scale photovoltaic solar is growing fast in North America and looking for 2012 to be its top year yet.

Q4 2011 Saw Record Installations “Sharp reductions in market prices combined with the impact of regional and national policies pushed the North American photovoltaic market to a new quarterly peak with 0.93 GW installed in Q4’11, according  to the latest North American PV Markets Quarterly report issued by NPD Solarbuzz, “the solar market research and analysis company notes. “The solar incentive policy mix in both the United States and Canadian markets drove up demand in large-scale ground-mount systems, which was 59% of this total. Regionally, the New Jersey, California, ...

“Turbine Cowboys” is a new reality series premiering on The Weather Channel this spring, and anyone with an interest in clean energy should check it out. Despite the highly mechanized nature of wind turbine construction and the use of robotic devices for maintenance, the human element is still very much at work. Turbine Cowboys is an important reminder that while renewable energy is cleaner and safer in terms of emissions and overall public health impacts, that does not necessarily translate into a low-risk work environment. Wind and Workers The Turbine Cowboys crew has been filming as far south as Baja California and up north to Alaska, which is a hint about the direction it’s going in. Along with the hazards you’d expect from working around electricity and huge ...

In a report published by Scientific Reports, researchers say they’re successfully working toward making low-cost solar cells from plants. While, technically, all plants are some sort of solar cell (photosynthesis takes sunlight, water, and CO2 and turns it into sugar, as you may remember from high school chemistry), the key here is the word “low cost.” Photosynthesis On Your Roof The project in question is focusing on a way to produce “biophotovoltaics” without all sorts of sophisticated lab equipment. And while esoteric and possibly arcane lab equipment is all sorts of cool, it’s also rather expensive and not always workable for mass-producing items. The new system is incredibly user-friendly and costs a lot less – mix green plants (like grass clippings) with custom-designed chemicals, and out comes a photovoltaic material made with the power of photosynthesis. MIT researcher Andreas Mershin, ...

ArrayPower says that it has invented a “sequenced inverter” design that could cut the cost of solar power by 10%. For those that don’t know what an inverter is, don’t worry, it is easy to understand and I will explain it: a typical inverter for a solar-powered home converts the DC (direct current) power that solar panels generate into 120- and 240-volt AC (alternating current) power, the same as what your power outlet provides. Small solar setups often generate DC at 12 volts, and that 12 volts of DC power is converted into 120 volts of AC power, which is suitable for most household appliances, portable devices chargers, etc. The new inverter setup mentioned above involves equipping each solar panel with a small inverter, instead of connecting all solar panels to one ...

 

The picture shows a test system consisting of 40 high concentrating photovoltaic (HCPV) modules. The latest prototypes of the modules achieved a major milestone with 33.9 percent solar module efficiency. (Press picture: Semprius)

Yep, it’s that time again—a new solar module efficiency record has been set and independently verified. The solar module company is Semprius. The new efficiency record is 33.9%. The modules are actually set to come to market this year. And the efficiency percentage “was externally certified after measurement under standard test conditions at the Instituto de Energia Solar (IES) at the University of Madrid (Universidad Politecnica de Madrid),” a news release notes. This is the first time that a photovoltaic module has converted over one-third of the solar energy hitting the module into usable electricity. The previous record was reportedly ...

Below is the original version of an article I wrote for GE’s ecomagination site (full disclosure: I am being paid for the ecomagination article,.. but not for any extra views I drive to it). Water power has been fairly invisible in recent years as wind and solar have stolen the spotlight, but I think we’re going to see a lot more attention put on it soon (and have already begun seeing that in 2012). We’re planning a “water power” page for CleanTechnica that will be a bit like the solar and wind pages we have, which will certainly include some of the info below, but we’ve got much more than this planned for the page, as there are so many water technologies bubbling up right now. But this is a big piece of the pie, so here’s the full, original piece (for the version published on ecomagination, check out ...