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Category: solar power

Excuse me, is that solar panel pointing in the right direction?

On a bright morning, graduate student Jeremy Klotz and professor Shree Nayar walked through upper Manhattan with a tall tripod and a camera that takes 360-degree images. Their route took them to bike docking stations, which use solar energy to power their kiosks, docking mechanisms, wireless communication, and even E-bike recharging in recent installations. At each docking station, the researchers raised the camera above the panel, snapped a spherical picture, and sent it to Klotz’s laptop.

Seconds later, the team’s computer vision program told them something remarkable: how much energy that panel would generate in a year—and how much it could generate if it were pointed at the optimal angle.

As it turns out, the solar panels powering the bike docking stations—and likely many solar panels across New York City and other urban destinations—may be leaving significant energy untapped simply because they are not at their best orientation.

‘Liquid droplet mops’ clean solar panels with 99.9% efficiency, cutting water use by 80%

With the rapid expansion of the global solar energy industry, the number of solar panels has surged in recent years. However, pollutants accumulating on panel surfaces can significantly reduce energy conversion efficiency while traditional cleaning methods are highly water-intensive.

In response to this challenge, an international research team led by the Department of Mechanical Engineering at City University of Hong Kong (CityUHK) has successfully developed a breakthrough technology, called “liquid droplet mops,” that uses only a minimal amount of water to effectively remove dust and pollutants from solar panel surfaces, significantly enhancing cleaning efficiency while conserving water.

The study was led by Professor Steven Wang, Associate Vice President (Resources Planning) and Associate Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering and the School of Energy and Environment. The project was conducted in collaboration with Professor Omar Matar from the Department of Chemical Engineering at the Imperial College London. The findings are published in Nature Sustainability.

Tiny crystal defects solve decades-old mystery in organic light emitters

Materials that emit and manipulate light are at the heart of technologies ranging from solar energy to advanced imaging systems. But even in well-studied materials, some fundamental behaviors remain unexplained. Researchers at Rice University have now solved a long-standing mystery in a widely used organic semiconductor, revealing how tiny structural imperfections can actually improve how these materials work.

In a study published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society, the team investigated 9,10-bis(phenylethynyl)anthracene (BPEA), a model system for studying how light energy moves through materials. For years, scientists have observed unusual optical behavior in BPEA, specifically two distinct absorption and emission signals that did not match existing theories.

“This was a long-standing puzzle in the field,” said Colette Sullivan, a doctoral student in Rice’s Department of Chemistry and co-author of the study. “Once we connected the experimental results with theory, it became clear the two signals were coming from completely different processes.”

How nuclear batteries could speed the race to fusion power

Fusion reactions release tremendous amounts of energy by fusing two lighter atoms into a heavier one. But harvesting that energy has proven challenging. The most common approach is to heat water and spin a steam turbine, but that approach isn’t terribly efficient, harnessing at best around 60% of the power.

Avalanche Energy thinks it can capture more of that energy by developing new materials known as radiovoltaics. Radiovoltaics are similar to photovoltaics — traditional solar panels — in that they use semiconductors to transform radiation into electricity. They’ve been around for a while, but they’re not very effective. Existing radiovoltaics are easily damaged by the very radiation they harness and don’t produce that much electricity.

Today, Avalanche was awarded a $5.2 million contract from DARPA to develop new radiovoltaics, the company exclusively told TechCrunch.

No battery needed: Single organic device can act as both indoor solar cell and photodetector

Next-generation optoelectronic systems (devices that convert light to electrical energy) leverage organic semiconductor-based indoor energy-autonomous architectures for cutting-edge applications. Notably, organic semiconductors possess mechanical flexibility, solution processability, and bandgap-tunable optoelectronic properties, making them highly lucrative for indoor power generation via organic photovoltaics (OPVs), as well as for spectrally selective photodetection through organic photodetectors (OPDs). Unfortunately, technological progress made in the fields of OPVs and OPDs has largely been separate, necessitating further research for the development of bifunctional OPV-OPD systems for concurrent energy harvesting and photodetection.

Additionally, the potential self-powered operation of such systems is restricted by conflicting charge transport kinetics, especially in the electron and hole transport layers (ETLs and HTLs, respectively). This limitation impacts device durability and stability and increases fabrication costs, making it indispensable to find new HTL materials such as poly(3,4-ethylenedioxythiophene), 2-(9H-carbazol-9-yl)ethyl]phosphonic acid self-assembled monolayer, MoOx, NiOx, and V2O5, beyond conventional options.

Integrated strategy unlocks 29.76% efficiency for all-perovskite tandem solar cells

Two stacked layers comprise tandem solar cells (TSCs), with each subcell absorbing different wavelengths of sunlight, which makes TSCs more efficient than single-layer solar cells. All-perovskite TSCs hold great promise for next-generation photovoltaics, with a theoretical efficiency exceeding 40%. However, their practical performance is hampered by mismatched crystallization kinetics between their wide-bandgap (WBG) and narrow-bandgap (NBG) subcells, leading to phase segregation and defect accumulation.

To address this challenge, a research group led by Prof. Ge Ziyi and Prof. Liu Chang from the Ningbo Institute of Materials Technology and Engineering of the Chinese Academy of Sciences has developed an innovative colloidal chemistry strategy to enhance the performance of these TSCs, achieving a power conversion efficiency (PCE) of 29.76%. Their study is published in Joule.

The researchers designed a unified carboxylate-based modulator system using two graded carboxylate anions—tartrate (Ta-) and citrate (Cit-)—to precisely regulate the nucleation dynamics of the two subcells.

Scientists Just Broke the Solar Power Limit Everyone Thought Was Absolute

A new “energy-multiplying” solar breakthrough could push efficiency beyond 100% and transform how we capture sunlight.

Solar energy is widely seen as a key tool in reducing reliance on fossil fuels and slowing climate change. The Sun delivers a vast amount of energy to Earth every second, but today’s solar cells can only capture a small portion of it. This limitation comes from a so-called “physical ceiling” that has long been considered unavoidable.

Breakthrough spin-flip technology boosts solar efficiency.

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