Every year, the United States Department of Energy hosts the Solar Decathlon, where teams of students from universities all over the world compete to build a functioning solar powered home in an effort to raise awareness of sustainable living. The competition involves 10 contests over two years. In the end, these homes get disassembled with [...]
The sun provides us with light and warmth every single day. We use sunlight to warm our homes, help grow our plants, and even power cities. The sun, whose official name is Sol (where we get the word “solar” from), produces enough energy every single second to power every electronic device on the Earth for [...]
Las Vegas is a city of bright lights, fancy shows, sprawling deserts, and a brand new solar farm that will provide energy for a nearby waste water treatment plant. The 15,000 panel solar farm is densely packed into 25 acres of city land that was originally an empty strip of land serving as a buffer [...]
Solar generated electricity is fast becoming a popular alternative energy production method. Many homes lay out solar panels on their roofs to capture the sun’s rays and turn that into clean, affordable energy. But, there’s one state where entire roofs are covered and some fields are home to long rows of obsidian and chrome colored [...]
Electricity can be generated by many different means. Solar panels, wind turbines, hydroelectricity, natural gas, coal, and geothermal vents are many of the ways we generate electricity. But now, David Carroll, a nanotechnologist from Wake Forest University has developed a thermoelectric fabric he calls power felt that generates electricity from heat or movement. The fabric [...]
Using the power of the sun for energy is nothing new, but it is certainly starting to become more popular. The traditional forms of energy that we use today – mainly fossil fuels – are finite. These forms of energy will run out sooner rather than later, so it makes sense to look into better, [...]
In the country that invented the solar panel, solar energy still only produces less than 1 percent of U.S. electricity. But as the price of solar power continues to fall and as states, such as California, mandate that a third of all power come from renewables by 2020, solar energy could become a major player [...]