Australians can now trade extra solar power for cold beer
In what they believe to be the world’s first, Asahi Group’s Carlton and United Breweries, an Australian beer maker, is now offering Victorian Bitter to households with rooftop solar energy to spare. The brewery has already installed solar panels on its Melbourne brewery and is purchasing Read More...
Transparent solar cell greenhouses could grow food and produce energy
Solar power is one of the fastest-growing forms of renewable energy, so there are many initiatives that are trying to see how solar can be combined with other industries, like agriculture, to become even more effective. We at The Optimist Daily have already written about agrivoltaic farming, Read More...
Sunne: The chic solar-powered lamp everyone will want in their home
Big industries, such as agriculture and transportation, are starting to move toward renewable energy to create an eco-friendly future, but if we want to maximize the benefits of renewable sources, we must embrace them in our homes and everyday lives. The democratization and normalization of Read More...
Brilliant invention provides light and drinking water at almost no cost
Amongst the cream of the crop of the Lexus Design Award 2021 is Henry Glogau’s ingenious contraption: a skylight that uses free sources of energy to light homes at night and distill seawater into safe drinking water. This no-cost, clean energy solution can provide basic services for Read More...
These colorful windows capture energy from indoor and outdoor light
What if we could build solar panels that aren’t an addition on top of buildings, but an actual part of the structural construction of homes and offices? This is the idea behind luminescent solar concentrators developed by researchers from Rice University. The technology transforms Read More...
Solar cell technology nears impressive record efficiency of 30 percent
Our technology for harvesting solar power has just gotten better thanks to scientists in Germany who have achieved a new efficiency record of almost 30 percent. The new achievement comes from researchers at Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin (HZB) who created a new solar cell that combined silicon and Read More...
This two-person solar electric car has a range of 1,000 miles
Personal transportation is about to take a giant leap into the future now that US startup Aptera unveiled a three-wheeled solar electric car with a range of up to 1,000 miles on a full battery. Although the car can be fully charged via a charging cord, it won’t need that when drivers are out on Read More...
First Solar prevents e-waste by creating new solar panels from old ones
Though the global surge in solar power is good news for our green energy transition, it also means that in the coming years we will face an enormous amount of e-waste. In fact, it’s estimated that the first wave of solar panels will generate as much as 8 million metric tons of e-waste by 2030. Read More...
A giant virtual power plant is coming to California to avoid blackouts
As energy blackouts become more common in California, a German energy company called Sonnen believes virtual power plants (VPPs) can solve the issue. Rather than rely on utility companies, virtual power plants involve connected sets of solar panels and batteries that produce and store energy Read More...
Two new innovations allow solar cells to harness more light
Solar cells work by absorbing light waves, harnessing the photons' energy to knock electrons off of atoms, thereby generating electricity. Here's the thing, though: different light waves have different levels of energy, and current solar cells can't use low-frequency wavelengths of Read More...