Latest Posts
After Years of Perovskite Promises, Does This One Deliver?
A California startup called Tandem PV says it has built the most efficient solar panel on the planet, hitting 30.4% efficiency where today's best silicon solar panels top out around 25%. That number came from the company's own lab, and the test module is barely bigger than a coaster. On the same…
How Solar Panels Make It Rain In The Desert
Solar panels have one job: turn sunlight into electricity. German scientists think panels can pull double duty and trigger solar induced rainfall in the desert. The United Arab Emirates handed the team $1.5 million for a UAE rain enhancement push, betting a big enough solar farm could pull water…
Why Small Reactors Just Had Their Best Year Ever
Three years ago, small modular reactors looked finished. NuScale's flagship project collapsed under massive cost overruns, and the customers walked. I said the same thing every time I covered these reactors: promising, but unproven. Now nuclear energy is having its best year in decades. New…
Why China Built the World’s Largest Air Battery
Lithium-ion batteries are great for about 4 hours of storage. After that, the price stops making sense. So China built an alternative out of thin air: the world's largest compressed air battery, a salt cavern energy storage system with no lithium and no fuel burned to get the power back out. The…
How My Home Battery Really Performed (2 Years Later)
My January electric bill came to $336, even with solar on the roof and 20 kWh of home battery storage on the garage wall. After 12 months of utility bills and circuit-level data, the solar battery math got weird. The panels saved money. The battery cost about $207 a year, thanks to net metering…
Why The US Sucks at Solar
About one in three Australian homes have rooftop solar. In America, it's less than one in ten, even though half the country sits under the same sun. The real story is the bill. The rooftop solar cost here runs up to seven times higher than in Australia, once tariffs, tax credits, and solar…
