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 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…
How IKEA-Style Wind Turbines Could Change Offshore Energy
You know what an offshore wind turbine looks like. A giant pole, three blades, bolted to the seafloor. The catch is it only works in shallow water, around 80 meters or less. That rules out most of the ocean, which is where the strongest, steadiest winds actually are. A Swedish company called SeaTwir
How the Super Soaker Inventor Built the Most Efficient Heat Engine Ever
What if all the heat your car engine, a factory, or a power plant throws away could run the grid instead? A new engine turns that waste heat into electricity, even the low-grade stuff today's best systems struggle with. It has no moving parts, and the wild part is who built it. Dr. Lonnie Johnson, t
Why China’s Supercritical CO₂ Turbine Matters
For over 200 years, we've been generating electricity essentially the same way: by boiling water. And it's worked! Today, steam turbines power the vast majority of the world's electricity. But this technology, which has powered us since the industrial revolution, might not be up
The National Grid Is Dead. Here's What Replaces It.
In April 2025, most of Spain and Portugal went dark. A cascading failure knocked out the Iberian peninsula's grid in seconds. Just four years earlier, Texas came within 4 minutes and 37 seconds of its own total collapse.1 Not a temporary blackout. A full shutdown. What engineers
Why Waiting for Perovskite Solar Isn’t Worth It (Solar 3.0)
Perovskite solar cells could hit 35% efficiency and cost half as much as silicon, but they're still years away from your roof. Meanwhile, silicon panels just lost their 30% federal tax credit in the US, making them suddenly more expensive. So here's the $20,000 question:
How Solar Changed in 2025 (And What's Next)
I called 2024 the year of perovskites. We got our first commercial shipments and some record-breaking efficiencies. But 2025? This was the year perovskites went from "interesting lab tech" to "you can actually buy these." Oxford PV shipped the first commercial batch to a US solar
Why Coastal Cities Are Betting on Osmotic Power
What if you could power cities just by mixing river water with seawater? Around 15,000 TWh of energy pours into the oceans each year as freshwater blends with saltwater at river mouths. That amounts to roughly half the energy the world consumes in electricity every year.12 And we
How Two Overhyped Materials Could Change Solar Forever
What if solar panels could generate twice the power for a fraction of the cost, making them cheap enough that you'd actually want them on your roof? Researchers in Australia may have just pulled it off. This is a solar cell made with both perovskites and graphene, the