Exploring everything within renewable energy like solar panels, wind turbines, hydro, geothermal energy, battery technology, and more.
How This Heat Pump Water Heater is Also a Battery. Go to https://ground.news/undecided for an innovative way to stay fully informed on tech, energy, the climate and more. Save 40% on the Ground News unlimited access Vantage plan with my link. Heat pump water heaters have been around for over a decad
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
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
Ever since Donut Lab announced their miracle solid-state battery, the internet has been absolutely certain about what it is. A capacitor. Vaporware. A scam. Except when you actually dig into those explanations, a lot of them start falling apart. Here's what Donut Lab is actually claiming: more energy
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:
When Spain's power grid failed on April 28th, 2025, it quickly became a very serious issue. Not only for the economic impacts, but life-or-death serious due to multiple, indirect deaths associated to the blackout. Emergency services, transportation, communication and other vital services were halted during this power outage.
Your lights just flickered. Not for long. Just a split second. You probably didn't think much about it, but somewhere a battery may have just saved your city from a blackout. I’m not talking about keeping your phone charged or your EV running. These kinds of batteries
NOTE: An earlier version of this story incorrectly associated the failure of Northvolt to their sodium ion battery production issues, but their challenges weren't chemistry specific. That section has been removed. I’ve got sodium batteries right here in my hands, but three sodium battery companies went bankrupt
Perovskite solar cells are smashing efficiency records and starting to hit the market, but what if the real future of solar is a material you’ve probably never heard of? It’s called kesterite, and new research suggests it could match perovskites’ efficiency without any toxic lead in the stack.
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
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
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
