A new report from CSIRO, Australia’s national science agency, has more accurately calculated the integration costs of renewables in electricity generation and found that solar and wind continue to be the cheapest source of energy in Australia.

Researchers have created a database of measurements from existing global power grid systems that will help develop new power systems capable of meeting changing demands, such as the move towards renewable energy sources.

Around a quarter of the ground in the northern hemisphere is permanently frozen. These areas are estimated to contain about twice as much carbon as the world’s current atmosphere.

A team of researchers from U of T Engineering has created a new process for converting carbon dioxide (CO2) captured from smokestacks into commercially valuable products, such as fuels and plastics.

A new international study by the ICTA-UAB and the McGill University (Canada) maps resistance movements’ associated with green energy and fossil fuel projects.

Methane, the main component of natural gas, is the cleanest-burning of all the fossil fuels, but when emitted into the atmosphere it is a much more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. 

Lithium-ion batteries (LIBs) that function as high-performance power sources for renewable applications, such as electric vehicles and consumer electronics, require electrodes that deliver high energy density without compromising cell lifetimes.

In 2018, California laid out an ambitious goal to transform the state’s energy system. A bill called SB 100 mandated that utility companies generate all of their electric power using zero-emission energy sources by 2045.

Scientists have built tiny droplet-based microbial factories that produce hydrogen, instead of oxygen, when exposed to daylight in air.

Understanding how particles travel through a device is vital for improving the efficiency of solar cells. Researchers from KAUST, working with an international team of scientists, have now developed a set of design guidelines for enhancing the performance of molecular materials.

When a packet of light, or photon, is absorbed by a semiconductor, it generates a pair of particles known as an exciton. An electron is one part of this pair; the other is its positively charged equivalent, called a hole. Excitons are electrically neutral, so it is impossible to set them in motion by applying an electric field. Instead the excitons "hop" by a random motion or diffusion. The dissociation of the excitons into charges is necessary to create a current but is highly improbable in an organic semiconductor.

“So typically, we need to blend two semiconductors, a so-called electron donor and an electron acceptor, to efficiently generate free charges,” explains Yuliar Firdaus. “The donor and acceptor materials penetrate into one another; maximizing the exciton diffusion length— the distance the exciton can travel before recombining and being lost— is crucial for optimizing the organic solar cell’s performance.

Read more: King Abdullah University of Science & Technology

Bilayer solar cell based on the organic semiconductor copper(I) thiocyanate (CuSCN) provides a new platform for exciton diffusion studies. (Photo Credit: © 2020 KAUST)