Future Energy Devices

Every solar panel runs two parallel processes simultaneously. One is photovoltaic conversion. The other is heating. The second process degrades the first. A silicon cell rated at 20 percent efficiency at 25 degrees Celsius loses roughly 0.45 percent of that efficiency for every degree it heats beyond that number. On a summer afternoon in a…

There is a moment in every large power outage when the same thought occurs to everyone standing in the dark: the electricity was coming from somewhere very far away. A coal plant two hundred kilometers distant. A hydrodam in a mountain range most residents have never visited. A grid built on the assumption that generation…