Tag Archive for: solarcells

Roadsides, reservoirs & farms are all finding space for solar systems. Germany is experimenting with adding solar cells to railway sleepers.

Solar panels could be installed in the spaces between railway tracks in world first

Solar panels are being rolled out “like carpet” on railway tracks in Switzerland.

Swiss start-up Sun-Ways is installing panels near Buttes train station in the west of the country in May, pending sign-off from the Federal Office of Transport.

As the climate crisis demands that we speed up Europe’s energy transition, developers have been seeing new potential in unusual surfaces.

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Source: Euro News

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The UCLA engineers explore a new, viable application of solar cells that does not require large plots of land.

UCLA engineers design solar roofs to harvest energy for greenhouses

As countries around the globe seek sustainable energy sources and the U.S. endeavors to become a net-zero emissions economy by 2050, renewable energy sources such as solar panels are in high demand.

However, solar panels can take up significant space and are often difficult to scale. Enter the new field of agrivoltaics, which focuses on the simultaneous use of land for both solar power generation and agriculture. For example, replacing the glass in greenhouses with solar panels could power the lamps and water controls in the greenhouse, or even the whole farm. But how does one build solar panels that can absorb energy from sunlight without blocking the light that plants need?

UCLA Samueli School of Engineering’s materials scientist Yang Yang and his team have designed just such a device. In a study published today in Nature Sustainability, they explore a new, viable application of solar cells that does not require large plots of land.

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Source: UCLA Samueli 

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One of the biggest advances we can expect to see over the next decades is how we store and use power from solar cells and other renewables.

Solar cells: essential for a brighter future

You wouldn’t recognise the precursor to the modern solar panel if you saw it, and who knows what they’ll look like in the future?

The precursor to the first solar panel wasn’t really a panel, and it didn’t even use the sun’s light. But the physical processes first observed by French scientist Antoine César Becquerel, in his laboratory in 1839 and then in bars of selenium by Willoughby Smith when checking telegraph cables to be submerged under the Atlantic Ocean, are essentially the same as what happens in solar cells everywhere today.

In a nutshell: light shines onto a semiconductor material, which then produces an electric current – no moving parts, no steam, no turbines.

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Source: COSMOS

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AI method learns from experienced staff on perovskite solar production lines

Academics from MIT and Stanford who have posited a new production method for perovskite solar cells have also developed a machine learning system which benefits from the experience of seasoned workers – and they’ve posted it online for anyone to use.

There’s no substitute for experience and researchers in the US have acknowledged the fact by coming up with a machine learning method for producing perovskite solar cells which can incorporate the observations of seasoned production line staff.

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Source: PV Magazine

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