solar-powered

A small town on the outskirts of the Mojave Desert may soon get 85 percent of its power needs exclusively from solar energy.

The municipal solar power plant for Nipton, Calif., will be equipped with High Gain Solar arrays (HGS) from Skyline Solar, the company announced Thursday.

Skyline Solar's HGS arrays are designed to use less silicon to save manufacturing costs while still providing effective solar energy. To do that the company uses a reflective metal cradle made of sheet metal to concentrate sunlight onto monocrystalline silicon cells. The company claims that its concentrated solar arrays offers 10 … Read more

Japanese construction company Shimizu likes to dream big. Big as in ringing the moon with solar panels and beaming the energy to Earth. But in light of Tokyo's plans to build a $2 billion robot moon base, Shimizu's recent ideas for futuristic engineering projects, including the construction of pyramid cities, seem a little less far-fetched.

Shimizu's "Proposals to Benefit Future Generations" include an offshore pyramid city, home to 750,000 people, that was featured in Discovery Channel's Extreme Engineering, seen in the video below. The pyramid would be the largest structure on the planet, … Read more

BrightSource Energy has raised $150 million to fund the construction of large solar power plants in the southwest U.S. over the next six years, the company said Thursday.

New investors in the Oakland, Calif.-based company include the California State Teachers Retirement System and Alstom, the France-based conglomerate that develops power generation and rail projects. Existing investors VantagePoint Venture Partners, Morgan Stanley, and Draper Fisher Jurvetson also funded the series D round, which brings the total equity raised for BrightSource Energy to more than $300 million.

The money will be used to develop a planned 2,610 megawatts of … Read more

Three days was all it took for two electrical engineering undergrads at the Nirma University in Ahmedabad, India, to put together a wind- and solar-powered helmet for bikers. The prototype headgear by the entrepreneurial pair, Pragnesh Dudhaiya and Aalok Bhatt, comprises solar cells and a mini fan, and is capable of charging a mobile phone using the energy generated from a 40-minute ride.

Granted, the design needs some serious work, but Pragnesh and Aslok hope the dual-purpose helmet will encourage bikers in the city to don the protective headgear. That in itself is admirable.

The pair plans to file a … Read more

The Department of Energy is funding a series of projects that marry concentrating solar power with storage, which offers the potential of solar power plants that operate 18 hours a day.

The DOE said Friday that it has made $62 million available to 13 companies to test equipment and materials, such as molten salts, to add storage to solar power systems that use heat to produce electricity.

Concentrating solar power, in which the sun's heat creates steam to drive an electricity turbine, is seeing a renaissance because it can be used for large-scale power plants in deserts. Adding storage … Read more

The technology that powers your Kindle may soon have military applications. For soldiers in combat zones, gadgets like GPS and heads-up displays are fantastically useful, provided they have the battery to power them. One of the most power-hungry components in these devices is the screen. While we may have reached a point where a gadget can run for days on a single charge, it's still not sufficient for grunts who may be in the field for weeks without access to power.

Hewlett-Packard's Information Surfaces Lab adopted a two-pronged approach when designing the flexible wrist display for troops. One, … Read more

A plane designed to fly day and night using solar power has successfully taken its first maiden flight.

The Solar Impulse HB-SIA soared into the air for its first flight early Wednesday from its home in Switzerland. After a smooth takeoff, the plane climbed to an altitude of 1,200 meters (3,937 feet or three-quarters of a mile) and stayed aloft for a total of 87 minutes. Pilot Markus Scherdel used the flight to run the Impulse through different exercises and maneuvers to see how it would handle itself.

As thousands of spectators gazed skyward, Scherdel worked the controls … Read more

A solar-charged light might seem like just another green gadget to the average American, but for families in rural Africa, it could prove revolutionary.

Product design consultancy Plus Minus Design is vying to replace unsustainable and potentially dangerous lanterns in the homes of off-grid Africans with the Solar Pebble. Engineered with the economic constraints of developing-world citizens in mind, the Solar Pebble will provide one hour of LED light for every two hours of charge, and will cost only $2.70 to manufacture.

Plus Minus Design, based in Leeds, U.K., was founded by three undergraduate students at the University of Leeds. While studying product design and engineering, Adam Robinson, Henry James, and Tom Eales were given the opportunity to work with SolarAid, a charity in the U.K.

SolarAid, which works to fight poverty and climate change, worked with the students to develop a solar-powered alternative to kerosene lanterns. Those lanterns, commonly used in rural Africa, draw 20 percent of an average Malawian family's income, SolarAid said, and pose respiratory health problems, as well as create fire hazards. … Read more