Solar News & Articles - IEEE Spectrum

Self-Charging Cell Phone Screens Coming Soon

An optical trick makes solar cells disappear12 Jun

How Bad Is PV Panel Performance?

Customers complain about long-term performance, durability, and reliability30 May

How Valuable is Concentrating Solar Power to the Grid?

NREL analysis suggests CSP can add a lot of value8 May

Silver Nanoparticles Boost Polymer Solar Cells' Commercial Potential

Korean researchers acheive record power-conversion efficiency in plasmonic polymer solar cells7 May

A Solar Mirage in the Middle East?

The oil-rich monarchs’ ambitions for solar power will be tough to achieve26 Apr

Photovoltaics Penetrate Brooklyn, New York

Rooftop residential PV installations are a new thing22 Apr

Sun Catalytix "Artificial Leaf" Can Heal Itself

Artificial photosynthesis device gains Wolverine powers, can run in impure water12 Apr

HVDC Supergrid Technologies Besting Expectations

Components for meshed high-voltage DC networks are improving fast. Market barriers are the likely rate-limiting factor for Europe's efforts to exchange renewable power at continental scale.27 Mar

Nanowires Could Enable Solar Cells to Surpass the Shockley-Queisser Limit

Researchers discover that nanowires can concentrate incoming light up to 15 times the normal intensity26 Mar

The Suntech Bankruptcy: Bad or Good News?

Of course it's both, and it all depends on who you are22 Mar

China's Suntech in Bankruptcy Proceedings

The PV market leader's wounds may be self-inflicted 20 Mar

How Do You Clean 250 Thousand Solar Thermal Mirrors? Trucks With Robot Arms!

Massive Shams 1 plant in the Abu Dhabi desert finds ways to deal with dust, wind18 Mar

Emirati Eminences Turn Out for World's (Sort Of) Biggest Concentrated Solar Plant Inauguration

100-megawatt Shams 1 plant is hailed as a big step for a region famous for hydrocarbon fuels18 Mar

German Renewables Reach 25 Percent

The numbers of photovoltaic installations are just as astonishing16 Mar

Vanadium Redox Gaining Ground in Energy Storage

With few credible candidates at grid scale, every one is welcome 10 Mar

Graphene Can Create "Hot Carrier" Cells for Photovoltaics

With graphene capable of producing multiple electrons from one photon its high-energy conversion in PVs is assured26 Feb

Moroccan Solar Streetlighting

Could it be a model in other regions cursed this incessant blazing sunlight?22 Feb

Carbon Nanotube-Based Thin Film Creates Hybrid Organic/Silicon Solar Cells

Higher conversion efficiency with lower manufacturing costs for PVs, together in one package21 Feb

Quantum Dots Demonstrate a New Wrinkle in Enabling High-Efficiency Photovoltaics

Quantum dots self assemble on nanowires in precise location to maximize photoluminescence 12 Feb

Nano-antenna Arrays May Yield Ultra-Efficient Solar Devices

Atomic layer deposition process enables nano-arrays theoretically capable of 70-percent efficency6 Feb

PlanetSolar’s Christian Ochsenbein Sails the Seas on Sunshine

Christian Ochsenbein was the engineer on board the only solar boat to circumnavigate the globe30 Jan

At Work

Weeding Out Flawed Solar Cells Before They’re Manufactured

Innovative optical furnace stresses silicon wafers with heat to find micro-cracks23 Jan

Graphene Still Trying to Replace ITO in Organic Solar Cells

Two years after a MIT research team showed how graphene could replace ITO in photovoltaics, another MIT team does it4 Jan

Green Energy Tech at Year's End

2012 was not a good year, and 2013 is not likely to be better28 Dec 2012

2012 Renewable Energy Recap: Renewables Reality Check

This year saw some of our big plans and potential coming into their own, though tinged with hints of the difficulties involved with renewable scale-up.21 Dec 2012