Category Archives: Energy & Green Tech

In South America, lithium is derived from salars, or salt flats. The turquoise glimmer of open-air pools contrasts sharply with the dazzling white of salt flats in Latin America’s “lithium triangle,” where hope resides for a better life fueled by a metal bonanza. A key component of batteries used in electric cars, demand has exploded…

Mineral wealth: the Moanda region in Gabon may hold as much as a quarter of the world’s known deposits of manganese. Mechanical diggers are hard at work in the bleak landscape of the Moanda open-cast mine in Gabon, using giant jaws to rip out manganese and then dump the ore into trucks with a crash….

Low-lying Singapore is seen as especially vulnerable to rising sea levels. Singapore announced Tuesday it aims to achieve carbon neutrality by 2050, giving a firm date for the first time, and will look at using hydrogen as a major power source. The city-state targets for carbon emissions to peak in 2030 at 60 million tonnes,…

SPAR floaters are constructed to be long and thin and are stabilized by heavy ballast far below. They require relatively deep water—both where they are assembled and set up (preferably in a fjord). Hywind Scotland employs a spar design. SEMI-SUBMERSIBLE wind turbines gain stability from the widely spaced pillars. They do not require as much…

Prof. Dr.-Ing. Jakob Burger stands in front of his newly constructed demonstration plant at the TUM Campus Straubing for Biotechnology and Sustainability. Credit: Technical University Munich Researchers at the Green Fuel Center (GFC) on the Technical University of Munich (TUM) Straubing Campus are working on the production of renewable fuels. Prof. Jakob Burger talks about…

Credit: Unsplash/CC0 Public Domain The use of shared micromobility services has increased in recent years, particularly in urban areas. But can shared e-scooters and e-bikes contribute to the sustainability of cities and their transportation systems? To answer these and other questions, Fraunhofer ISI conducted a new study on behalf of the micromobility provider Lime by…

Credit: Unsplash/CC0 Public Domain At a nondescript office park in the Mira Mesa neighborhood of San Diego sit a pair of nondescript cubes, adjacent to a nondescript library annex that houses old books, papers and other items from UC San Diego. But something different is happening. Inside each cube sits a collection of used electric…

Country-specific differences of current energy systems and relative generation technology favourability in Africa. LCOEs are calculated as a function of cost, electricity yield and interest rates. We used average cost data from 2021, and derived country-specific solar electricity yields from the Global Solar Atlas solar insolation dataset. An insolation value was used in the LCOE…

Credit: CC0 Public Domain To reduce the carbon emissions that are driving climate change and meet climate targets, the world will need to deploy renewable energy at an unprecedented speed and scale. Solar energy promises to play a crucial role in achieving a sustainable, low-carbon energy future, especially if the price of production continues to…

Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain Mesoscopic dye-sensitized solar cells (DSCs) were invented in 1990s by Brian O’Regan and Michael Grätzel, taking on the latter’s name—the world-famous Grätzel cells. DSCs convert light into electricity through photosensitizers—dye compounds that absorb light and inject electrons into an array of oxide nanocrystals which subsequently are collected as electric current. In…