Lifeboat Foundation

Tesla buys SolarCity.

(Reuters) — SolarCity Corp agreed to be acquired by sister company Tesla Motors Inc in a deal worth $200 million less than the initial offer, sending shares of both companies down in early trading on Monday.

Electric vehicle maker Tesla expects to achieve “significant” cost savings and “dramatic improvements” in manufacturing efficiency as a result of the acquisition of solar panel installer SolarCity, Tesla Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk said on Monday.

Continue reading “Tesla acquires sister firm SolarCity for $2.6 billion” »

We spend our lives surrounded by hi-tech materials and chemicals that make our batteries, solar cells and mobile phones work. But developing new technologies requires time-consuming, expensive and even dangerous experiments.

Luckily we now have a secret weapon that allows us to save time, money and risk by avoiding some of these experiments: computers.

Continue reading “Lab 2.0: Will Computers Replace Experimental Science?” »

“Building the world’s largest factory to accelerate a sustainable energy future.”

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““The factory is the machine that builds the machine,” Musk says, sitting in the lobby of his new building.”

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Nice.

PV Nano Cell has commercially developed ‘Sicrys’, a single-crystal, nanometric silver conductive ink delivering enhanced performance for digital conductive printing in mass production applications. The inks are also available in copper-based form, delivering all of the product’s properties and advantages with improved cost efficiency.

Problem

Continue reading “PV Nano Cell’s nanometric silver conductive ink enables non-contact digital inkjet printing” »

Researchers at the University of Illinois at Chicago have engineered a potentially game-changing solar cell that cheaply and efficiently converts atmospheric carbon dioxide directly into usable hydrocarbon fuel, using only sunlight for energy.

The finding is reported in the July 29 issue of Science and was funded by the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Energy. A provisional patent application has been filed.

Unlike conventional solar cells, which convert sunlight into electricity that must be stored in heavy batteries, the new device essentially does the work of plants, converting atmospheric carbon dioxide into fuel, solving two crucial problems at once. A solar farm of such “artificial leaves” could remove significant amounts of carbon from the atmosphere and produce energy-dense fuel efficiently.

Continue reading “Breakthrough solar cell captures carbon dioxide and sunlight, produces burnable fuel” »

The nextgen of Solar and fuel energy.

Scientists have just discovered a way to directly convert solar energy into a synthetic fuel using carbon dioxide. Current solar technologies operate in either photovoltaic solar or thermal solar. Photovoltaic solar energy is generated through solar panels, which are typically seen on the roofs of houses and many solar plants. The other method of thermal solar is typically only used in large-scale energy plants, as it used mirrors to focus solar energy to heat a liquid which then powers turbines. Both methods, however, involve the conversion of solar energy into electricity. While electricity is useful, much energy is lost in the storing of electricity, something that the conversion process to liquid fuel overcomes.

We spend our lives surrounded by high-tech materials and chemicals that make our batteries, solar cells and mobile phones work. But developing new technologies requires time-consuming, expensive and even dangerous experiments.

Luckily we now have a secret weapon that allows us to save time, money and risk by avoiding some of these experiments: computers.

Continue reading “Welcome to Lab 2.0 Where Computers Replace Experimental Science” »

Interesting work on solar energy and Q-dot photosensitizers.

Interfacial triplet-triplet energy transfer is used to significantly extend the exciton lifetime of cadmium selenide nanocrystals in an experimental demonstration of their molecular-like photochemistry.

Continue reading “Quantum dot photosensitizers as a new paradigm for photochemical activation” »