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Monday, December 10, 2012

Advancements made in the alternative energy industries

You know not a day goes by where an article in my news feeds does not tell of some advancement in alternative energy technologies. Well, today instead of writing articles on each of these I figure that I am going to write one large article which will encompass them all. I will start out by tackling advancements in the solar energy market, then move onto wind energy, then hydrogen fuel cells then, then I will talk about the first fiber optics with solar cell properties, and finally wrap all of this up with a story about how nano technology is revolutionizing the alternative energy sector.

In the past year, not a day has gone by when I did not see a story where another company set a new record for solar cell efficiency. By efficiency what I mean is how much of the light that a solar cell sees which is successfully converted to electricity. Now it should be noted that this story is on concentrated solar cells only. Solar Junction has now managed to surpass all other solar manufacturers with an efficiency of 43.5%. But I can almost promise you if you were to wait around another month or two, someone or some entity will break this record as well.

Now the ext story is how the wind turbines in the world could be greatly helped out by superconductors. Now if you have been following this blog for sometime you already know the properties of superconductors, but in the off chance that you are a new reader of this blog, I explained the properties of superconductors in laymen's terms here and you should really check that story out so that you understand what I am talking about here. But in effect a team at University of Huston has been working on a project that uses superconducting wires to not only produce electricity but to transport it as well. And if you want to learn more of what I am talking about you should really check out that article as well.

Now we make onto the hydrogen making process that fuel cells use. Now this article is full of scientific jargon, but I encourage you to read it as well. But in short a team of researchers at UC Davis have been investigating a type of Hydrogenases that can be made from nickel and iron and could possibly replace the alternative, much more expensive platinum.

Now we have come to the fiber optic with solar cell properties. And of course this is brought to us by another great university team from Penn State University. Their idea is rather unique in the world of fiber optics because they have managed embed the chip that which encodes and decodes the fiber optic signal. For morre on this subject, I would refer you to this article.

And now we come to nanotechnology. Nanotechnology has made major advances in recent years. And such advances in it also helps out the alternative energy market. This article is about how silver nanocubes can help out the solar industries. But nanotechnology does not just help out the solar industry; in fact there are leaps and bounds made by nanotechnology every day in the fields of medicine and many many others.

And this winds up my very large blog post about the advancements made in the fields of alternative energy. But I must say that it is by no means an all encompassing post; as the field of alternative energy is growing by leaps and bounds every day. It is just meant as a guide.

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