Solar power generation is being touted as a solution to our ever-increasing energy consumption and dependence on fossil fuels. Satellites in Earth’s orbit can capture solar energy through photovoltaic cells and transmit that power to ground based stations. Solar cells in orbit are not hindered by weather, clouds, or night. The energy generated by this process is clean and pollution-free. Althou...

The intermittent nature of the sunlight and its increasing contribution to electricity generation is fostering the energy storage research. Direct solar charging of an auspicious type of redox flow battery could make solar energy directly and efficiently dispatchable. The first solar aqueous alkaline redox flow battery using low cost and environmentally safe materials is demonstrated. The elect...

Reducing hot-carrier relaxation rates is of great significance in overcoming energy loss that fundamentally limits the efficiency of solar energy utilization. Semiconductor quantum dots are expected to have much slower carrier cooling because the spacing between their discrete electronic levels is much larger than phonon energy. However, the slower carrier cooling is difficult to observe due to...

The paper examines design and operating data of current concentrated solar power (CSP) 10 solar tower (ST) plants. The study includes CSP with or without boost by combustion of natural gas 11 (NG) and with or without thermal energy storage (TES). The study then reviews the novel trends to 12 produce better ratio of solar field power to electric power, better capacity factor, better matching of ...

Solar energy is only renewable energy source that does not depend on earth's resources. Current industrial manufacturing of solar cells use manufacturing steps that have many sustainable issues. So it becomes very important to promote technologies that are more sustainable than current state of the art. This paper will look into prospects of microwave heating for silicon solar cell fabrication ...

In this paper, the annual and economic performance of an integrated solar combined cycle (ISCC) with indirect energy storage tanks is investigated. The study includes four scenarios, in which the combined cycle performance was studied exclusively in the first scenario. In the second scenario, the integrated solar combined cycle (ISCC) was examined, and the use of supplementary firing instead of...