Energy News Monitoring

Producing sustainable and environmentally friendly fuels has been one of the main interests of scientific research for many years. Scientists have come up with many effective solutions to achieve this goal. One of the most promising technologies is harvesting solar energy with the help of semiconductors which can initiate surface electrochemical reactions. This kind of reaction needs extremely stable and active catalysts, particularly...

The International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) released its Renewable Energy Statistics 2019 annual report on the global capacity and use of renewable energy. This edition provides data sets on power-generation capacity for 2009-2018, actual power generation for 2009-2017 and renewable energy balances for over 130 countries and areas for 2016-2017. As in the previous edition, the 2019 report shows stable performance in the global...

Conference & Exhibition Wind Europe 2019, which was held from April 2-4, became the most important event of the year in the field of renewable energy on the continent. Every two years the leading representatives of the wind power market demonstrate their technical achievements, and in 2019 the organizers chose one of the most beautiful cities in Spain - Bilbao, for this purpose. This choice was by no means accidental, for several years...

For many years scientists have been looking for a new generation of highly efficient, low-cost and easy-to-process solar cells. To improve the materials for solar cells researchers need to get a better understanding of how these materials function at the atomic and electronic scales. Perovskite solar cells (PSCs) based on methylammonium lead iodide (CH3NH3PbI3) have shown outstanding performance in the recent years. Owing to their...

The Renewables Global Status Report (GSR-2019) is the 14th edition of an annual overview of the state of renewable energy worldwide produced by the international policy network REN21. GSR-2019 provides data for 2018, which was a stable year for renewable energy technologies. 181 gigawatts (GW) of renewable power were added in 2018 compared to 178 GW in 2017. The global renewable power capacity therefore totalled 2,378 GW (8% more than...

Energy storage is of fundamental importance in the development of renewable energy technologies. Low capacity factor values combined with the unpredictability of electricity generation over time - as is typical of solar and wind farms - deter investment in the sector and lower its competitiveness, compared to fossil-fuel based energy production. In addressing the issue the 8th International Energy Storage Europa and the accompanying...

The thin-film solar cell is a device which converts light into electrical energy and is made up of layers of a photon-absorbing material deposited over a flexible substrate. Thin-film solar cells were originally developed in the 1970s and have improved over the years so that now the global thin-film solar cell market is growing at an unprecedented rate. Gallium arsenide (GaAs) is a commonly used III-V semiconductor compound for...

The synthesis of catalysts with flexible properties and sizes has made a big step forward thanks to new nanotechnologies which can help tune the catalytic activity to suit the requirements of the chemical reaction. Scientists have long been researching new selective catalysis with solution-dispersed or supported-metal nanocatalysts. However, several challenges remain, particularly concerning the structural stability of the catalytic...

Today, many research organisations are investigating new methods to achieve a clean transition from fossil energy to renewable fuels. The ETH Zurich and the German Aerospace Center (Deutsches Zentrum für Luft-und Raumfahrt; DLR) have discovered a thermochemical pathway to produce liquid fuel by means of concentrated solar energy. The SUN-to-LIQUID project, which is funded by the EU and Switzerland, has succeeded in synthesising solar...

Covanta is a holding company, incorporated in Delaware in 1992 and engaged predominantly in the business of waste and energy services. Covanta is one of the world’s largest owners and operators of infrastructure for the conversion of waste to energy (known as “energy-from-waste” or “EfW”). The company owns and operates related waste transport and disposal and other renewable energy production businesses. Covanta´s EfW facilities earn...