Energy Efficient

By commandeering smart thermostats and water heaters and sipping power from in-home EV chargers, virtual power plants are being formed across the country. Here's how they work and how they help green energy efforts.

Helix Earth Technologies has repurposed a technology originally developed to filter air on spacecraft to develop a system that can be retrofitted to existing commercial air conditioning units and slash their energy usage.

Water can hold a huge amount of thermal energy, and a new system to tap into this is being trialed in Scotland. A startup called SeaWarm uses heat stored in bodies of water for buildings, pulling four times more heat out than electricity used.

A new industrial-scale “sand battery” has been announced for Finland, packing 1 MW of power and a capacity of up to 100 MWh of thermal energy for use during those cold polar winters. The new battery will be 10 times bigger than a prior pilot plant.

Canada's Diamond Schmidt and Dutch firm MVRDV are leading a project that riffs on nature to create an energy-efficient university building that will be arranged around a light-filled atrium likened to a fissure in a boulder.

Sage Geosystems has pioneered a new form of cheap energy storage that uses the Earth as a giant bellows, pumping water into underground fractures, then letting it squirt back up at 70% efficiency – or 200% efficiency if you also harvest heat energy.

Nobody wants to live in a drafty house, yet checking for substantial air leaks within a home can be a complex process. Scientists have now devised what could be a much easier method of doing so, utilizing a technique that dates back to 1864.

A student team from TU Delft presented the latest Eco-Runner in May, a hydrogen-powered city car concept designed to be more than a hundred times more fuel-efficient than modern fossil-fuel vehicles. Now the car has set a Guinness distance record.

Solar cells are good for the environment, but they have downsides. They’re expensive to make, and there are limited ways to recycle them. But researchers have developed a new manufacturing technique that may address both of these issues.

Tokamak Energy has released the first images of what its commercial fusion power plant, which it says would safely generate enough electricity to power 50,000 homes in the 2030s, would look like.

We've been following an automotive startup's journey to get its three-wheeled solar-electric vehicle on the road for more than 15 years, and now the latest teardrop-shaped Aptera prototype has made its public debut in San Diego.

Heating and cooling buildings is a major consumer of energy, especially older ones that weren’t built with modern energy efficiencies in mind. Now Fraunhofer engineers have developed a modular solar-powered facade that can heat or cool rooms.