Energy

There are energy sources all over the place, if you know where to look. Researchers at CUHK have now designed new modular nanogenerators that can harvest energy from various different types of motion, such as ocean waves or a person's body movements.

Would transparent solar cells installed in greenhouse roofs deprive plants of vital sunlight? To find out, researchers at North Carolina State University grew lettuce under various wavelengths of light, and found that the plants did just fine.

There are untold energy sources all around us, if we can just figure out how to tap into them. Swiss researchers have now demonstrated an environmentally friendly way to make spongy wood flooring that can generate electricity with every step.

Air conditioners and other cooling systems are among our biggest consumers of electricity. Now researchers have developed a hybrid device that can not only cool buildings drastically without using electricity, it captures solar energy to heat water.

Wearing a big, heavy backpack can get pretty tiring. That's why scientists have developed a pack that's not only claimed to lighten the load on the wearer, but that also uses the motion of that load to generate electricity.

Australian company Lavo has debuted a hydrogen production, storage and conversion system for the home. It stores up to two days' worth of energy from your rooftop solar – and should outlast a lithium battery by many years. So what's the catch?

Zinc-air batteries are great little energy storage devices, but they’re not usually rechargeable. Now a team led by the University of Münster has developed a new zinc-air chemistry that makes this type of battery more efficient and rechargeable.

Whether it is crafting the world’s fastest electrodes or building battery parts out of microwaved plastic, 2020 showed us just how imaginative scientists can be when it comes developing technologies for next-generation energy storage.

Silicon has long been the gold standard for solar cells, but it’s approaching its limit. Perovskite is emerging as a promising partner, and now engineers have achieved a new efficiency record for this kind of tandem solar cell – almost 30 percent.

QuantumScape has announced stunning performance figures for what may be the first commercially viable solid-state lithium-metal battery. It's claimed to add as much as 80% to the range of an electric car, and charge from 0-80% in just 15 minutes.

Engineers at the National University of Singapore have developed a new way to convert natural gas into a solid form, enabling safer and easier storage and transport. The process can be done in just 15 minutes using a low-toxicity mixture.

Researchers at Lancaster University have developed a new material that can store energy for months, and potentially years, at a time. The material can be activated by light, and then release the pent-up energy on demand in the form of heat.