Solar Powered

Nobody likes buildings that are too hot in the summer or too cold in the winter. That's where the FlectoLine facade comes in, as it uses two bio-inspired mechanisms to regulate how much solar thermal energy gets through a building's windows.

Greenhouse gases and plastic waste are two of the biggest environmental problems the world faces today. A new reactor from Cambridge tackles both at once, converting CO2 and used plastic bottles into useful materials, powered entirely by sunlight.

Members of a student team from the Technology University of Eindhoven are about to embark on a fact-finding mission to the South Pole that will inform the creation of an autonomous solar-powered Antarctica research rover.

Desalination is an important technology that may help unlock more drinking water, and now two independent teams have developed new types of solar-powered desalination systems using very different mechanisms.

Researchers from the Eindhoven University of Technology have fine-tuned an artificial leaf design and used it to produce drugs for the first time.

​Low-tech Magazine has rebuilt its website to be entirely solar powered, and is wilfully designed to go offline when conditions dictate. The new site has a much-reduced energy footprint, and is something of an exemplar in efficient website design.

​If you're using the sun to power a mobile device, it only makes sense to put the solar cells on something you're wearing that will be receiving a lot of sunlight. With that in mind, researchers have created a pair of sunglasses that generate electricity via solar cells that double as their lenses.

Isolated communities often lack garbage disposal infrastructure, meaning it’s hard to either truck out the trash or process it on-site. The Trashpresso is designed to lighten the load a little, as a semi-portable, solar-powered plant that turns trash into tiles.

​Leaves are kind of like nature’s power plants, converting sunlight into energy for the plant. Now a team at Eindhoven University of Technology is using artificial leaves to produce chemicals, which could lead to solar-powered “mini-factories” that can create drugs and chemicals almost anywhere.

An adventurous spirit landed German-born Alexander Wopper in the southern Chilean city of Valdivia 30 years ago, and it's that same spirit that emboldened him to breathe new life into the underused river that cuts right through its center.

Solar-concentrating thermal technology is being used to power the air-conditioning system of an entire shopping center in Australia solely from the rays of the sun. It is expected that this technology will help drastically reduce commercial building energy use.

A recently announced partnership with a New York City-based start-up is set to bolster Las Vegas' commitment to renewable energy sources. Soon enough, some of "Sin City's" sidewalks will be illuminated by EnGoPLANET's innovative, sun- and people-powered street lights.