According to Science News for Students, air pollution is taking a toll on solar energy.
Air contaminants are sticking to the surfaces of solar panels, preventing light from reaching the solar cells below, and reducing the production of electricity. Not only are these consequences costly environmentally, they’re also quite costly economically.
According to The Conversation, California Governor Jerry Brown has signed a new law committing to make the Golden State the state 100 percent carbon-free by 2045.
The new law is comprised of multiple targets, committing California to draw half its electricity from renewable sources by 2026, and then to 60 percent by 2030.
California’s mission to stop relying on fossil fuels for energy has been a longtime goal in the making. Since 2010, utility-scale solar and wind electricity in California increased from 3 percent to 18 percent in 2017, exceeding expected targets, due to solar prices drop in recent years. In 2011, Brown signed a law committing the state to derive a third of its energy from renewable sources like wind and solar power by 2020. And in 2017, about 56 percent of the power California generated came from non-carbon emitting sources, placing state over halfway to their goal for 2045.
Join us at the Electrochemical Conference on Energy and the Environment (ECEE 2019): Bioelectrochemistry and Energy Storage, which will be held in Glasgow, Scotland from July 21-26, 2019 at the Scottish Exhibition and Conference Center.
Peer Review Week 2018 is still going strong, and ECS is celebrating by highlighting insights on peer review from some of the most-qualified authorities on the subject—ECS journal editors.
The opinions shared below are those of technical and associate editors of ECS journals. The majority of these comments were originally published in Interface or on the ECS Redcat Blog within recent years.
Learn more about ECS journals and their editorial boards: Journal of The Electrochemical Society | ECS Journal of Solid State Science and Technology.
Join the celebration! There’s still time to participate in the week’s events and join the global conversation about peer review by tweeting @PeerRevWeek and following #PeerReviewWeek18 and #PeerRevDiversityInclusion.
Fudong Han is one winner of the 2018 Battery Division Student Research Award sponsored by Mercedes-Benz Research & Development.
The Battery Division Student Research Award (see all of the winners) was established in 1979 to recognize promising young engineers and scientists in the field of electrochemical power sources with the intention to encourage recipients to initiate or continue careers in the field. With the generous sponsorship of Mercedes-Benz Research & Development, the Battery Division is now able to provide two deserving students with an annual prize of $1,000 each and travel support to attend the ECS biannual meeting at which their achievements are recognized. ECS extends many thanks to Mercedes-Benz Research & Development for its support.
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ECS would like to congratulate Johan Scheers of the Volvo Group for winning first place in the August 2018 Refer a Friend Contest! Scheers receives a complimentary meeting registration to a 2019 ECS biannual meeting of his choice.
The second place recipient, Anatolie Carcea from the University of Toronto, receives a complimentary 5-year membership. Tatiana Lastovina from Southern Federal University in Russia, the third place winner, receives a complimentary 3-year membership.
Members were challenged to recruit new members to the Society throughout August; emails were sent each week to encourage these member-to-member recruitment efforts.
Peter C. Foller kicked-off his career with a mildly stressful, yet necessary, experience we can all relate too – public speaking. It was Foller’s first time presenting his research, an event he still vividly remembers. Foller, then a graduate student, attended an ECS meeting with faculty advisor Charles W. Tobias, where he hoped his presentation would lead him towards networking opportunities, and ideally, a job. Moreover, Foller recalls that ECS meeting presentations were something Professor Tobias expected of students, long after that final handshake in his office followed by that slow turn, eyeglasses lowered, “And now you may call me Charles…”
Photo Credit: UCLA Samueli Engineering
Materials scientists from the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering have developed a powerful thin-film solar cell that generates more energy from sunlight than average solar panels, as a result of its double-layer design, according to UCLA.
The device is made of an inexpensive compound of lead and iodine, known as perovskite, that has proven to be very efficient at capturing energy from sunlight. A thin layer of the perovskite is sprayed onto a commercially available solar cell, while the solar cell that forms the bottom layer of the device is made of a compound of copper, indium, gallium and selenide, or CIGS, creating a new cell that successfully converts 22.4 percent of the incoming energy from the sun, versus the previous record of 10.9 percent by a group at IBM’s Thomas J. Watson Research Center in 2015.
Join ECS as it celebrates Peer Review Week 2018 (September 10-15), the fourth annual installment of an international event dedicated to recognizing and examining the pivotal role that peer review plays in scholarly communication.
The theme of this year’s Peer Review Week is “Diversity in Peer Review.” The week’s events, which will consist of in-person seminars, webinars, interviews, and social media activities, will focus upon the importance of diversity and inclusion in peer review.
Credit: University of Minnesota, McAlpine Group
We’ve all heard of the bionic man, the famous 1970’s movie and comic book story of a man who, after a tragic accident, damaged body was rebuilt and replaced with bionic, high tech parts, creating a superhuman, out-of-this-world, specimen. It turns out this sci-fi tale may soon become a reality.
According to the University of Minnesota, researchers there have successfully created the first fully 3D printed bionic eye prototype, complete with an array of light receptors that could one day help blind people see.
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