These low-tech systems offer cheap, long-duration storage with minimal degradation, using abundant materials and basic ...

As global energy demand accelerates, one truth remains underappreciated: heat is the largest end use of energy. Today, more than 50 percent of global final energy consumption is dedicated to ...

Europe has experienced a wind and solar boom over the past decades, with new renewable energy projects coming online. But the uptick in renewables has created a problem that few saw coming – sometimes ...

A research group from Ghana has developed a solar PV-powered steam cooker (ISESC) with sand-based thermal energy storage (TES). “The potential of sand, given its thermal stability and low cost, has ...

Researchers from India’s National Institute of Technology (NIT) Kurukshetra and the National Institute of Solar Energy (NISE) Gurugram have created a prototype solar geyser system that uses ordinary ...

A small town in Finland is experimenting with a new type of infrastructure: the world’s largest sand battery. The battery—a 42-foot-tall, nearly 50-foot-wide silo filled with 2,000 tons of crushed ...

A Finnish-Swedish consortium has designed a hybrid system that uses photovoltaics and solar thermal energy separately to provide steam to industrial facilities. The PV unit is coupled to a sand-based ...

For more than a century, fossil fuel companies have drilled oil and gas wells to increase the production, consumption, and export of fossil fuels. These wells are often abandoned once they are no ...

The systems, which can store clean energy as heat, were chosen by readers as the 11th Breakthrough Technology of 2024. We need heat to make everything from steel bars to ketchup packets. Today, a ...

When spring arrives and the heating season comes to an end, keeping warm becomes less of an issue. However, scientists remind us that it is not just a seasonal necessity -- heat is also a valuable ...