As I often do on a Saturday morning, I was up early reading through energy headlines. I happened across this story on eSolar:Bill Gross's Solar Breakthrough"We are producing the lowest cost solar electrons in the history of the world," Bill Gross is telling me. "Nobody's ...

How much land would it take for solar power to satisfy the electricity demands of the U.S.? I made some attempts to calculate this before, but a recent story may enable me to calculate some more reliable numbers if the solar is provided via solar thermal power:Solar ...

First, thanks to all who contributed ideas. You may have an entirely different opinion on the most important energy stories. Feel free to share it. Many of these stories were contributed by various readers. Comments by readers are italicized. If you want to know who wrote what, you can see ...

UD-led team sets solar cell record, joins DuPont on $100 million projectUsing a novel technology that adds multiple innovations to a very high-performance crystalline silicon solar cell platform, a consortium led by the University of Delaware has achieved a record-breaking combined solar cell efficiency of 42.8 percent ...

I wanted to briefly comment on several issues. Some of them deserve their own essays, but I am too pressed for time.Google SolarIf you are into solar, Google's Solar Panel Project is incredibly cool. They provide real time data on their solar energy production. One ...

After grappling with the thought experiment of replacing all of our electricity consumption with solar panels, the problem came into focus. This problem seems simple, but it isn't trivial. As I mentioned, I have seen people approach this problem in several different ways, and after tackling it myself I ...

Note: This is a work in progress. I am modifying the calculations as I get constructive feedback. Credit goes to several people for that. I think I have figured out the best approach to solving this problem in my latest effort.A comment over at The Oil ...

The previous essay on solar energy got picked up and linked to from a number of places. Between those links and the original blog entry, some of the comments I read were largely in left field, and many of them didn't come close to representing my actual position or ...

I have done a lot of research lately into various alternative diesel technologies as I was working on my renewable diesel chapter. One thing that became very clear to me is that the world will not be able to displace more than a fraction of our petroleum usage with ...