TechStuff Classic: How Solar Towers Work

Evan turns his AI-powered voice agent loose on the people who are always at the forefront of technological adoption: the fraudsters and the rip-off artists. How will the scammers and spammers react when they face Evan’s voice agent in a battle of wits? And what happens when they ... Show More

Blue Origin's latest rocket test ended in what the company called "an anomaly" — and what everyone else would call an explosion. Reed Albergotti (Semafor) explains why blowing things up is just part of the process and why the US Space Program is probably going to be fine. Then, K ... Show More

What if the fastest path to superintelligence is AI that builds itself? That's the bet Richard Socher is making — and he has the track record to back it up. A double unicorn founder and early investor in eight unicorn companies (including Perplexity and Hugging Face), Richard has ... Show More

Perovskites are cheap, abundant photovoltaic materials that some have hailed as the future of green energy.Around the world, companies are layering perovskites on top of traditional silicon to develop so-called tandem solar cells that some think could deliver at least 20% more po ... Show More

Today, solar’s dominance feels inevitable. But in 1979, when Neville Williams started promoting the industry at the Department of Energy, it felt like a far-off dream. That didn’t stop the early pioneers from thinking big and pushing the government to invest in the early technolo ... Show More

A new kind of solar cell - made by drying a special liquid on a surface - is being heralded as a revolution in solar power. The minerals known as perovskites were discovered more than 150 years ago. More recently, their crystal structure has been copied using other materials and ... Show More

As expected, 2013 was yet another record year for solar in the U.S. With 5.1 gigawatts of PV and CSP coming online, the solar industry was the second largest provider of electricity capacity behind natural gas. But how long will it continue? With a tax credit expiration looming, ... Show More

This year, GTM Research is forecasting that 66 gigawatts of PV capacity will be installed around the world -- a 21 percent increase over last year. But next year, capacity will only expand by 4 percent. In fact, without some of the top markets like India, America and China, the g ... Show More

<p>This week, we finally left behind a destructive regime that thwarted environmental policy at every turn. We exchanged it for a government putting climate experts and clean-energy doers in its highest ranks in a way that no prior administration has done before.</p><p>What comes ... Show More

Daniel and Kelly talk about how to keep solar panels bright and powerful when they far away on a dusty planet.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. 

We are at the height of the Sun's activity in its eleven year cycle, known to astronomers as the solar maximum. This means that over the next several months there's going to be a lot of solar activity. It's got us thinking back to 1859. That's when astronomer Richard Carrington w ... Show More

On a tous entendu cette critique fustigeant que les énergies renouvelables, notamment l'éolien et le solaire, étaient beaucoup trop coûteux à produire pour les bénéfices qu’ils apportent au final. Cette idée reçue pourrait bientôt être révolue puisque d'après le dernier rapport d ... Show More