Ausra of Palo Alto, California, who builds utility-level solar thermal power, has raised $24.5 million in a third round of funding from returning investors Khosla Ventures and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. Now a new investor KERN Partners, based in Alberta, Canada, has also joined the round. This announcement is just over a month from [...]

A guest author going by Libelle posted a piece titled “Compressed Air Energy Storage – How Viable Is It?” Sunday at TheOilDrum, Canada. It’s a top-flight review of the physics and explains the thermodynamics in a quaint, easy to grasp way. Libelle suggests that raising the elevation of water might be more effective. From here [...]

It’s the 4th of July and the celebration is on for freedoms thought through and made real for the American portion of mankind now some 230 years on. There is a list of complaints about federal efforts to cut those freedoms back, but on the whole we’ve slipped but a little. The scary one though, [...]

A team of researchers at Boston College and Duke University have developed a highly engineered metamaterial capable of absorbing all of the light that strikes, to the point of a scientific standard of perfection. The metamaterial uses geometric surface features to capture the electric and magnetic properties of light in the shorter spectrum share of [...]

A review of the players in thermal based solar shows some surprising numbers and valuable innovation. The base design of a mirror focused on a black tube filled with an oil base working fluid, while old is still coming on strong. Two prototypes have started up and ten, yes ten, are in or past the [...]

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