Australian scientists have recently developed a way to print solar cells from organic plastics and materials. The implication is decentralised power plants printed on to any surface that can absorb sunlight: rooftops of cars, windows of high-rise buildings, laptop covers, outdoor advertising, roofing materials and so on.
A Tunisian company, Saphon Energy, has produced a wind turbine that does not make use of blades and captures 80 percent of the wind’s energy rather than the 30 percent that current technologies do.
Scientists from Europe have discovered that graphene – the world’s thinnest material – allows protons to pass through it but not atoms. Nobel prize winner Andre Geim, the head of the research, said this opened the possibility for hydrogen to be sieved from the air to be used in fuel cells – allowing hydrogen vehicles (which use hydrogen and oxygen as fuel and emit only water) to become commercially viable.