National Renewable Energy Laboratory

Some are calibrated to work indoors in low light conditions.

Haelesel explained that testing at institutions like the US National Renewable Energy Laboratory or NREL and at the well-known Fraunhofer Institute in Germany primarily focuses on a standard known as AM 1.5G.

So what does that mean? Well AM stands for air mass and the 1.5 number represents the strength of sunlight after passing through 1.5 times the thickness of the atmosphere.

That corresponds roughly to the sun at about 48 degrees above the horizon which is typical of mid-latitude regions.

And there was a company that happened to need heat for some idiosyncratic reasons.

But like, is this a special case where it's, you know, a one off? So fortunately, smart people would be at the National God, what's it called? The National Laboratory of the Rockies used to be NREL.

They actually looked at this.

They were like, OK, this works if, you know, you can find enough electricity that's cheap enough and the battery costs are low enough and you can compete with natural gas, which is very cheap in the US.

But to achieve the conversions of energy that are needed to make these things work requires a multitude of different types of materials, and unless those materials can be efficiently separated out at the end of the product's useful life, then just like any other unloved piece of hardware there's a fair chance they'll get hurled into landfill along with everything else that we can't be bothered to deal with responsibly.

In a recent Forbes online article Jeff McMahon tells us the United States installs seven million pounds per day of solar panels according to the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, a pace that secures only fourth place among countries for installed capacity.

Those numbers are also considered in this comprehensive 2018 article by Kelly Pickerel for Solar Power World.

Kelly sets out the size of the challenge very clearly.

I don't care about that right now.

What our federal agencies did starting in 78 out in Colorado, I think it was NREL, or it changed into NREL in the 1970s, eventually caught up to us.

Wait, wait.

Wait, am I dying here? Interesting.

Nope, you're good.

NREL changed the game back in the early 2000s.

And then we had the Tennessee Dike Burst that, you know, unloaded a whole bunch of, you know, coal combustion residue into the subdivisions.

We had the Government Accountability Office 85-10R, which changed what fly ash was recognized as.

They've actually dropped 65% since 2009.

And a recent report by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in the US projected that innovation in wind power technology could drive it down another 50% by 2030.

As a final look to the future let's go back to our two tourists at the Anonymous Airfield one last time where they seem to have made their way to the entrance of the Empire State Building.

Because researchers at the University of Virginia are working on a design for an offshore turbine that will reach the almost inconceivable height of 1640 feet or just under 500 meters.

They qualify for SNAP.

Scientists at Argonne National Laboratory and National Renewable Energy Laboratory planted native flowers and grasses at two solar farms in southern Minnesota in 2018.

They then began a study of the sites over five years to learn how insect communities responded to the new habitat.

Habitats responded really well.

They qualify for SNAP.

Scientists at Argonne National Laboratory and National Renewable Energy Laboratory planted native flowers and grasses at two solar farms in southern Minnesota in 2018.

They then began a study of the sites over five years to learn how insect communities responded to the new habitat.

Habitats responded really well.