Sunrise brief: NASA awards Blue Origin $35 million to build solar cells from moon dust

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Heliene plans to manufacture 1 GW solar modules, 1.5 GW solar cells in the U.S.  Canadian-based Heliene plans a new factory in Minnesota that will begin producing modules in 2024 and cells in 2025.

One research team’s approach to scaling a domestic circular lithium-ion battery economy National Renewable Energy Laboratory researchers continue their quest to accommodate growing electric vehicle and infrastructure demands.

Renewed efforts to build solar cells from moondust  Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin has been awarded $35 million in funding from NASA to improve the company’s commercial solution that produces silicon from lunar regolith. The U.S. space agency’s first efforts to build solar cells based on lunar regolith date back to 2005.

Pressure brings sweltering sun and soaking rain: July extremes in America  In a new weekly update for pv magazine, Solcast, a DNV company, presents the solar irradiance data it collected for North America this month. July’s high pressure in the southwest and trough in the northeast dramatically influenced the region’s solar energy production.

Stiff competition predicted for USDA $9.7 billion focused on renewables  Modeling shows that five of the nation’s 63 rural generation and transmission cooperative utilities alone could cost-effectively install 19 GW of solar and 7 GW of storage with support from a USDA program.

Solar-plus-battery projects take shape in the Northeast  Altus Power announced a 10 MW solar, 15 MWh storage project in Massachusetts while Summit Ridge Energy commissioned two of four planned energy storage systems in New York City.

 

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