The Economic Survey of India 2025-26 has highlighted significant progress in energy generation from non-fossil fuels and renewable sources. It highlights that India has surpassed its goal of achieving 50 per cent installed power capacity [...]
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Younan Company has announced the development of a large utility-scale solar and battery storage project in California under Soleil Renewable Energy, LLC. The project is planned in East Kern county, on approximately 3,200 acres of [...]
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Instead of absorbing energy from the sun to produce electricity, a new class of devices generates power by absorbing heat from its surroundings and beaming it at outer space. Such devices, which do not require exotic materials as their predecessors did, could help ventilate greenhouses and homes, researchers say.
In 2014, scientists invented superthin materials that can cool buildings without using electricity by beaming heat into outer space. When these materials absorb warmth, their compositions and structures ensure they emit heat outward as very specific wavelengths of infrared radiation, ones that air does not absorb. Instead, the radiation is free to leave the atmosphere, carrying energy with it and cooling the area around the material in a process called radiative cooling. The materials could help reduce demand for electricity. Air-conditioning accounts for nearly 15 percent of the electricity consumed by buildings in the United States alone.
Researchers then began exploring whether they could harness radiative cooling to generate power. Whereas solar cells produce electricity from the flow of energy into them from the sun, thermoradiative devices could generate power from energy flowing out from them into space.
“Thermoradiative devices operate like solar cells in reverse,” says Jeremy Munday, professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of California, Davis. “Rather than pointing them at a hot object like the sun, you point them at a cool object, like the sky.”
However, these devices were typically semiconductor electronics that needed rare or expensive materials to operate efficiently. In a new study, Munday and his colleagues investigated using Stirling engines, which “are mechanically simple and do not rely on exotic materials,” he says. “They also directly produce mechanical power—which is valuable for applications like air movement or water pumping—without needing intermediate electrical conversion.”
At the heart of a Stirling engine is a gas sealed in an airtight chamber. When the gas is heated, it expands, and pressure increases within the chamber; when it is cooled, it contracts, reducing pressure. This creates a cycle of expansion and contraction that drives a piston, generating power.
Whereas internal combustion engines rely on large differences in temperature to generate power, a Stirling engine is very efficient when it comes to small differences in temperature.
“Stirling engines have been around since the early 1800s, but they always operated by touching some warm object and rejecting waste heat into the local, ambient environment,” Munday says. Instead, the new device is heated by its surroundings and cooled when it radiates energy into space.
The new device combines a Stirling engine with a panel that acts as a heat-radiating antenna. The researchers placed it on the ground outdoors at night.
A year of nighttime experiments revealed that the device could generate more than 10 degrees Celsius of cooling most months, which the researchers could convert to produce more than 400 milliwatts of mechanical power per square meter. The scientists used their invention to directly power a fan and also coupled it to a small electrical motor to generate current.
Jeremy Munday’s experimental engine resembles a mechanical pinwheel and is mounted on a metal sheet.Jeremy Munday
Since the source of the new device’s energy is Earth’s ambient heat instead of the sun, its power output “is much lower than solar photovoltaics—roughly two orders of magnitude lower,” Munday says. “However, the goal is not to replace solar. Instead, this enables useful work when solar power is unavailable, such as at night and without requiring batteries, wiring, or fuel.”
The researchers calculated the device could generate more than 5 cubic feet per minute of air flow, the minimum air rate the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers requires to minimize detrimental effects on health inside public buildings. Potential applications may include circulating carbon dioxide within greenhouses and improving comfort inside residential buildings, they say.
Munday and his colleagues note there are many ways in which they could further improve the device’s performance. For instance, they could replace the air sealed in the device with hydrogen or helium gas, which would reduce internal engine friction. “With more-efficient engine designs, we think this approach could enable a new class of passive, around-the-clock power systems that complement solar energy and help support resilient, off-grid infrastructure,” Munday says.
In the future, “we would like to set up these devices in a real greenhouse as a first proof-of-concept application,” Munday says. They would also like to engineer the device to work during the day, he notes.
The scientists detailed their findings in the journal Science Advances.
This article appears in the February 2026 print issue as “Engine Generates Power by Beaming Heat into Space.”
EU solar generation increased by over 20% for the fourth year running in 2025, with its share in the energy mix surpassing coal and hydro. For the first time in history, solar and wind generated more energy in the EU than fossil fuels.
Solar generated a record 369 TWh of energy across the EU in 2025, according to the European Electricity Review published by energy think tank Ember.
The result is an increase of 62 TWh on 2024 and more than doubles the 145 TWh generated in 2020. Ember says solar energy has grown at an average annual growth in generation of 21% over the past five years, a rate far beyond any other energy source.
This growth trajectory, buoyed by an added 65.1 GW of solar in the EU last year, led solar to generate a record 13% of the bloc's power in 2025, moving ahead of coal and hydro. Every EU country saw growth in solar generation increase year-on-year last year, led by Hungary with a 28% contribution to its power mix. In Cyprus, Greece, Spain and the Netherlands, solar’s share in the electricity mix was also over 20%.
For the first time in history, solar and wind energy generated more EU electricity than fossil fuels in 2025, together responsible for a record 30% of EU power ahead of fossil fuels’ 29%. Solar and wind generated more electricity than all fossil sources in 14 of the EU’s 27 member states.
Report author Beatrice Petrovich said the milestone shows just how rapidly the EU is moving towards a power system backed by wind and solar. “As fossil fuel dependencies feed instability on the global stage, the stakes of transitioning to clean energy are clearer than ever,” Petrovich said.
In 2025, 19 EU countries recorded at least one hour when wind and solar combined accounted for over 70% of the country's hourly power generation, compared to only two countries in 2020. Ember found wind and solar supplied more than half of electricity generation during at least one third of all hours in Denmark, Estonia, Germany, Greece, Lithuania, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Portugal and Spain.
Ember’s report adds that all renewable sources, comprising solar, wind, hydro, bioenergy and other renewables, generated a total 1,331 TWh of energy in the EU last year for a 47.7% share of the total mix, 0.2% down on the year prior. The report says the share remained stable as the weather conditions that caused a drop in wind and hydro output boosted solar generation.
While gas generation rose by 8% compared to 2024, pushing the EU power sector’s gas import bill up to €32 billion, coal power fell to a historic low of 9.2%, with 19 EU countries now generating less than 5% of their energy from coal.
As solar and wind energy becomes the backbone of Europe’s power system, Ember’s report says electricity storage, together with grid enhancements and demand flexibility, will be crucial to put increasingly abundant renewable power to use and displace imported fossil power.
Among a series of recommendations listed in the report is removing barriers to battery deployment in national legislation, EU member states collaboration on permitting for key cross-border power lines, supporting investment in heat pumps and other electric technologies, introducing policy for electrifying transport, heating, and industry via the forthcoming Electrification Action Plan and delivering legislation to ban Russian gap and LNG imports by 2027.
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