solar power

Isaac Arthur explores space-based solar power, in which satellites beam energy down via microwaves to rectennas on Earth. He discusses feasibility, profitability and its role in spurring space colonization.

Tech Ingredients builds a larger solar-powered desiccant air conditioner that uses a calcium chloride liquid desiccant with evaporative cooling to cool their lab. The video includes the engineering calculations.

Quint BUILDs tests a rooftop water storage setup in which solar power pumps water up to the roof and a turbine generates power later. He works through the numbers to show how much energy it actually stores.

Real Engineering looks at why Africa's abundant solar potential is hard to turn into usable power, especially for Europe. It covers the transmission, infrastructure and economic obstacles, and the pivot from concentrated solar to photovoltaics.

Dave Jones of EEVblog debunks the Solar Roadways project, which raised millions through Indiegogo and government funding. He works through the solar generation and LED power calculations to show the idea isn't viable.

Practical Engineering explains why connecting solar and other inverter-based generation to the grid is hard. It covers grid stability, load balancing and the behind-the-scenes engineering challenges of renewables.

EEVblog's Dave Jones critiques Reflect Orbital's plan to sell sunlight to solar farms after dark using orbital mirrors. He walks through the numbers to show the idea does not work out.

Explains the proposed NASA JPL plan to use the Sun as a gravitational lens, sending solar sail craft to its focal region to image an exoplanet's surface. It covers the distances involved, how imaging with the Sun would work and the mission design.

Chuck Moore, inventor of Forth, presents GreenArrays' 144-core asynchronous chip at Strange Loop 2013. He explains how idle cores draw almost no power and how tight code minimizes energy use.

Olympic track cyclist Robert Forstemann tries to pedal hard enough to power a 700 W toaster and toast a slice of bread. The film frames it as a comparison of how much energy people consume versus how much they can generate.

A short clip of the Snowbird, a human-powered ornithopter built by University of Toronto students. On August 2, 2010 it sustained altitude and airspeed for 19.3 seconds, the first such flight.

A short film in which friends build the first true-to-scale model of the solar system, with full planetary orbits, on a Nevada dry lakebed. It conveys the real distances and sizes involved.

A short Vox explainer on the duck curve, the shape electricity demand takes in California as solar output grows. It explains why grid operators struggle to balance supply and demand with lots of solar.

Disney Research's demo of quasistatic cavity resonance, which uses a purpose-built room or cabinet to generate magnetic fields that deliver kilowatts of power wirelessly to mobile receivers inside.

A Just Have a Think video on the proposed 16 billion pound Xlinks project to build solar, wind and battery capacity in southern Morocco. It would send around 3.6GW to the UK by subsea HVDC cable as near-baseload power.

Markus Kayser's Solar Sinter project video shows a machine in the desert using sunlight and sand to 3D print glass objects. It is a short demonstration of desert manufacturing from renewable energy and local material.

Practical Engineering explains what a black start is: restarting a power grid after total collapse. It shows why most plants need outside power to start and why rebuilding a synchronized grid is delicate and high-stakes.

A hobbyist compares vertical bifacial solar panels against south-facing angled panels using winter production results. It tests whether the usual mounting approach is actually best.

Technology Connections explains the difference between power (watts) and energy (watt-hours) and why confusing them leads to errors. It runs about 52 minutes and uses everyday examples.

Kenneth Finnegan shows how USB-C Power Delivery trigger boards like the ZY12PDN negotiate 5V to 20V so you can power projects from a USB-C charger, including the color coding for each voltage.

John Oliver's Last Week Tonight segment on the state of the US power grid, why it needs fixing, and the risks of aging infrastructure.

An animation presenting a non-standard helical or vortex model of the solar system, in which the planets trail the Sun through space instead of orbiting in flat circles. The model is a non-conventional view that the author says differs from standard diagrams.

Steve Mould shows that LEDs and solar panels are both diodes made from semiconductors, so a solar panel can emit light and an LED can generate electricity. He demonstrates a small solar panel lighting up.

In this TEDxBerlin talk, environmental activist Michael Shellenberger explains why he changed from opposing nuclear power to advocating it, after looking at the evidence on Chernobyl, Fukushima and air pollution.

A minutephysics explainer on why the planets orbit in a flat plane. It shows how conserved angular momentum flattens a collapsing cloud of matter into a disk.

A QCon London 2020 talk by Tesla engineers on the architecture of Tesla's Virtual Power Plant. It covers aggregating distributed batteries and solar with vertically integrated hardware and software across cloud and edge.

Footage of Richard Box's art installation in which fluorescent tubes light up in the ground under high voltage power lines, showing the electric fields they produce.

A short 2000s Apple commercial for the PowerMac G4 that plays on the computer being classed as a weapon under US export restrictions, with tanks as imagery.

The Eames Office's 1977 film Powers of Ten starts at a picnic in Chicago and zooms out by a factor of ten every ten seconds to the edge of the universe. It then zooms inward to a proton in a carbon atom.

Practical Engineering's explanation of the February 2021 Texas winter storm and the resulting power grid outage. It lays out the facts about ERCOT, the grid's isolation, and how generation across fuel types failed in the cold.

A short SIGBOVIK 2017 presentation by Tom Wildenhain showing that PowerPoint animations are Turing complete, with a working Turing machine built in slides. The talk is delivered deadpan as a serious research result.

Bryan Cantrill's Papers We Love talk on FreeBSD Jails and Solaris Zones, tracing how OS-level virtualization grew out of chroot and the limits of the traditional UNIX security model.

A feature-length film by the Makani team chronicling their thirteen-year effort to build energy kites that harvest wind power, with footage from test sites in Hawaii, California and Norway. It shows the engineering, the team and the eventual shutdown.

Shriram Krishnamurthi's PWLConf 2019 talk on the formal notion of expressive power of programming languages, based on Felleisen's paper. It explains how to tell when a feature adds power by whether emulating it requires global rewriting.

Tom Wildenhain's guest lecture for CMU's Esoteric Programming Languages course shows that PowerPoint transitions and slides are Turing complete without macros, building up to a mind-bending fractal ending.

A clip from the BBC series Britain from Above showing UK peak power demand. It shows a grid engineer preparing for the surge as millions put the kettle on when a popular show ends.

A former fusion scientist argues why fusion power by 2040 is unrealistic, covering the physics challenges, neutron issues and optimistic company claims, with a brief note of good news.

Andrei Tarkovsky's 1972 film Solaris, in which a psychologist is sent to a space station orbiting a planet with an alien intelligence and meets his dead wife there. It is the full movie, uploaded by Mosfilm.

Gamers Nexus benchmarks the Ryzen 9 7950X in its BIOS Eco Mode presets (65W, 105W and stock 170W). It measures the performance cost against the power and heat savings.

Big Clive takes apart an IKEA Koppla USB power supply to assess its safety, looking at isolation and transformer construction.