Published

2 years ago

July 25, 2024

Alice Rush

Heliene and India-based Premier Energies are planning a joint venture to create a solar cell manufacturing facility in the U.S.

Under the terms of the companies’ agreement, the facility would produce an annual aggregate capacity of 1 GW NTyp cells. Heliene currently sources solar cells from PEPPL’s Hyderabad facility for use in module manufacturing at its Mountain Iron, Minn. location.

“Premier Energies has been a valued partner of Heliene’s for many years now and we share a commitment to providing the highest-quality, most-reliable products to solar customers,” says Martin Pochtaruk, CEO of Heliene.

“With demand for U.S.-made modules and components growing, now is the perfect time to embark on the next phase of our partnership with this joint venture. Our new cell manufacturing facility will not only expand the footprint and impact of each of our companies, but it will also establish us as true leaders in the effort to friend-shore up the U.S. solar manufacturing supply chain.”

Under the terms of the venture, Heliene will contribute construction, project management, human resources, financial resource and management, facility operations, supply chain and logistics and regulatory expertise.

Premier will contribute cell technology engineering and operational expertise in the manufacturing process of the cells, manufacturing equipment selection, financial resources, raw material vendor relationships and supply agreements management.

The post Heliene, Premier Energies to Partner on Domestic Solar Cell Manufacturing Facility Build appeared first on Solar Industry.

Heliene, Premier Energies to Partner on Domestic Solar Cell Manufacturing Facility Build

Renewable Energy

Are Our Brains “Wired” Differently?

Published

12 hours ago

March 30, 2026

Alice Rush

At left is something that theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer said shortly before he was executed by the Third Reich for his protest against the fascist regime.

Most of us have had the thought he expressed here. We may be talking with an old friend who went to a prestigious college and showed when we were young considerable intelligence, who now, when it comes to world politics is now limited to the talking points of Newsmax and Fox News.

How did this happen?

Nobody knows, but, over the last couple of decades, this subject has caught the attention of neuroscientists who believe that liberals’ and conservatives’ brains are internally connected differently from each other.

As an example, tests show that the brain activity of self-identified liberals and conservatives are vastly different when experimental subjects are shown photographs of potentially threatening animals, like spiders and snakes. Those who think of themselves as conservatives have brain activity that show fear and hatred, while self-described liberals’ brains suggest that they perceive such animals as simply members of the planet on which we live.

Maybe no one is to blame; perhaps we just live in different worlds of consciousness.

Those hankering for a great read on this subject, albeit fiction, should check out Ian McEwan’s masterpiece “Saturday.”

Are Our Brains “Wired” Differently?

Renewable Energy

Science Is Not a Set of Facts; It’s a Process of Learning More About Our Universe

Published

13 hours ago

March 30, 2026

Alice Rush

At left is an interesting thought exercise. Here’s everything I can think of, and it’s not much. When I was in elementary school in the early 1960s, it was believed that:

The main types of rocks: sedimentary, metamorphic, and igneous, had been in place and remained the same since the formation of the earth. Now we have the “rock cycle,” where rock compounds are known to be continually changing form over very long periods of geologic time.

Every atom in our bodies and elsewhere on our planet is the result of the explosion of stars somewhere in the universe. As Neil DeGrasse Tyson puts it, “You are in the universe, and the universe is in you.”