Published

2 years ago

March 21, 2024

Alice Rush

Silfab Solar has made an agreement with SOLARCYCLE to purchase ultra-low carbon domestic glass for its PV panels from the glass manufacturer’s forthcoming Georgia facility that will recycle materials from retired panels to make new solar glass.

“SOLARCYCLE is an ideal partner because of its demonstrated success and innovative processes that already have made Silfab a more sustainable operation,” says Paolo Maccario, Silfab president and CEO. “Utilizing American-produced glass in our PV modules further meets the county’s demands for USA content in made-in-America clean energy products and creates additional U.S. jobs.”

With the planned SOLARCYCLE glass facility located about 300 miles from Silfab Solar’s newest factory in South Carolina, the companies estimate to be reducing the climate impacts created during shipping by more than 50%.

Silfab also plans to send its older or under-performing modules, as well as materials left over from the production process, to SOLARCYCLE for recycling.

The post Silfab Solar to Secure Additional Glass from SOLARCYCLE Georgia Facility appeared first on Solar Industry.

Silfab Solar to Secure Additional Glass from SOLARCYCLE Georgia Facility

Renewable Energy

Renewable Energy Concepts Can’t Violate the Laws of Physics

Published

15 hours ago

February 28, 2026

Alice Rush

In the early days of 2GreenEnergy, my people and I were vigorously engaged in finding solid ideas in cleantech that needed funding in order to move forward.

I vividly remember a conversation with a guy in Maryland who was trying to explain the (ostensible) breakthrough that he and his team had made in hydrokinetics. When I was having trouble visualizing what we was talking about, he asked me to “think of it as a river in a box.”

“Oh!” I exclaimed. “You mean you take a box full of standing water, add energy to it get it moving, then extract that energy, leaving you with more energy that you added to it.”

“Exactly.”

I politely explained that the laws of physics, specifically the first and second laws of thermodynamics, make this impossible.

He wasn’t through, however, and insisted that, in his office, his people had constructed a “working model.”

Here’s where my tone descended into something less than 100% polite. I told him that he may think he has a working model, but he’s wrong; if he believes this, he’s ignorant; if he doesn’t, but is conducting this conversation anyway, he’s a fraud.

“But don’t you want to come see it?” he implored.

“No. Not only would not fly across the country to see whatever it is you claim to have built, I wouldn’t walk across the street to a “working model” of something that is theoretically impossible.”

—

I tell this story because the claim made at the upper left is essentially identical. You’re pumping water up out of a stream, and then claiming to extract more energy when the water flows back into the stream.

Of course, social media today is rife with complete crap like this. We’ve devolved to a point where defrauding money out of idiots is rapidly replacing baseball as our national pastime.