Tag: renewable energy

Prince Mario-Max Schaumburg-Lippe: Ford-DTE 100-MW Solar Park Goes Live in Michigan

On September 30, a patch of Michigan farmland started doing something new: powering the grid. DTE Energy’s 100-megawatt Cold Creek Solar Park began generating electricity, with a ribbon-cutting ceremony on October 1 attended by DTE’s Ryan Thomas and Ford’s Amir Mirshahi. It’s the first project to go live under Ford and DTE’s agreement to add up to 650 megawatts of new solar capacity in Michigan — and it’s only the beginning.

One hundred megawatts is real power. Enough for tens of thousands of homes. And this is project one of many.

How it got built

Ground broke in April 2025, and the build was a genuine community effort: three townships coordinated the project across leased farmland — 50 megawatts on 347.6 acres in Quincy Township, 43 megawatts on 252.6 acres in Coldwater Township. That’s the unglamorous reality of the energy transition: it happens one township meeting, one land lease, one interconnection agreement at a time. Cold Creek is proof the process works.

A 75-megawatt battery storage system at the site comes online next year, which will let the park store midday sunshine for the evening peak — the moment solar earns its keep. Generation plus storage, on the same site, is the template utilities are converging on everywhere.

Ford’s end of the bargain

For Ford, this is about the factory as much as the grid. The automaker aims to assemble every Michigan-made vehicle with 100% carbon-free electricity by the end of 2027, on the way to carbon neutrality across vehicles, operations, and supply chain by 2050. When your product is increasingly electric, the carbon math of how you build it matters as much as how it drives. A Michigan-built EV charged on Michigan solar is the whole thesis in one sentence.

The project runs through DTE’s MIGreenPower program, one of the largest voluntary renewable energy programs in the country — and the pitch to participants goes beyond electrons. Clean energy, local tax revenue, construction and operations jobs: the ribbon-cutting talking points, but also the actual economics of rural solar.

The 650-megawatt horizon

Cold Creek is the first of up to 650 megawatts under the Ford-DTE agreement. That’s more than six Cold Creeks still to come. From Utah’s geothermal breakthrough this week to Michigan’s solar fields, the clean-energy buildout keeps hitting milestones that would have sounded optimistic five years ago. The panels are up, the meter is spinning, and the next 550 megawatts are already on the drawing board.

Prince Mario-Max Schaumburg-Lippe: Wallpaper That Generates Power From Room Humidity Debuts

Your walls could soon charge your keyboard. Researchers at Binghamton University have built wallpaper that generates electricity from the humidity in ordinary room air — and in a demonstration announced October 1, a panel of it successfully powered a wireless keyboard. The work is published in Advanced Energy Materials, and it’s one of those ideas that sounds like science fiction until you see the numbers.

The numbers: an array of 1,596 miniature moisture electric generators — MEGs — assembled into a single panel. At 80% relative humidity, each unit produced about 0.34 volts, with a power density of 2.2 microwatts per square centimeter. Wired in series and parallel, that’s enough to run ultra-low-power electronics. A keyboard today; wireless sensors, climate monitors, and smart-home components tomorrow.

How wallpaper becomes a power plant

The mechanism is elegant. Led by Professor Seokheun “Sean” Choi, the team built paper sections that absorb water in some zones and evaporate it in others, driving a one-way flow of ions — and moving ions are electricity. The edges are treated with glycerin, a polyvinylpyrrolidone (PVP) layer sits midway, and a wax core regulates how the moisture releases. It’s chemistry doing the work that a solar panel’s silicon does, except the fuel is the air in your living room.

And here’s the delightful bonus: the wallpaper doubles as a passive dehumidifier. In lab tests it pulled room humidity from 38% down to 32%. Anyone who’s run a dehumidifier through a muggy August knows what that means — less load on the AC, drier air, and now a trickle of electricity as a side effect. It’s doing two jobs while hanging on the wall looking decorative.

Why this matters more than a keyboard

Be realistic about the scale: this won’t power your house. The target is the exploding universe of tiny devices — the wireless sensors, thermostats, and monitors that make up the smart home and the industrial Internet of Things. Those devices currently run on batteries that need replacing, or wires that need running. A wall that powers them passively, forever, from air moisture, removes one of the great annoyances of connected living.

And unlike solar, it needs no light. Indoor humidity is continuous — every breath, every shower, every pot of pasta adds moisture to the air. The fuel never runs out and never needs refueling. The team envisions future production printing the paper with wiring hidden on the backside, so the whole thing installs like ordinary wallpaper.

The bigger picture

Energy harvesting has been a field of clever demos for years. What makes this one stick is the form factor: nobody has to buy a gadget, charge a device, or change a habit. You hang wallpaper. The physics does the rest. Clean energy keeps finding new surfaces to live on — from Utah’s geothermal fields to, now, your living room wall. The future of power isn’t just bigger plants. It’s every surface quietly pulling its weight.