Cheap solar power is coming

Sweet!!!

It has been called the holy grail of the modern era: cheap solar energy.

And scientists say it may be within our grasp soon.

A Queensland University team has grown the world’s first titanium oxide nano crystals that are likely to revolutionise the way solar energy is harvested and used.

Creating these highly efficient miniature crystals with large reactive surfaces was thought of as impossible by most scientists.

Max Lu, who led the study, said they were a step closer to the holy grail of cost-effective solar energy with their discovery.

‘Highly active surfaces in such crystals allow high reactivity and efficiency in devices used for solar energy conversion and hydrogen production,’ said Lu.

‘Titania nano-crystals are promising materials for cost-effective solar cells, hydrogen production from splitting water, and solar decontamination of pollutants.

‘The beauty of our technique is that it is very simple and cheap to make such materials at mild conditions.’

Lu said it wasn’t just renewable energy where this research could be applied.

‘These crystals are also fantastic for purifying air and water,’ he said.

‘The same principle for such materials to convert sunlight to electricity is also working to break down pollutants in water and air.

‘One could paint these crystals onto a window or a wall to purify the air in a room. The potential of applications of this technology in water purification and recycling are huge.’

Lu said it would be about five years for the water and air pollution applications to be commercially available, and about 5 to 10 years for the solar energy conversion using such crystals.

Details of the project have been published in the latest edition of the journal Nature.

(Source: http://www.stpetersburgnews.net/story/365194)

Utility-Scale Solar Power

Rather than using large reflective surfaces, the eSolar array uses smaller reflective surfaces, reducing the installation costs, control costs. The smaller size also means increased construction speeds. Also the decreased wind profile means increased up-time. Each array, or module, is 25 MW; which can be multipled for larger plant needs.

(Source: http://peswiki.com/index.php/Directory:eSolar)

Municipal Solar Power Plants

April 16, 2008
Posted by Martin Roscheisen, CEO

At Nanosolar, we believe very much that meaningful scale for solar will come foremost from utility-scale solar power plants, in particular from municipal solar power plants of 2-10MW in size. These are rows of solar panels mounted onto the ground of free fields at the outskirts of towns and cities, feeding power directly into the municipal electricity grid.

A 2MW municipal solar power plant requires about 10 acres of land to serve a city of 1,000 homes — that’s acreage generally easily available at the outskirts of any city of such size in even the most developed countries. Similar for a 10MW plant for a city with 5,000 homes: This would require five such lots.

Municipal solar power plants are an avenue for delivering a Gigawatt of power in a state through one solar farm each in a few hundred cities — local to where the power is needed — as opposed to constructing a new coal-fired or nuclear plant. They can also be deployed very rapidly. (It takes 10-15 years to get a new coal plant done; a solar plant can be done in 12 months — provided no administrative blocks exist).

In a solar power plant, solar panels are mounted onto rails above the ground so that grass and flowers can continue to flourish in between and below the rows of panels. Care is taken that sufficient amounts of rainwater can drop through between adjoining panels so that the flowers and organisms below are not starved.

Municipal solar power plants integrate very naturally into the existing landscape as well as the existing electricity grid. By feeding power into the grid directly at municipal voltage levels (typically 20kV), they even avoid the expense of a substation for down-transforming power from high (multi-100kV) transmission voltages as required by conventional power. Furthermore, the solar power plants utilize power inverter electronics with increasingly intelligent features which enlightened utilities around the world are now recognizing as a very good way to improve grid power quality especially at the outer branches of the electric grid where power quality is hard to manage otherwise.

In any region with a decent amount of sunshine, there is no more economic way of reliably providing municipal power during the day than through a municipal solar power plant.

Ground-mounted solar power plants are installed in industrially streamlined ways, with specialized tractors deploying standardized substructure components according to standard system block designs to achieve optimal cost efficiency.

While rooftops are surely a good application too for solar panels, it is a business that’s difficult to scale rapidly in a truly meaningful way. Crawling onto rooftops and mounting solar panels in compliance with building codes is fundamentally always a somewhat more expensive proposition.

Municipal solar power plants can be deployed at a different level of efficiency and speed. This is just not yet known very well to the public, particularly in the United States and in California (where we have California Solar Incentives which are adminstered by the state utilities and which presently block this most cost-efficient form of installing solar).

But towns and cities throughout Europe and Asia have already proven the concept, and more and more — in fact increasingly entire counties — are now implementing plans to go 100% renewable based on a mix of solar and biofuels. It works, it is economic, and it is possible now. (Any U.S. utility executive who is concerned about the new world of local power but desires to learn more should join this trip.) It is a silent revolution going on that the press rarely reports about.

A good exception is an article today in our local newspaper – “Local communities reach for power over energy” (SF Chronicle) – describing how Marin County in California is wrestling with going for local renewable power. We salute their effort. It is well timed, smart, and shows a lot of foresight. They are on the right track based on what we see happening in our own industry and in energy overall. In a few years, they will have less expensive power than it is available in the rest of PG&E territory.

The amount of activity going on behind the scenes in readying technologies, sites, and financings for such is tremendous, and this will become very visible to the public in many locations in the United States in 2010. There is a reason why one of the world’s largest power producers invested in Nanosolar.

But now is the time for cities and counties to lay the adminstrative foundation for having their own power, 100% renewable, if they care to make a difference by then.

PS: The SF Chronicle article describes a dynamic of arguments as it may unfold in a lot of communities these days. There’s the Berkeley professor quoted as the “it’s-too-expensive” skeptic. I went through the economics paper behind this skepticism and am not surprised: First, he predicts the cost of installing multi-MW municipal power based on the cost of a small residential silicon PV rooftop system. Secondly, he extrapolates the near-term cost of solar by averaging legacy technology providers with emerging cost leaders and fails to look at the world’s most streamlined solar installations as a reference (of which there are admittedly none yet in California). I guess these kinds of errors happen as the energy industry transitions to be more like the technology industry.

(Source: http://blog.nanosolar.com/)

Renewable Energy Website with Plans.

This link was given to me yesterday. There is some cool plans to do your own wind generators and such on there… Enjoy!
http://www.re-energy.ca/
Some plans can be found here:

	Wind Energy Backgrounder [PDF Format - 309 Kb]
	Wind Energy Lesson Plan [PDF Format - 50 Kb]
	Vertical Axis Wind Turbine [PDF Format - 1 Mb]

Solar Company Says Its Tech Can Power 90 Percent of Grid and Cars

Solar-power-plant company Ausra has released a paper claiming that solar-thermal electric technology can provide 90 percent of U.S. grid electricity, with enough left over to power a fleet of plug-in electric vehicles. The company estimates that changeover would eliminate 40 percent of the country’s greenhouse gas emissions with a land footprint of 9,600 square miles, about the size of Vermont (thanks, Kent).

The key to the scenario, however, is developing the ability to store energy for 16 hours, thus creating a stable power source through cloudy periods and the night, a feat which has so far eluded engineers.

“If we can do storage,” Ausra CEO Bob Fishman said, “We can take on coal.”

…

(Full Article: http://blog.wired.com)

Special Coating Greatly Improves Solar Cell Performance

The energy from sunlight falling on only 9 percent of California’s Mojave Desert could power all of the United States’ electricity needs if the energy could be efficiently harvested, according to some estimates. Unfortunately, current-generation solar cell technologies are too expensive and inefficient for wide-scale commercial applications.

…

(Full Article: http://www.physorg.com/news122908304.html)

Solar cell directly splits water for hydrogen

Plants trees and algae do it. Even some bacteria and moss do it, but scientists have had a difficult time developing methods to turn sunlight into useful fuel. Now, Penn State researchers have a proof-of-concept device that can split water and produce recoverable hydrogen.

“This is a proof-of-concept system that is very inefficient. But ultimately, catalytic systems with 10 to 15 percent solar conversion efficiency might be achievable,” says Thomas E. Mallouk, the DuPont Professor of Materials Chemistry and Physics. “If this could be realized, water photolysis would provide a clean source of hydrogen fuel from water and sunlight.”

Although solar cells can now produce electricity from visible light at efficiencies of greater than 10 percent, solar hydrogen cells – like those developed by Craig Grimes, professor of electrical engineering at Penn State – have been limited by the poor spectral response of the semiconductors used. In principle, molecular light absorbers can use more of the visible spectrum in a process that is mimetic of natural photosynthesis. Photosynthesis uses chlorophyll and other dye molecules to absorb visible light.

…

(Source: http://www.zpenergy.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=2776)
(Full Article: http://www.physorg.com/news122534699.html)

Google Prepared to Spend More on Green Energy than U.S. Gov’t!

Since the government won’t do it, Google Inc is prepared to invest hundreds of millions of dollars in big commercial alternative-energy projects to end the nation’s reliance on dirty energy like coal and oil. While the Bush Administration has made some token statements and gesture to support green energy, real change is far from their main agenda. With a grossly disproportional amount of our national budget invested in warfare, it seems there’s no money left over for creating a livable future. In reality, the Feds are in happily in bed with big oil and the torrid love affair looks set to continue—that is, until innovative corporations like Google step up to the plate.

According to Reuters, the Internet giant says it will invest in researching green technologies and renewable-energy companies, and is eager to help promising technologies amass scale to help drive the cost of alternative energy below the cost of coal.

“There are a lot of technologies that get to the pilot scale and look promising, but the first few large commercial projects deploying those technologies, financing those can be extremely difficult,” Dan Reicher said in an interview at the Clean-tech Investor Summit in Indian Wells, California.

“Often the usual equity and debt players will say come back to us when you’ve demonstrated this at scale,” said Reicher, director of climate and energy initiatives for Google’s philanthropic arm, Google.org.

The stage between successfully developing a new technology and amassing scale is referred in the industry as the “Valley of Death,” Reicher said. Venture capital firms will traditionally pour tens of millions into developing new technologies, Reicher said. But even then it’s not nearly enough to build a utility-scale solar thermal plant, for instance, and that’s where Google thinks it can be helpful. They’ll step up to get the little guys off the ground.

“When you get to building a commercial-scale project in the energy world, you can be looking easily at hundreds of millions or even across the billion dollar threshold,” Reicher said. “Over years we’ll be looking at hundreds of millions of dollars. So we’re very mindful of the Valley of Death.”

In addition to considering project finance, Google has already committed $20 million to funding start-up firms researching solar-thermal and high-altitude wind power. It is also looking closely at several companies with enhanced geothermal systems, Reicher said. Enhanced geothermal systems, or EGS, create power by pumping water into hot rocks in the ground rather than harvesting hot water already there.

“We arrived at these three technologies because we think they have real promise to move down the cost curve and to be competitive with coal and to get to very large scale,” Reicher said.

Google announced in November it planned to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to help drive the cost of electricity made from renewable sources below the price of power generated from dirty coal-fired plants.
The company has also pledged $10 million to Pasadena, California-based eSolar Inc to support research and development on solar thermal power, which concentrates heat from the sun to create steam and spin turbines. Another $10 million has been invested in Alameda, California-based Makani Power Inc, which is developing high-altitude wind technologies.

Google Power….Wow!

(Source: http://www.dailygalaxy.com)

Google Prepared to Spend More on Green Energy than U.S. Gov’t!

Since the government won’t do it, Google Inc is prepared to invest hundreds of millions of dollars in big commercial alternative-energy projects to end the nation’s reliance on dirty energy like coal and oil. While the Bush Administration has made some token statements and gesture to support green energy, real change is far from their main agenda. With a grossly disproportional amount of our national budget invested in warfare, it seems there’s no money left over for creating a livable future. In reality, the Feds are in happily in bed with big oil and the torrid love affair looks set to continue—that is, until innovative corporations like Google step up to the plate.

According to Reuters, the Internet giant says it will invest in researching green technologies and renewable-energy companies, and is eager to help promising technologies amass scale to help drive the cost of alternative energy below the cost of coal.

“There are a lot of technologies that get to the pilot scale and look promising, but the first few large commercial projects deploying those technologies, financing those can be extremely difficult,” Dan Reicher said in an interview at the Clean-tech Investor Summit in Indian Wells, California.

“Often the usual equity and debt players will say come back to us when you’ve demonstrated this at scale,” said Reicher, director of climate and energy initiatives for Google’s philanthropic arm, Google.org.

The stage between successfully developing a new technology and amassing scale is referred in the industry as the “Valley of Death,” Reicher said. Venture capital firms will traditionally pour tens of millions into developing new technologies, Reicher said. But even then it’s not nearly enough to build a utility-scale solar thermal plant, for instance, and that’s where Google thinks it can be helpful. They’ll step up to get the little guys off the ground.

“When you get to building a commercial-scale project in the energy world, you can be looking easily at hundreds of millions or even across the billion dollar threshold,” Reicher said. “Over years we’ll be looking at hundreds of millions of dollars. So we’re very mindful of the Valley of Death.”

In addition to considering project finance, Google has already committed $20 million to funding start-up firms researching solar-thermal and high-altitude wind power. It is also looking closely at several companies with enhanced geothermal systems, Reicher said. Enhanced geothermal systems, or EGS, create power by pumping water into hot rocks in the ground rather than harvesting hot water already there.

“We arrived at these three technologies because we think they have real promise to move down the cost curve and to be competitive with coal and to get to very large scale,” Reicher said.

Google announced in November it planned to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to help drive the cost of electricity made from renewable sources below the price of power generated from dirty coal-fired plants.
The company has also pledged $10 million to Pasadena, California-based eSolar Inc to support research and development on solar thermal power, which concentrates heat from the sun to create steam and spin turbines. Another $10 million has been invested in Alameda, California-based Makani Power Inc, which is developing high-altitude wind technologies.

Google Power….Wow!

(Source: http://www.dailygalaxy.com)

Scientists Invent Solar Cell Sheet That Collects Energy at Night

Researchers at Idaho National Laboratory, along with partners at Microcontinuum Inc. (Cambridge, MA) and Patrick Pinhero of the University of Missouri, are developing a novel way to collect energy from the sun with a technology that could potentially cost pennies a yard, be imprinted on flexible materials and still draw energy after the sun has set.

…

(Full article: http://www.nextenergynews.com)

2 men claim to have more powerful solar panel

By Kyle Stock
The Post and Courier
Thursday, December 6, 2007

A local entrepreneur and an electrician from California say they have exclusive rights to a solar panel that will turn the energy industry on its head and help the environment — a device 15 times more powerful than any other and cheaper to boot.

The pair organized in July as FreEnergy LLC and unveiled their sun-powered generating system to a crowd of about 20 people in North Charleston on Wednesday.

FreEnergy’s chief executive is Nelson Mensch, an electrician who moved to Charleston from California this year. He said he was a “total skeptic” when he first heard about the device but vowed that it produces about 3,200 watts of power versus 200 watts cranked out by an average photovoltaic solar panel.

The device is based on traditional silicon-chip technology, but its purported advantage is that it captures all of the light in the solar spectrum, as opposed to about 17 percent in the most efficient photovoltaic cells to date.

FreEnergy President Andre Woods called the device “possibly earth-shattering.”

“We can give assurances that your power cost can be the same for 30 years,” Woods said. “The economic impact of this is almost incomprehensible.”

The company declined to say who invented the panel, how they came to acquire the rights to manufacture it or how they will bankroll the 200-worker factory they are proposing to buy or build by summer.

FreEnergy said the panel was patent-protected but would not elaborate, citing fears of knockoff products. The company said the oil industry has squashed or shelved similar technology.

“The only reason there aren’t solar panels on every rooftop is that big oil companies have not figured out how to charge you for the sun,” Woods said.

Powering an average-sized house with FreEnergy panels would cost about $19,000, versus $30,000 for conventional photovoltaics, according to Woods.

At least one South Carolina solar panel dealer was skeptical of FreEnergy’s claims.

“If this is real, this is like New York or Paris kind of stuff, not Charleston,” said David Odell, whose Greenville-based Sunstore Solar sells and installs photovoltaic panels.

(Source: http://www.charleston.net/news)

Time to join the Renewable Energy Business!

Looking for work!!!
You got it. I’ve been in the Gaming Industry for 10 years now. I had a blast, I worked for a great company, with great people. The Canadian Dollar is just too high and it’s difficult to sell our games down in the US now.

In June, I was let go and I took this as an opportunity to review what’s up ahead of me. Great opportunity to do greater deeds.

Here is what I feel like doing now, but just don’t know how to proceed. So you guys can write me and help me reaching my new goals. I’d like to assist this beautiful planet and the beautiful people to reach sustainability. No more oil, no more coal, no more Nuclear. Just clean energy.

I’m looking to join the renewable energy business, either solar or other forms, for any position. I’m a programmer, but I could fill any kind of roles and would be willing to follow any kind of training required. If you know anyone, close friend or through your network that has insiders in the Solar energy business, hook me up. I would be eternally grateful.

Regards,

Spray-On Solar-Power Cells Are True Breakthrough

Another nice solar energy breakthrough.

SOLAR REVOLUTION – Solar Paint

Ted Sargent is a pioneer in solar science. He’s working on solar technology that could literally be woven into every aspect of daily life, from our clothes to our roads, using what is known as a spray-on solar cell. The implications for our energy systems are profound. As Ted says, “Solar energy is not just an exciting science problem, but an incredibly important human problem.”

Ted is working on solar nanotechnology with the potential to make solar energy very cheap and allow society to collect it on a huge scale. Currently, solar technology costs more to build and install than most people are willing to pay. Solar panels, for example, the technology most commonly associated with solar energy, are installed on your rooftop. The cost of collecting one kilowatt per hour of solar energy (about a third of the electricity an average household uses on any given day) is about $11,000.

Not only are panels expensive to install, they capture only the visible portion of the sun’s rays so they work only on sunny days. Ted’s focus is the infrared portion of the sun’s rays which accounts for more than half of all solar energy. What’s more, infrared energy is available to us even in cloudy weather.

A quantum dot is a semiconductor nanostructure that confines the motion of conduction band electrons, valence band holes, or excitons (bound pairs of conduction band electrons and valence band holes) in all three spatial directions. The confinement can be due to electrostatic potentials (generated by external electrodes, doping, strain, impurities), the presence of an interface between different semiconductor materials (e.g. in core-shell nanocrystal systems), the presence of the semiconductor surface (e.g. semiconductor nanocrystal), or a combination of these. A quantum dot has a discrete quantized energy spectrum. The corresponding wave functions are spatially localized within the quantum dot, but extend over many periods of the crystal lattice. A quantum dot contains a small finite number (of the order of 1-100) of conduction band electrons, valence band holes, or excitons, i.e., a finite number of elementary electric charges.

Nano Solar – Amazing new Tech!

This is a wonderful new invention. I’d love to see that been added to the house building process.

The New Dawn of Solar

Green Tech
Nanosolar Powersheet

Imagine a solar panel without the panel. Just a coating, thin as a layer of paint, that takes light and converts it to electricity. From there, you can picture roof shingles with solar cells built inside and window coatings that seem to suck power from the air. Consider solar-powered buildings stretching not just across sunny Southern California, but through China and India and Kenya as well, because even in those countries, going solar will be cheaper than burning coal. That’s the promise of thin-film solar cells: solar power that’s ubiquitous because it’s cheap. The basic technology has been around for decades, but this year, Silicon Valley–based Nanosolar created the manufacturing technology that could make that promise a reality.

The company produces its PowerSheet solar cells with printing-press-style machines that set down a layer of solar-absorbing nano-ink onto metal sheets as thin as aluminum foil, so the panels can be made for about a tenth of what current panels cost and at a rate of several hundred feet per minute. With backing from Google’s founders and $20 million from the U.S. Department of Energy, Nanosolar’s first commercial cells rolled off the presses this year.

Cost has always been one of solar’s biggest problems. Traditional solar cells require silicon, and silicon is an expensive commodity (exacerbated currently by a global silicon shortage). What’s more, says Peter Harrop, chairman of electronics consulting firm IDTechEx, “it has to be put on glass, so it’s heavy, dangerous, expensive to ship and expensive to install because it has to be mounted.” And up to 70 percent of the silicon gets wasted in the manufacturing process. That means even the cheapest solar panels cost about $3 per watt of energy they go on to produce. To compete with coal, that figure has to shrink to just $1 per watt.

Nanosolar’s cells use no silicon, and the company’s manufacturing process allows it to create cells that are as efficient as most commercial cells for as little as 30 cents a watt. “You’re talking about printing rolls of the stuff—printing it on the roofs of 18-wheeler trailers, printing it on garages, printing it wherever you want it,” says Dan Kammen, founding director of the Renewable and Appropriate Energy Laboratory at the University of California at Berkeley. “It really is quite a big deal in terms of altering the way we think about solar and in inherently altering the economics of solar.”

In San Jose, Nanosolar has built what will soon be the world’s largest solar-panel manufacturing facility. CEO Martin Roscheisen claims that once full production starts early next year, it will create 430 megawatts’ worth of solar cells a year—more than the combined total of every other solar plant in the U.S. The first 100,000 cells will be shipped to Europe, where a consortium will be building a 1.4-megawatt power plant next year.

Right now, the biggest question for Nanosolar is not if its products can work, but rather if it can make enough of them. California, for instance, recently launched the Million Solar Roofs initiative, which will provide tax breaks and rebates to encourage the installation of 100,000 solar roofs per year, every year, for 10 consecutive years (the state currently has 30,000 solar roofs). The company is ready for the solar boom. “Most important,” Harrop says, “Nanosolar is putting down factories instead of blathering to the press and doing endless experiments. These guys are getting on with it, and that is impressive.” nanosolar.com —MICHAEL MOYER

(Source: http://www.neatorama.com/2007/11/14/revolutionary-solar-energy/)
(Original: http://www.popsci.com/popsci/flat/bown/2007/green/item_59.html)
(Main website: Nanosolar)

Making Water Do the Splits

By Robert F.
Service Science
NOW Daily News
20 August 2007

It’s hard to imagine a greener way to power the planet than using solar power to turn water into hydrogen gas. This clean fuel can be piped through fuel cells to produce electricity and then recombined with oxygen to yield water as a waste product. Sunlight doesn’t break water molecules apart on its own, however, which is why Earth is covered with oceans. So researchers have spent decades searching for catalysts to help it along. And new work by researchers in Virginia takes a key step toward that goal.

A good solar catalyst has to be a jack of many trades. It must absorb high levels of solar energy, move the resulting electrons to a catalytic site where they can split water molecules into hydrogen and oxygen atoms, and finally stitch a new bond between two hydrogen ions to generate hydrogen gas. On top of that, the catalyst must be cheap and not generate any unwanted byproducts that would prevent the reaction from working over and over again.

No water-splitting catalyst has come close to meeting all these challenges. One major stumbling block has been that two electrons are needed to turn hydrogen ions into hydrogen gas. Previous approaches for turning water to hydrogen have created catalysts only capable of dealing with one electron at a time, largely because electrons tend to repel each other.

Now researchers led by Karen Brewer, a chemist at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in Blacksburg, report in an advanced online publication in the Journal of the American Chemical Society that they’ve found a way to double their electron pleasure. To do so, the researchers created long, complex molecules with a pair of light-absorbing groups on both ends. These groups funnel the electrons through a pair of molecular bridges to a single atom of catalytically active rhodium in the center. The bridges turn out to be key, Brewer explains, because they keep electrons far apart from one another until they reach the metal center that can handle both at one time to carry out the necessary reactions. In tests with the catalyst dissolved in water, the researchers found that it was able to convert about 1% of the energy in sunlight into stored energy in the form of hydrogen gas, a good start but still well below the amount of energy that can be harvested by conventional solar cells.

The new catalyst isn’t ready to revolutionize the energy business just yet, says Daniel Nocera, a chemist and solar fuels expert at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. One limitation of Brewer’s system, he points out, is that it requires organic molecules called amines, which give up their electrons to the light-absorbing complexes that in turn pass those on to the metal. Ultimately, researchers would prefer to pull these electrons from water molecules directly when they are split. Still, Nocera says, Brewer’s team “is on the right track.”

(Source: http://sciencenow.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/2007/820/3?rss=1)

Solar power makes tiny village beam

GUDDA, India (CNN) — In Gudda, a village with very little, residents are literally beaming. Just two years ago, villagers had never seen light after dark, unless it came from the moon. Then, solar light arrived and changed everything.

“When the lanterns first arrived, the villagers asked, ‘What is this?’ ” says Hanuman Ram, the local solar engineer. “I explained to them how it worked. Then slowly, as people saw it, they said, ‘Wow, what a thing this is!’ “

There are no real roads that lead to the tiny village in the state of Rajasthan in northwestern India, home to about 100 families. There are only thin strips of tar dotted with massive potholes that force vehicles into thick brush. Other times, cars have to maneuver over just dirt.

There is no electricity — power lines don’t extend out here. Water is scarce, too. At the village well, women balance jugs of water on their heads, deftly evading the livestock that saunters along.

…

(Full article: http://www.cnn.com)

Spray-On Solar-Power Cells Are True Breakthrough

Stefan Lovgren

for National Geographic News

January 14, 2005

Scientists have invented a plastic solar cell that can turn the sun’s power into electrical energy, even on a cloudy day.

The plastic material uses nanotechnology and contains the first solar cells able to harness the sun’s invisible, infrared rays. The breakthrough has led theorists to predict that plastic solar cells could one day become five times more efficient than current solar cell technology.

Like paint, the composite can be sprayed onto other materials and used as portable electricity. A sweater coated in the material could power a cell phone or other wireless devices. A hydrogen-powered car painted with the film could potentially convert enough energy into electricity to continually recharge the car’s battery.

The researchers envision that one day “solar farms” consisting of the plastic material could be rolled across deserts to generate enough clean energy to supply the entire planet’s power needs.

“The sun that reaches the Earth’s surface delivers 10,000 times more energy than we consume,” said Ted Sargent, an electrical and computer engineering professor at the University of Toronto. Sargent is one of the inventors of the new plastic material.

“If we could cover 0.1 percent of the Earth’s surface with [very efficient] large-area solar cells,” he said, “we could in principle replace all of our energy habits with a source of power which is clean and renewable.”

Infrared Power

Plastic solar cells are not new. But existing materials are only able to harness the sun’s visible light. While half of the sun’s power lies in the visible spectrum, the other half lies in the infrared spectrum.

The new material is the first plastic composite that is able to harness the infrared portion.

“Everything that’s warm gives off some heat. Even people and animals give off heat,” Sargent said. “So there actually is some power remaining in the infrared [spectrum], even when it appears to us to be dark outside.”

The researchers combined specially designed nano particles called quantum dots with a polymer to make the plastic that can detect energy in the infrared.

With further advances, the new plastic “could allow up to 30 percent of the sun’s radiant energy to be harnessed, compared to 6 percent in today’s best plastic solar cells,” said Peter Peumans, a Stanford University electrical engineering professor, who studied the work.

Electrical Sweaters

The new material could make technology truly wireless.

“We have this expectation that we don’t have to plug into a phone jack anymore to talk on the phone, but we’re resigned to the fact that we have to plug into an electrical outlet to recharge the batteries,” Sargent said. “That’s only communications wireless, not power wireless.”

He said the plastic coating could be woven into a shirt or sweater and used to charge an item like a cell phone.

“A sweater is already absorbing all sorts of light both in the infrared and the visible,” said Sargent. “Instead of just turning that into heat, as it currently does, imagine if it were to turn that into electricity.”

Other possibilities include energy-saving plastic sheeting that could be unfurled onto a rooftop to supply heating needs, or solar cell window coating that could let in enough infrared light to power home appliances.

Cost-Effectiveness

Ultimately, a large amount of the sun’s energy could be harnessed through “solar farms” and used to power all our energy needs, the researchers predict.

“This could potentially displace other sources of electrical production that produce greenhouse gases, such as coal,” Sargent said.

In Japan, the world’s largest solar-power market, the government expects that 50 percent of residential power supply will come from solar power by 2030, up from a fraction of a percent today.

The biggest hurdle facing solar power is cost-effectiveness.

At a current cost of 25 to 50 cents per kilowatt-hour, solar power is significantly more expensive than conventional electrical power for residences. Average U.S. residential power prices are less than ten cents per kilowatt-hour, according to experts.

But that could change with the new material.

“Flexible, roller-processed solar cells have the potential to turn the sun’s power into a clean, green, convenient source of energy,” said John Wolfe, a nanotechnology venture capital investor at Lux Capital in New York City.

(Source: http://news.nationalgeographic.com)

Shrinking the cost for solar power

By Michael Kanellos,

Staff Writer,
CNET News.com

One of the big problems with solar power has been that it costs more than electricity generated by conventional means. But some experts think that, under certain circumstances, the premium for solar power can be erased, without subsidies or dramatic technical breakthroughs.

A sufficiently large solar thermal power plant (also called concentrated solar power, or CSP) could potentially generate electricity at about the same cost as electricity from a conventional gas-burning power plant, experts say.

It’s not easy. The plant would also have to come with a large energy storage system, be built next to others and be located close to users. To date, no one has completed a facility that comports to all of these parameters, said Fred Morse, an energy analyst who has studied the issue.

“Solar thermal is available at much more attractive prices than solar photovoltaic. The land mass isn’t huge, but it does take a while to build these,” said Stephan Dolezalek, a managing partner and co-head of the clean tech practice at venture firm Vantage Point Venture Partners, an investor in Bright Source Energy, which builds solar thermal plants and components.

Both Dolezalek and Jiang Lin, who heads up the China Energy Group at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, said that solar thermal is likely the most promising technology in the entire alternative-energy field right now.

When asked when solar thermal can hit parity, Lin responded “now.”

Thermal by the numbers
Conventionally generated electricity ranges between 5 and 18 cents per kilowatt hour (the amount of money to get a kilowatt of power for an hour) but in most places it’s below 10 cents, according to the Energy Information Agency. Solar thermal costs around 15 to 17 cents a kilowatt hour, according to statistics from Schott, a German company that makes solar thermal equipment.

A solar thermal plant would need a facility to store the heat harvested in the day by its sunlight-concentrating mirrors so that the heat could be used to generate electricity at night. “You need the kind of system that can run in the evening,” Morse said. At some sites, such as Nevada Solar One, excess heat is stored in molten salt and released at night to run the turbine.

The plant, ideally, should be capable of generating about 300 megawatts of electricity. Those plants can churn out electricity at about 13 cents a kilowatt.

That’s still a relatively high price, so utilities would need to group two, three or more 300-megawatt plants together to share operational resources, Morse said. “They could share control rooms or spare parts,” he said. That would knock the price closer to 11 cents a kilowatt hour.

“Under 10 cents is sort of the magic line,” he said.

Dolezalek puts it another way: the plants need to be around 500 megawatts in size. Most solar thermal plants right now aren’t that big. The 22-year-old thermal plant in California’s Mojave Desert is 354 megawatts. Utility company Southern California Edison is erecting a 500-megawatt plant scheduled to open in 2009.

By 2014, solar thermal plants located in the Southwest could crank out nearly 3 gigawatts of power, estimated Travis Bradford of the Prometheus Institute for Sustainable Development, a nonprofit based in Cambridge, Mass. That’s enough for about 1 million homes.

Costs can then be reduced further by building the plants close to consumers. It costs about $1.5 million per mile for transmission lines, according to statistics from Acciona Solar Power, which owns solar thermal plants. Solar thermal plants work best in arid deserts that get little rainfall. Since some of the fastest-growing cities in the world are located in sun belts, that’s less of a problem than it used to be.

But getting to that point isn’t easy. Land-use hearings and permits can drag on for years while construction costs rise. The amount of land required can be an issue too: the 354-megawatt plant in California occupies 1,000 acres. Larger plants would need more land, while smaller plants result in higher costs per kilowatt hour.

Even if all of these factors could be completely optimized, solar thermal power plants would likely not produce electricity at a level that would compete with coal plants. Coal plants, however, will likely be hit with carbon taxes in the near future, which will make solar thermal more competitive. Still, at less than 10 cents a kilowatt, solar thermal would be competitive with electricity from gas-powered plants.

Utilities will also likely work hard to lower the costs of solar thermal in the coming decades, Morse added. Utilities are under mandates to increase their renewable energy sources. Citizen groups often complain about wind turbines and the wind doesn’t blow at a constant, predictable rate. Several companies are intent on tapping heat from under the surface of the earth to generate power. Geothermal power, however, works best only in certain locations.

“There is an enough flat, unproductive land in the U.S. to power the U.S.,” Morse said. “We just don’t have the wires to get there. Eisenhower built the national highway system. Some president will build the national grid.”

(Source: http://tech.msn.com)