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Posts Tagged ‘Solar Power’

For Solar, A Ray of Sunshine

The solar electrical power industry may be ready for its moment in the sun.

It’s still true that solar sources generate less than 1% of total U.S. electricity vs. the 70% generated from industrial-age fuels such as coal, petroleum and natural gas.

But energy price spikes in 2001, 2005 and 2008 spurred states and the federal government to explore alternatives to fossil fuels. Solar stocks soared alongside rising oil prices in 2008.

Solar panels at a power station in the northwest China city of Shizuishan. The country is pushing solar power projects, making up for Europe. AP View Enlarged Image

But solar has a fickle history of rising, then disappearing from view — often for what seems decades. This time is different, some industry watchers contend.

“In the 1970s and 1980s, there was a technology issue,” said Mike Taylor, director of research with the Solar Energy Power Association. “(Photovoltaic) solar wasn’t ready for prime time commercialization.”

Government-led energy initiatives in Japan through the 1990s fostered development of solar technologies and manufacturing. Spain and Germany picked up the baton, installing large-scale solar facilities over the past several years.

Now the industry appears set for another leap. The bulk of that is occurring in China, a country moving aggressively onto the solar-energy stage.

The U.S. also is creeping forward, as federal and state incentives lure utilities and larger commercial entities onto the scene.

Dow Unveils Solar Power Shingles

Dow Chemical has unveiled a residential roof shingle in the form of a solar panel designed to be integrated into asphalt-tiled roofs.

Jane Palmieri, managing director of Dow’s Solar Solutions unit, said the Powerhouse thin-film shingle slashes installation costs because it can be installed by a roofer who is already building or retrofitting a roof.

“As a roofer is nailing asphalt shingle on roof, wherever the array needs to be installed he just switches to solar shingle,” said Ms. Palmieri, who said the solar singles are similarly attached to the roof with nails.

“You don’t have to have a solar installation crew do the work or have an electrician on site,” she added. “The solar shingle can be handled like any other shingle – it can be palletized, dropped from a roof, walked on.”

An electrician is still needed to connect the completed array to an inverter and to a home’s electrical system, but unlike conventional solar panels that must be wired together, the solar shingles plug into each other to form the array.

Dow plans to begin test-marketing the solar shingle in mid-2010, initially targeting new-home construction. Ms. Palmieri said the market could be worth $5 billion by 2015 and noted that 90 percent of homes in the United States use asphalt shingles.

Ms. Palmieri said a solar shingle array is 10 percent to 15 percent cheaper than a standard rack-mounted solar panel system and about 40 percent less expensive than competing building-integrated photovoltaic products.

“Our objective is to prove that this can be a mainstream adopted product,” she said.

New Battery Could Change World

In a modest building on the west side of Salt Lake City, a team of specialists in advanced materials and electrochemistry has produced what could be the single most important breakthrough for clean, alternative energy since Socrates first noted solar heating 2,400 years ago.

The prize is the culmination of 10 years of research and testing — a new generation of deep-storage battery that’s small enough, and safe enough, to sit in your basement and power your home.

It promises to nudge the world to a paradigm shift as big as the switch from centralized mainframe computers in the 1980s to personal laptops. But this time the mainframe is America’s antiquated electrical grid; and the switch is to personal power stations in millions of individual homes.

Former energy secretary Bill Richardson once disparaged the U.S. electrical grid as “third world,” and he was painfully close to the mark. It’s an inefficient, aging relic of a century-old approach to energy and a weak link in national security in an age of terrorism.

Taking a load off the grid through electricity production and storage at home would extend the life of the system and avoid the expenditure of tens, or even hundreds, of billions to make it “smart.”

Solar energy has been around, of course, but it’s been prohibitively expensive. Now the cost is tumbling, driven by new thin-film chemistry and manufacturing techniques. Leaders in the field include companies like Arizona-based First Solar, which can paint solar cells onto glass; and Konarka, an upstart that purchased a defunct Polaroid film factory in New Bedford, Mass., and now plans to print cells onto rolls of flexible plastic.

The convergence of these two key technologies — solar power and deep-storage batteries — has profound implications for oil-strapped America.

“These batteries switch the whole dialogue to renewables,” said Daniel Nocera, a noted chemist and professor of energy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who sits on Ceramatec’s science advisory board. “They will turn us away from dumb technology, circa 1900 — a 110-year-old approach — and turn us forward.”

Let’s Get Real About Alternative Energy

(CNN) — We need to introduce simple arithmetic into our discussions of energy.

We need to understand how much energy our chosen lifestyles consume, we need to decide where we want that energy to come from, and we need to get on with building energy systems of sufficient size to match our desired consumption.

Our failure to talk straight about the numbers is allowing people to persist in wishful thinking, inspired by inane sayings such as “every little bit helps.”

Assuming we are serious about getting off fossil fuels, the scale of building required should not be underestimated. Small actions alone will not deliver a solution.

Let’s express energy consumption and energy production using simple personal units, namely kilowatt-hours. One kilowatt-hour (kWh) is the energy used by leaving a 40-watt bulb on for 24 hours. The chemical energy in the food we eat to stay alive amounts to about 3 kWh per day. Taking one hot bath uses about 5 kWh of heat. Driving an average European car 100 kilometers (roughly 62 miles) uses 80 kWh of fuel. With a few of these numbers in mind, we can start to evaluate some of the recommendations that people make about energy.

Take, for example, the idea that one of the top 10 things you should do to make a difference to your energy consumption is to unplug your cell-phone charger when you are not using it. The truth is that leaving a phone charger plugged in uses about 0.01 kWh per day, 1/100th of the power consumed by a lightbulb.

This means that switching the phone charger off for a whole day saves the same energy as is used in driving an average car for one second. Switching off phone chargers is like bailing the Titanic with a teaspoon. I’m not saying you shouldn’t unplug it, but please realize, when you do so, what a tiny fraction it is of your total energy footprint.

In total, the European lifestyle uses 125 kWh per day per person for transport, heating, manufacturing, and electricity. That’s equivalent to every person having 125 light bulbs switched on all the time. The average American uses 250 kWh per day: 250 light bulbs.

Most of this energy today comes from fossil fuels. What are our post-fossil-fuel options?

Among the energy-saving options, two promising technology switches are the electrification of transportation (electric vehicles can be about four times as energy-efficient as standard fossil-fuel vehicles) and the use of electric-powered heat pumps to deliver winter heating and hot water (heat pumps can be four times as energy-efficient as standard heaters).

Among all the energy-supply technologies, the three with the biggest potential today are solar power, wind power and nuclear power.

It’s not going to be easy to make a energy plan that adds up, but it is possible. We need to get building.

BrightSource and PG&E Ink Largest Solar Energy Deal

photo: BrightSource Energy

California utility PG&E on Wednesday expanded an agreement with BrightSource Energy to buy 1,310 megawatts of carbon-free electricity to be generated by seven giant solar power plant projects – the world’s biggest solar deal to date. Coming on top of a 1,300 megawatt agreement with Southern California Edison in February, the Google-backed, Oakland, Calif.-based  startup says it now holds more than 40% of the Big Solar contracts in the United States.

While BrightSource’s technology is untested on a large scale, the company has built a six-megawatt demonstration plant in Israel, where its technology development arm is headquartered. BrightSource deploys arrays of mirrors called heliostats that concentrate sunlight on a water-filled boiler that sits atop a tower. The intense heat vaporizes the water to create high-pressure steam that drives a standard electricity-generating turbine.

Woolard says an independent engineering firm, R.W. Beck, has validated the technology at the Negev Desert demo plant. That no doubt helped persuade PG&E, which has sent executives to Israel to inspect the project, to supersize its contract.

“What it came down to is that they saw us delivering,” Woolard says. “Our plant in Israel performed above expectations. The fact that we have a solar plant producing the highest quality, highest temperature, highest pressure steam anywhere in the world is the most important thing.”

IBEW Sees Future in Alternative Energy Jobs

MINNEAPOLIS - Darryl Thayer, a member of International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 292 in Minneapolis, hardly received a visionary’s welcome when he addressed the Minnesota legislature in 1968 about the need to develop solar energy and wean the state from fossil fuel-based sources. Worse yet, says Thayer, many of his fellow workers “thought I was nuts.” How climates have changed.

Forty-one years later, the legislature has a green energy task force. And Thayer, a 53-year member who teaches solar classes at Local 292’s apprenticeship training center is a hero to folks like Ray Zeran, one of 600 unemployed members who are looking to benefit from billions of dollars of state funds and federal stimulus money focused on renewable energy projects.

While Minnesota may appear to be an improbable generator of sun power, Nimlos says that the 45th parallel is primed for harnessing solar energy. Residing on a latitude similar to Germany’s, where solar power is well-developed, Minnesota’s lower temperatures keep panels operating at maximum efficiency. And the state’s clear skies make it competitive with Jacksonville, Fla., San Francisco and Houston.

IBEW participates in the U.S. Department of Energy’s Solar America Cities project which targets 25 metropolitan areas for sun power development. Thayer— who earned a B.A. in physics over 13 years working as a journeyman electrician and has nearly completed his master’s in engineering—has written a curriculum for the project. Fully half of all Minnesota solar installers who have achieved National Association of Certified Energy Practitioners qualifications are Local 292 members.

Minneapolis Local 292′s JATC has a waiting list for members to train in solar installation. Veteran member Darryl Thayer, kneeling, instructs Bradley Kanis, left, Claude Clavette. Instructor Kelley Benyo stands at right. A large solar panel is mounted outside the training center (below). Photos courtesy of The Electrical Worker

Wind power has been expanding rapidly in the southwest quadrant of Minnesota. Local 343, in the southeast, is aiming to be the labor supply of choice on wind projects. The local is completing a 60-foot climbing tower for practicing high-voltage safety, climbing and rescue procedures on turbines in conjunction with an NJATC wind power curriculum. Toft, who sets a priority on making IBEW-organized contractors more competitive in wind projects, expects to see 1,700 towers erected over the next few years.

The IBEW Minnesota State Council’s efforts to promote new training and encourage grassroots political activism to set high standards for renewable energy workers are returning results that could reach far into the future.

IBEW is supporting state legislation to include more money to cover the labor costs of relocating existing power lines to make way for new highway and rail projects that will be financed by the federal stimulus. The local is gearing up to provide labor from new needs. A state bill supported by environmentalists provides that one-half of all new parking facilities include outlets to charge electric vehicles.

In a state that mandates the licensing of electricians, IBEW is challenging the perception that solar and wind energy require entirely new careers. Local 292 Business Representative Dan McConnell meets with community college educators who are setting up renewable energy training. “I ask them what will happen to students who are only trained in renewable energy installations if the bubble bursts in any specific sector,” says McConnell.

McConnell proposes to educators and legislators that the demand for solar workers be filled by journeymen and apprentice electricians who receive supplementary training in how to properly design and angle panels and calculate their efficiency. “Solar panels are live when they come out of the box,” says McConnell. Safety should not be taken for granted. And better-trained workers, he says, “are far more recession-proof than workers trained exclusively on renewable installations.”

Solar Plug In Stations are in Chicago

Future Now: Solar Plug-in Stations