Solar information.
I would like to be a part of the solar and wind growth in this country. According to the US wind maps, my local area doesn't have enough potential for sustained growth. We have lots of cloudy days especially during the winter, sometimes weeks at a time. I would start a business in this area if it could be viable. Put people to work and cut our dependence on oil. Does anyone have any information about the company in Ca. that is printing solar cells on lighweight aluminum sheets and does it work?
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Tom Zellars on -
Don,
I know of a solar company in Ca. called Nanosolar. They print microscopic solar collecting particles onto a high-conducting metal substrate. The company claims that their solar film is 5-10% more efficient than competitors' products. I can't be sure if this is true or not, as I haven't seen any lab tests done on them, but I think it could lead to solar roofing tiles if the technology is cheap and efficient enough. Here's their website: www.nanosolar.com.
-Tom Zellars
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Permalink Reply by Don Clayton on -
Thanks for the info. Don't know if it is the same company I heard of but I'll check it out.
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Permalink Reply by Tom Zellars on
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One more thing, have you considered biofuel production? I looked at your page and I discovered you used to be in agriculture. Why not use agricultural waste to produce cellulosic ethanol? Cellulosic biofuel can be produced from a variety of non-feedstock plants and certain types of organic waste (wood clippings for example). Another idea is Methanol. Methanol can be produced from municipal waste. Methanol is slightly more corrosive than ethanol, so it would require cars to upgrade their parts to accommodate it, but it's very practical to produce.
Tom Zellars
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Permalink Reply by Wind4me.com on -
I spoke to somebody familiar with Nanosolar and they called it a ''''Game Changer'''' in cost and efficiency
Skibare
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Permalink Reply by Bruce Eric Montgomery on -
Two Large Solar Plants Planned in California
By MATTHEW L. WALD
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/15/business/15solar.html
Two California companies said Thursday that they would each build solar power plants that were 10 times bigger than the largest now in service, creating the first true utility-scale use of a technology now mostly confined to rooftop supplements to conventional power supplies.
The solar power will be sold to Pacific Gas and Electric, which is under a state mandate to get 20 percent of its electricity from renewable sources by 2010. The utility said that it expected the plants, both using photovoltaic technology, which turns sunlight directly into electricity, would be competitive with other renewable sources, including wind and solar thermal, which uses the sun’s heat to boil water.
Solar power is more costly than wind, watt for watt, experts say, but delivers the energy at a time of day when electricity prices are higher and is more valuable even if it is more costly.
OptiSolar, a company that has just begun to make thin-film solar panels — with a layer of semiconductor material thinner than a human hair on the back of a glass panel — will install 550 megawatts in San Luis Obispo County, in central California. And the SunPower Corporation, which uses crystalline cells, will build 250 megawatts in the same county. The OptiSolar plant will cover about nine square miles and the SunPower plant about 3.5, although the actual cell area will be smaller.
They will total 800 megawatts. A megawatt is enough power to run a large Wal-Mart. At peak hours, together the plants will produce as much power as a large coal plant or a small nuclear reactor. But they will run far fewer hours of the year so output will be at least a third less than that of a coal plant of the same size.
The scale of the California announcement makes it “pretty significant,” said Robert J. Thormeyer, a spokesman for the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners, whose members sit on the state public utility commissions.
But such developments are only possible in states that have ambitious quotas for renewable power and have good sun, he said. “It’s hard to say if it’s something we’ll see replicated in other states,” he said. But “it opens up a door.”
The chairman of SunPower, Thomas H. Werner, said the 250 megawatts that his company would build was as much solar photovoltaic capacity as was installed worldwide last year.
At OptiSolar, the chief executive, Randy Goldstein, said, “There is really no point in doing this on small scale.”
“If you’re going to make a difference, you’ve got to do it big,” Mr. Goldstein said in a telephone interview.
The largest current installation in the United States is at Nellis Air Force Base, in Nevada, with 14 megawatts, also built by SunPower. Spain has one completed plant at 23 megawatts. A German company, Juwi, has a 40-megawatt installation east of Leipzig. Florida Power and Light recently ordered a 25-megawatt plant.
Solar energy, both photovoltaic and thermal, which uses the sun’s heat to make steam, is bounding ahead, driven mostly by state quotas. California requires that 20 percent of the kilowatt-hours sold by investor-owned utilities come from renewable sources by 2010, a goal that some companies are struggling to meet. Pacific Gas and Electric expects that when these two solar plants are completed, its total will rise to 24 percent, but that will not be until 2013.
Both plants would require a variety of permits.
The planned California installations raise questions about the idea that solar power is best deployed on the roofs of houses and businesses. Although they can help avoid transmission expenses when built near load, the companies said that by building on a gargantuan scale, they expected to achieve economies of scale in the cost of design, installation and connection to the grid, as well as marketing and overhead. A typical home installation is several thousandths of a megawatt, while these are in the hundreds of megawatts.
The prices are not clear. The companies said their contracts did not allow them to talk about the price, and a spokeswoman for Pacific Gas and Electric said her company was trying to obtain the best possible deal for its ratepayers by not disclosing the contracts and not telling other suppliers of renewable energy what it was willing to pay.
According to the California Energy Commission, last year the price of power from a solar photovoltaic installation was 70.5 cents a kilowatt-hour, roughly six times the national average retail rate for residential power. But both OptiSolar and SunPower said their costs were much lower.
SunPower’s panels are mounted at a 20-degree angle, facing south, and pivot over the course of the day, so they face the sun. OptiSolar’s panels are installed at a fixed angle. They are larger and less efficient, but much less costly, so that the cost per watt of energy is similar, company executives said.
Both are good at producing power at the time of day when prices tend to be high, in the afternoon.
Neither approaches the economy of fossil-fuel burning plants, said Jennifer Zerwer, a spokeswoman for Pacific Gas and Electric. But they are competitive with wind power and with power from solar thermal plants.
And prices will eventually fall, she said.
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Permalink Reply by Andrew M D Streit on -
Nano Solar is backed by Google. While the technology is newish, it is the manufacturing process that is effecient not the panels, by reducing production cost they hope to pull down prices. The efficiencies of the panels is still 13% as opposed to 22% by Sunpower or Sanyo. Also Unisolar already produces a flexible panel, or PV laminate. We really need a panel that can improve output to the 35% range and decrease the square footage needed to produce meaningful energy amounts.
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Permalink Reply by Lou De Frog on -
PV is energy intensive to produce. You get the energy used in production back in thirty years. A printed system that is 10% more efficient will require 10% less coverage to get the same effect and production costs will come down significantly
The one system that will work anywhere is the production of methane from human sewage to run an internal combustion engine to drive an electric generator. It is really an efficient way to dispose of sewage. If toxins can be kept out of the drains it will also yield high quality pathogen free fertilizer. If those plumbing vents to the sky are plugged up the methane now escaping and adding to greenhouse gas, will be put to good use. Methane is 22 X worse than CO2 as a greenhouse gas.
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