Alternative Energy / Solar Energy

• Solar Energy Facing Tough Love in Europe

  Across the European Union, solar energy is facing tough love conditions as its feed-in-tariffs (FiT) face déjà vu in another round of reduction. Like in the classic Tale of Two Cities, the world of solar energy today seems filled with the excitement of seeing its revolutionary potential realized by rapid growth, while fearful that falling prices, changing feed in tariff subsidies and looming government deficits will overwhelm it first. There is no denying solar energy’s promise and potential.  Its rapid growth is a worldwide phenomenon.  Lately I have been catching up on the news reports and changing solar situation in…

• Could Solar Energy Help Mend Israel’s Relationship with the Palestinians

  There’s been little cause for optimism lately with Israeli-Palestinian negotiations. Yet from a small patch of desert this past month may have bubbled a ray of hope. A ray of sun that is. On June 5, a day that ironically marked both the anniversary of Six-Day War as well as World Environment Day, Israeli company Arava Power cut the ribbon on Israel’s first commercial solar field at Kibbutz Ketura in the southern Negev desert. Amid dozens of rows of 15 foot-high solar panels, the inauguration of the five-megawatt solar field was celebrated in front of government ministers, press and international…

• Uzbekistan's Untapped Solar Energy Riches

  The 17th century English philosopher, Francis Bacon, once observed that, "knowledge is power." So, here’s some power knowledge that the West has overlooked, but may well contain critical information for jumpstarting Western interest in solar power.  It’s based upon more than five decade’s worth of solar research by the sole 20th century competitor to the U.S. for global influence, the USSR. In 1965 the Uzbek Academy of Sciences began publishing the “Geliotekhnika” ("Applied Solar Energy") quarterly journal the former Soviet Union's sole scientific publication devoted to solar power. Topics covered ranged from solar radiation, photovoltaics and solar materials to direct conversion…

• New Solar Cells Can Now be Printed on Paper

  It’s not a joke, MIT’s Miles C. Barr, Jill A. Rowehl, Richard R. Lunt, Jingjing Xu, Annie Wang, Christopher M. Boyce, Sung Gap Im, and Vladimir Bulovi? led by Karen K. Gleason are printing photovoltaic cells on regular paper.  Moreover, the process as being reported in MIT News, its possible to print on ordinary untreated paper, cloth or plastic as the substrate for building a solar cell array. The new technology paper is published in the journal Advanced Materials, published online July 8. The MIT News article opens describing that the sheet of paper looks like any other document that…

• The Optimal Solar Solution: Stratosphere Solar Collection

  Very high altitude offers major solar advantages.  The stratosphere begins at 5 to 30 miles up, depending on where you look and the conditions at the moment.  The stratosphere is has about 3 times the solar radiation intensity than most ground level locations as much of the air absorption is avoided. That’s a pretty good motivator to examine the possible ways to get up there.  Getting up there is also far cheaper than going into full orbit.  Then the surface area involved is vastly diminished.  Best of all the connection between the collector and the surface can be hard wired. …

• The Largest Solar Rooftop Project in the World: Total Cost $2.6 Billion

  Bank of America Merrill Lynch, Prologis, and NRG Energy team up for the largest rooftop distributed solar project in the world. Rooftop solar energy is great for the home, but businesses are beginning to realize the potential of tapping into urban roof space for utilities-scale electricity generation.  Through a distributed approach—which links together several small-scale solar modules to essentially create a vastly dispersed solar farm—rooftop space can be taken advantage of for solar installation rather than building atop hundreds of acres of land.  That’s exactly the approach being taken by Bank of America Merrill Lynch, Prologis, and NRG Energy, who…

• Google's $280 Million Investment in Solar Loans

  Google has invested $280 million to set up a residential solar fund with installer SolarCity, which leases systems to households that want to avoid the upfront costs of buying and installing their own solar panels. This comes as the president of Suntech’s America business announced that the Chinese solar panel manufacturer is working on “four or five” financing initiatives, including a residential solar financing programme to be launched in the next quarter. At a conference in San Francisco, Steven Chan said that Suntech will also offer financing for commercial businesses and utilities, after already launching solar loans for the construction…

• Why Japan Will Turn to Solar Energy Following Fukushima

  As the dire news continues to leach out of Fukishima, the silver lining in its nuclear cloud is that renewable energy technologies, despite their daunting start-up costs, are receiving renewed scrutiny. Make no mistake - given the trillions of dollars invested over the last five decades in nuclear energy, the industry and its lobbyists will not go down without a fight, promoting new, “safe” reactor designs, etc. etc. etc. But the Fukushima debacle has finally bared the industry’s darkest secret, it inability to manage its nuclear waste. The six reactor TEPCO Daichi Fukushima stored all its waste onsite, and the…

• Solar Power in Space: Power Satellites

  Power satellites are an idea that has been around since the late 1960s but not developed commercially because we don't know how to build an inexpensive space transport system.  That may have changed recently, at least in theory. We have known for decades that solar power satellites can send energy to the earth.  Communication satellites do it every day, just not at levels useful for power.  Power satellites scale to humanity's need; a calculation by G. Harry Stein back in the 1980s noted that there was room for 177 TW in geosynchronous orbit (more than ten times current energy use).…

• North Africa’s Solar Energy Desert Plan Comes Under Fire

  A plan to turn the desert sunshine of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) into electricity, both for the region and for export to Europe, has been criticized for ignoring the needs of local people and the science community. Critics say that the Desertec Industrial Initiative's (Dii) centralized, top-down approach means that electrification may not benefit the desert people and may stifle capacity-building in the region's science community. They were speaking on the sidelines of the Solar Energy for Science Symposium in Germany this week (19–20 May), held to push the project forward and explore the potential for scientific…