Alternative Energy / Solar Energy

• Darwinian Downsizing in the Solar Industry

  The solar industry is suffering some 19th century Darwinian style competition, with Chinese manufacturers Suntech (STP) and Yingli Green Energy Holding (YGE) clearly dumping panels in the US and Europe below cost to gain market share. You may laugh, but I watched the Japanese pursue the same strategy in the seventies and eighties with a vast array of products, from cars to memory chips, to devastating success. They now control half the US automobile market, and the most profitable half at that. As a solar consumer I shouldn't care, as the 50% price drop has, with Obama's generous tax subsidies,…

• Solar Power from the Sahara

  Europe intends to import its first solar generated electricity from North Africa within the next five years, European Energy Commissioner Günther Oettinger said in an interview last month. The European Union is backing projects to turn the plentiful sunlight in the Sahara desert into electricity for Europe, a scheme it hopes will help meet its target of deriving 20% of its energy from renewable sources by 2020. The Sahara is the world's largest hot desert. At over 3,600,000 square miles), it covers most of Northern Africa, making it almost as large as Europe or the United States. The desert stretches…

• Solar Energy Still Has a Long Way to Go

  Journalists from the mainstream media have been credulous cheerleaders for the wind and solar industries -- and for the faux environmental movement in general. Rod Adams takes the New York Times to task for a typical example of atrocious journalism on solar energy. ...a normally credible news source, the New York Times, apparently did not bother to more fully investigate the credibility of the "study" to find out that it is just a paper that was commissioned by an organization that is dedicated to a well publicized agenda. On July 26, 2010, on the front page of the New York…

• Captured CO2 to be Used as a New Fuel Source Using Solar Power

  George Washington University’s Dr. Stuart Licht and colleagues have published the first experimental evidence of their new solar thermal electrochemical photovoltaic (STEP) process, which combines electrical and chemical pathways to convert CO2 to carbon or to carbon monoxide for subsequent use in synthesizing a range of industrially relevant products including hydrocarbon fuels. According to the research team the STEP process is fundamentally capable of converting more solar energy than either photovoltaic or solar thermal processes working alone.The STEP process uses a high temperature solar powered electrolysis cell to capture CO2 in a single step. Solar thermal energy decreases the energy…

• Solar Powered Plane completes Night Flight

  This week’s record-breaking night flight by the Solar Impulse aircraft has been widely acclaimed, but few of us are ever likely to fly in such a plane. Swiss adventurer Bertrand Piccard, the initiator of the project, pilot André Borschberg, and the host of designers and developers who made the flight possible may have entered the history books, but what does their achievement mean in practical terms? “I hope that in two years time at the next Green Aviation Show we shall be able to give a prize to the hero of the day, Bertrand Piccard,” Gerard Feldzer, director of the…

• Obama Announces $2 Billion More in Stimulus Aid for Solar Power

  President Barack Obama announced nearly $2 billion in government loan guarantees for two solar projects, placing bets on both solar thermal and photovoltaic technologies. The two projects will directly create 5,000 jobs, the president said in his weekly radio address, though many of those will be temporary construction jobs. The guarantees are funded by last year’s economic stimulus package and represent the 12th and 13th such guarantees provided by the Department of Energy, bringing the total DOE loans for clean energy to $14.8 billion, supporting a total expenditure of $22.4 billion in new projects. The new awards consist of $1.45…

• Solar’s Time in the Sun is Nigh, Say Financiers

  The focus of growth in renewables is likely to flip from wind to solar, as the falling price of the technology and equipment make it more competitive with other renewables, experts said. In the next five years, the renewable energy sector will be defined by tremendous growth in photovoltaic and thermal solar projects, financing experts told attendees of Argyle Executive Forum’s 2010 Deal Making in the Energy Sector conference in New York last week. “Solar is going to be huge in the future,” said Geoff Broglio, vice president of Hudson Clean Energy Partners in Teaneck, New Jersey. “It’s growing tremendously…

• Solar Energy May Soon Get Much Cheaper

  Scientists from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) have developed a new solar cell that they hope will cost a tiny fraction of current production. The new cells consist of tiny silicon wires that measure a mere 1-micron in diameter. These wires are embedded lengthwise and perpendicular into plastic plates where they convert light into electricity at an exceptional rate of efficiency. Any light that is leftover bounces around inside the wire matrix until it finds another wire that can absorb it, thus nearly all the light is captured and converted into electricity. Professor Harry Atwater at his namesake research…

• ADB Launches $9 Billion Plan for Solar Energy in Asia

  The Asian Development Bank launched a $9 billion solar power initiative to develop projects generating 3,000 megawatts by 2012. The announcement, which came at the regional lending agency’s annual meeting in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, said that Central Asian countries would be prime candidates for siting the projects. “Given Central Asia’s growing demand for electricity, the availability of desert land for large- scale solar energy development, and their stated commitment to offset high carbon emissions, several countries in the region are excellent candidates for ADB support through this initiative,” ADB managing director general Rajat Nag said. The development bank will provide $2.25…

• Indian Solar Investment Signals Greater World Bank Support for Renewable Energy

  The first commercial utility solar project in India received a $10 million investment from a World Bank affiliate as the international lending agency steps up its support of renewable energy in emerging economies. The World Bank Group has pledged to increase its investments in alternative energies by more than 20% a year. In fiscal 2009, the group boosted support by 24% to $3.3 billion. The investment in India’s Azure Power Private solar project came from the International Finance Corp., the private sector arm of the World Bank Group. It marked IFC’s first investment in solar power and its first clean…