Breakthrough in solar energy storage
Now there is another group out there, more of a fringe element perhaps, which is proposing the idea that you run your car on water. There is some interesting discourse and commentary on this in the green tech gazette. If you really want the hyperbola and sales pitch on this, check out ‘Run Your Car with Water’
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Germany Accelerates Cuts to Solar
June 6 (Bloomberg) — German legislators voted for steeper cuts to subsidized prices for electricity generated from solar panels and wind turbines, after almost a decade of state aid made its renewable-energy industry one of the world’s strongest.
Chancellor Angela Merkel’s coalition in the lower house of parliament in Berlin today approved trimming the fixed price paid to most solar generators by 10 percent and reduce aid for offshore wind power after 2015. Last year the guaranteed price paid for solar-produced electricity was reduced by 5 percent.
Europe’s largest power market is altering its renewable- energy law to spur the industry to control expenses and improve efficiency. Almost nine years of subsidized prices have spawned the world’s biggest market for photovoltaic panels and created the largest exporter of equipment for wind energy. Renewable- energy companies were pleased the reductions weren’t worse.
Cymbet Corporation – Company
Company Press Releases Avnet Electronics Marketing Adds Cymbet’s Eco-friendly Solid State Batteries to Americas Offering February 22, 2011
PHOENIX February 22, 2011 Avnet Electronics Marketing Americas, a business region of Avnet, Inc. (NYSE: AVT), announced today that it will carry the complete line of rechargeable solid state batteries and evaluation kits from Cymbet Corporation. This distribution agreement encompasses Cymbet’s entire line of EnerChip solid state batteries (SSB) and development tools, including the new EnerChip EP Energy Processor Universal Energy Harvesting EVAL-09 Kit and the EnerChip CC Solar Energy Harvesting EVAL-10 Kit. Cymbet’s energy-efficient products are available from Avnet Electronics Marketing Americas and online at www.AvnetExpress.com.
Cymbet’s EnerChips are used in power back-up, embedded energy and energy harvesting applications. EnerChip SSBs are used in many industries including industrial control, medical, consumer electronics, appliances, handheld devices, transportation, renewable energy and wireless sensors. Because EnerChip SSBs are packaged in standard dual-flat no-leads (DFN) or quad-flat no-leads (QFN) packages, the batteries use surface mount technology assembly and are reflow solder tolerant. The EnerChip CC is a rechargeable solid state battery co-packaged with integrated power management functions that provides a cost effective single chip drop-in solution.
Solar Panel and Solar Regulator / Controller Charging FAQS
Solar Panels – The Silent Power Plant Boat owners have few choices when it comes to charging batteries while away from mains power – generators, engine driven alternators, wind or tow generators and solar panels. In this article we investigate the practical use, advantages, disadvantages, and cost of using solar panels.
Solar panels convert sunlight directly into electricity with an efficiency of about 13%. The earth’s surface receives close to 1000 watts per square meter of energy from the sun. Solar panels can convert this 1000 watts into about 130 watts of electricity per square meter of solar panel surface. Since solar panels are usually mounted in a fixed position, the sun does not always strike it straight on and we can’t count on getting the full 130 watts all day. Early in the morning and late at night solar panels have a much reduced output with maximum output near noon. A good rule is you can get the equivalent of about 42% of maximum output per 12 hours of sunlight – less on cloudy days. So a one square meter solar panel should provide 0.42 x 12 hours x 130 watts = 655 watt-hours per day. Mismatches between optimum solar panel output voltage and actual battery voltage results in losses that further reduce the practical output of the solar panel to about 500 watt-hours per day per square meter of solar panel surface.
500 watts represents an actual achievable charging current of about 36 amps for one hour into a 13.8 volt battery or an average of 3 amps over 12 hours – not bad considering the typical usage of energy on a boat. This amount of power is more than enough to run a small 12 volt refrigerator, a few lights and a vhf radio. It won’t run your hair drier or air conditioning for very long so don’t look to solar energy if these toys are in daily use aboard your boat. Panels sizes range from 11 watts to over 100 watts, with the larger units most popular and the smaller units being useful only to keep your batteries topped off when you’re not using your boat.
Some Jamaicans Basking In Solar Energy
Some Jamaicans basking
in solar energy
BY KIMONE THOMPSON Sunday observer staff reporter thompsonk@jamaicaobserver.com
Sunday, January 20, 2008
WHILE most Jamaicans were ruing missed television programmes, the loss of unsaved computer data and wilting under uncomfortable heat on account of the recent islandwide blackout, there were a handful of persons who didn’t notice there was no electricity.
It was only when Michael Drakulich and Patricia Isaacs-Green, both of whom live in St Ann, and Kingstonians Dr Willard Pinnock and Paul Beswick saw that their neighbours’ houses were in darkness that they realised there was a power outage. And had they not installed alternative sources of power in their homes and business places years earlier, they would’ve been in darkness too.
Dr Willard Pinnock show off his photovolatic equipment at his home in Mona.
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Renewable Companies See Advantages in Auto
By Jennifer Kho
In Michigan, a 320-acre Ford Motor Co. plant sits idle after 52 years of assembling Lincoln Continentals, Ford Thunderbirds and other vehicles. It’s one of a series of U.S. assemblies that have closed or shrunk, with more than 435,000 automotive-manufacturing jobs disappearing since the beginning of the decade, according to a Congressional Research Service report released in August.
But behind some of the buildings’ walls, a group of renewable-energy companies are working to transform the defunct assembly into a manufacturing park for equipment such as thin-film solar panels and energy-storage and power-management systems for solar- and wind-power systems. Xtreme Power, which makes the energy-storage and power-management systems, and Clairvoyant Energy, which develops thin-film solar production capacity using equipment from Oerlikon Solar, have agreed to buy the space from Ford — with the help of about $100 million in tax credits and funding from other government sources.
Single News Item – News
15 March 2011 Energy Statistics should include the estimation of the solar thermal energy produced and, with this objective in mind, the International Energy Agency Solar Heating and Cooling Programme (IEA-SHC) and major solar thermal industry associations agreed on a common calculation method to estimate the annual solar collector energy output in kWh. With this method it will be simpler to estimate the impressive amount of energy produced by solar thermal systems worldwide and compare it with other (renewable) energy sources.
With an installed capacity above 190 GWth worldwide, solar thermal systems are one of the major sources of renewable energy and still show a significant growth potential. A first milestone was achieved in 2004, when international solar thermal experts agreed on a methodology to convert installed collector area (in m ) into solar thermal capacity (kWth).
Students harness solar power to race model cars
Students harness solar power to race model cars 10:00 PM PDT on Monday, May 7, 2007 By JUAN SAUCEDO
The Press-Enterprise
It took a series of orientation sessions for students from the Youth Opportunity Center in Jurupa to learn how to harness the power of the sun.
Last month, more than 50 students learned about solar energy and how photovoltaic light panels can power a car.
Independent Power Systems – Colorado and Montana Solar
Welcome to Independent Power Systems
With more than a decade of experience and hundreds of successful commercial and residential installations, Independent Power Systems (IPS) is your solar electric contractor of choice in Boulder, Colorado and Bozeman, Montana.
Why should I go solar with IPS?
- More than 10 years in Business
- National Board of Energy Practitioners (NABCEP) Certified
- Colorado Solar Energy Industries Association (COSEIA) Certified
- Colorado licensed Professional Engineer
- Colorado licensed Master Electrician
- Colorado Electrical Contractor # 6773
- In-house turnkey solutions
Going Solar is Easy – Let IPS show you how
The decision to go solar is easy, and with IPS so is the rest of the process. From the initial solar assessment to alerting you that XCEL is ready to turn on your net meter, IPS guides you through the process, making what can be complex decisions easy. IPS specialists work with permitting departments throughout Colorado and know just who to call in handling all the needed permitting for your project. XCEL Energy liason manages the entire XCEL Energy Solar Rewards rebate program from application to fulfillment. Our project manager keeps you informed every step of the way, from the day the installation team arrives through scheduling needed inspections.
Easy Money – The XCEL Rebate and the Federal Investment Tax Credit
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Cheaper Materials Could Be Key To Low
ScienceDaily (Feb. 19, 2009) — Unconventional solar cell materials that are as abundant but much less costly than silicon and other semiconductors in use today could substantially reduce the cost of solar photovoltaics, according to a new study from the Energy and Resources Group and the Department of Chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley, and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL).
These materials, some of which are highly abundant, could expand the potential for solar cells to become a globally significant source of low-carbon energy, the study authors said.
The analysis, which appeared online Feb. 13 in Environmental Science & Technology, examines the two most pressing challenges to large-scale deployment of solar photovoltaics as the world moves toward a carbon neutral future: cost per kilowatt hour and total resource abundance. The UC Berkeley study evaluated 23 promising semiconducting materials and discovered that 12 are abundant enough to meet or exceed annual worldwide energy demand. Of those 12, nine have a significant raw material cost reduction over traditional crystalline silicon, the most widely used photovoltaic material in mass production today.