Amazon Green

Friday 26 August 2011

Solar power's appeal keeps heating up (Staci Matlock | The New Mexican) Thursday, August 25, 2011

A 5-kilowatt solar photovoltaic system installed on the Baker house in Santa Fe in 2008 powers all the family's electrical needs and an electric vehicle, plus it brings in a check for about $100 a month from Public Service Company of New Mexico.

"Maintenance-free since day one, and a really great investment both financially and environmentally," wrote Dan Baker in an email. "Working the numbers, my return on investment over the first 10 years will be about 4.5 percent, and a lot safer than the stock market."

New Mexico has long been home to solar power aficionados such as Baker. Some of them have been designing and tinkering with solar photovoltaic and thermal systems for years. Solar makes sense in a state that ranks second in the nation behind Arizona for solar power production potential.

Tax incentives, concern about climate change and the steep fluctuations in fuel prices are encouraging a growing number of people to follow in the Baker family's footsteps.

The Solar Fiesta this weekend in Albuquerque will be a gathering of solar experts to demonstrate systems, talk tax credits and educate people about the benefits of solar. A solar cook-off and a talk on converting cars to run on electricity are among dozens of presentations at the fiesta, Saturday through Sunday at Albuquerque Academy.

State and federal tax credits allow people to take 40 percent off the cost of installing solar PV or thermal systems up to a capped amount. More than 1,000 people applied for the state tax credit in 2010. That was an 86 percent growth in applications from the prior year, according to Jane Tabor, clean-energy administrator for the New Mexico Energy Minerals and Natural Resources Department. The state has received a couple of hundred applications already for this year. "Saving money on your utility bills is one of the only ways a homeowner can cut costs," Tabor said.

Investors also seem convinced solar is a good place to put their money. More than $20 million in private investment capital has been invested in solar projects since the tax-credit program was approved in 2007, said Louise Martinez, a bureau chief with the department.

Martinez said a manufacturer's tax credit also has encouraged solar manufacturing companies such as Schott Solar to open up in New Mexico.

Under state law, Public Service Company of New Mexico and other utilities reward customers with home solar and wind energy systems in two ways. The company pays 8 cents a kilowatt for 12 years as a renewable-energy credit, because those systems help the company meet state-mandated renewable-energy requirements. The company also does net metering, only charging a customer for power if they use more than their home power system produces.

Currently, 187 homes and businesses served by PNM have installed a total of 11.9 megawatts of solar photovoltaics, and there are 522 applications in process, according to PNM spokeswoman Susan Sponar. She said there's been a steady increase in applications each year.

The company also has 22 megawatts of utility-scale solar photovoltaic production.

The barrier for many people is the upfront cost to install.

New Mexico, along with two dozen other states, has approved a program that allows people to obtain funding to install solar systems with no upfront investment and pay the loan back through property taxes. The program is known as Property Assessment Clean Energy bond financing. Santa Fe County was selected by the New Mexico Association of Counties to develop a model ordinance to set up the PACE program. Homeowners can opt into the program, which would allow them to apply for special funds through the county, install the solar systems and then repay the lending agency through a special assessment on property taxes.

But the Federal Housing Finance Authority had problems with the PACE program. The authority ordered mortgage-underwriting giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac not to give mortgages on properties that had PACE assessments. The mandate effectively has put all PACE programs, such as the one proposed in Santa Fe County, on hold.

A bipartisan bill introduced in Congress on July 20 is the second attempt to address the authority's concerns so the lending programs can move forward.

For more information on the Solar Fiesta, visit www.nmsea.org.

Contact Staci Matlock at 986-3055 or smatlock@sfnewmexican.com

(Source: http://www.santafenewmexican.com/SantaFeNorthernNM/Solar-power-s-appeal-keeps-heating-up)

Sunday 21 August 2011

Tiny Gold Particles Boost Organic Solar Cell Efficiency: Plasmonic Technique Helps Enhance Power Conversion by Up to 20 Percent

In the world of solar energy, organic photovoltaic solar cells have a wide range of potential applications, but they are still considered an upstart. While these carbon-based cells, which use organic polymers or small molecules as semiconductors, are much thinner and less expensive to produce than conventional solar cells made with inorganic silicon wafers, they still lag behind in their ability to efficiently convert sunlight into electricity.
Now, UCLA researchers and their colleagues from China and Japan have shown that by incorporating gold nanoparticles into these organic photovoltaics -- taking advantage of the plasmonic effect, by which metal helps to enhance the absorption of sunlight -- they can significantly improve the cells' power conversion.
In a paper recently published in ACS Nano, the team of researchers, led by Yang Yang, a professor of materials science and engineering at the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science and director of the Nano Renewable Energy Center at UCLA's California NanoSystems Institute, demonstrate how they sandwiched a layer of gold nanoparticles between two light-absorbing subcells in a tandem polymer solar cell in order to harvest a greater fraction of the solar spectrum.
They found that by employing the interconnecting gold-nanoparticle layer, they were able to enhance power conversion by as much as 20 percent. The gold nanoparticles create a strong electromagnetic field inside the thin organic photovoltaic layers by a plasmonic effect, which concentrates light so that much more of it can be absorbed by the subcells.
The team is the first to report a plasmonic-enhanced polymer tandem solar cell, having overcome the difficulties involved in incorporating metal nanostructures into the overall device structure.
"We have successfully demonstrated a highly efficient plasmonic polymer tandem solar cell by simply incorporating gold nanoparticles layer between two subcells," Yang said. "The plasmonic effect happening in the middle of the interconnecting layer can enhance both the top and bottom subcells simultaneously -- a 'sweet spot' -- leading to an improvement in the power conversion efficiency of the tandem solar cell from 5.22 percent to 6.24 percent. The enhancement ratio is as high as 20 percent."
The research team included Xing Wang Zhang from the Key Lab of Semiconductor Materials Science at the Institute of Semiconductors at Beijing's Chinese Academy of Science and Ziruo Hong from the Graduate School of Science and Engineering at Japan's Yamagata University.
Experimental and theoretical results demonstrate that the enhancement effect was attained from local near-field enhancement of the gold nanoparticles. The results show that the plasmonic effect has great potential for the future development of polymer solar cells. The team's proposed interlayer structures as an open platform can be applied to various polymer materials, opening up opportunities for highly efficient, multi-stacked tandem solar cells.
The research was financially supported by grants from the U.S. Office of Naval Research and the National Science Foundation.
The team also included Jun Yang, Jingbi You, Chun-Chao Chen, and Wan-Ching Hsu of the UCLA Department of Materials Science and Engineering and the California NanoSystems Institute.

(Source: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/08/110816162311.htm)

Monday 15 August 2011

Hybrid solar system makes rooftop hydrogen



While roofs across the world sport photovoltaic solar panels to convert sunlight into electricity, a Duke University engineer believes a novel hybrid system can wring even more useful energy out of the sun's rays.
Instead of systems based on standard solar panels, Duke engineer Nico Hotz proposes a hybrid option in which sunlight heats a combination of water and methanol in a maze of glass tubes on a rooftop. After two catalytic reactions, the system produces hydrogen much more efficiently than current technology without significant impurities. The resulting hydrogen can be stored and used on demand in fuel cells.
For his analysis, Hotz compared the hybrid system to three different technologies in terms of their exergetic performance. Exergy is a way of describing how much of a given quantity of energy can theoretically be converted to useful work.
"The hybrid system achieved exergetic efficiencies of 28.5 percent in the summer and 18.5 percent in the winter, compared to 5 to 15 percent for the conventional systems in the summer, and 2.5 to 5 percent in the winter," said Hotz, assistant professor of mechanical engineering and materials science at Duke's Pratt School of Engineering.
The paper describing the results of Hotz's analysis was named the top paper during the ASME Energy Sustainability Fuel Cell 2011 conference in Washington, D.C. Hotz recently joined the Duke faculty after completing post-graduate work at the University of California-Berkeley, where he analyzed a model of the new system.
He is currently constructing one of the systems at Duke to test whether or not the theoretical efficiencies are born out experimentally.
Hotz's comparisons took place during the months of July and February in order to measure each system's performance during summer and winter months.
Like other solar-based systems, the hybrid system begins with the collection of sunlight. Then things get different. While the hybrid device might look like a traditional solar collector from the distance, it is actually a series of copper tubes coated with a thin layer of aluminum and aluminum oxide and partly filled with catalytic nanoparticles. A combination of water and methanol flows through the tubes, which are sealed in a vacuum.
"This set-up allows up to 95 percent of the sunlight to be absorbed with very little being lost as heat to the surroundings," Hotz said. "This is crucial because it permits us to achieve temperatures of well over 200 degrees Celsius within the tubes. By comparison, a standard solar collector can only heat water between 60 and 70 degrees Celsius."
Once the evaporated liquid achieves these higher temperatures, tiny amounts of a catalyst are added, which produces hydrogen. This combination of high temperature and added catalysts produces hydrogen very efficiently, Hotz said.
The resulting hydrogen can then be immediately directed to a fuel cell to provide electricity to a building during the day, or compressed and stored in a tank to provide power later.
The three systems examined in the analysis
+ were the standard photovoltaic cell which converts sunlight directly into electricity to then split water electrolytically into hydrogen and oxygen;
+ a photocatalytic system producing hydrogen similar to Hotz's system, but simpler and not mature yet;
+ and a system in which photovoltaic cells turn sunlight into electricity which is then stored in different types of batteries (with lithium ion being the most efficient).
"We performed a cost analysis and found that the hybrid solar-methanol is the least expensive solution, considering the total installation costs of $7,900 if designed to fulfill the requirements in summer, although this is still much more expensive than a conventional fossil fuel-fed generator," Hotz said.
Costs and efficiencies of systems can vary widely depending on location - since the roof-mounted collectors that could provide all the building's needs in summer might not be enough for winter.
A rooftop system large enough to supply all of a winter's electrical needs would produce more energy than needed in summer, so the owner could decide to shut down portions of the rooftop structure or, if possible, sell excess energy back to the grid.
"The installation costs per year including the fuel costs, and the price per amount of electricity produced, however showed that the (hybrid) solar scenarios can compete with the fossil fuel-based system to some degree," Hotz said.
"In summer, the first and third scenarios, as well as the hybrid system, are cheaper than a propane- or diesel-combusting generator."
This could be an important consideration, especially if a structure is to be located in a remote area where traditional forms of energy would be too difficult or expensive to obtain.

(Source: http://www.solardaily.com/reports/Hybrid_solar_system_makes_rooftop_hydrogen_999.html)

Wednesday 10 August 2011

Solar use in Sydney soars (by Staff Writers)

Be set by rising consumer energy prices, consumers in Sydney, Australia's most populous city, are looking to solar energy.
In 2010 the city introduced a solar bonus scheme, which was very popular in Sydney's more prosperous suburbs, with more than 14 percent of homes installing rooftop solar panels, compared with a New South Wales statewide average of about 3 percent.
Paul Myors is an energy efficiency specialist with Ausgrid, a state-owned electricity infrastructure company which owns, maintains and operates the electrical distribution networks to 1.6 million customers.
He said that the number of private dwellings with solar panels had increased from 2,000 18 months ago to 46,000 after the former New South Wales Labor government introduced a solar bonus rebate scheme.
That plan allowed for a 60-cents-per-kilowatt-hour feed-in tariff for consumers utilizing solar panels, The Sydney Morning Herald reported.
Myors noted that, while government statistics indicated that electricity usage increased every year from the 1950s, in 2007 usage peaked and since then has been shrinking by about 2 percent annually because of increased energy prices and conservation measures.
Analysts say high installation rates of solar energy equipment in certain towns are because a number of Australian solar panel companies manufacturing the photovoltaic panels have conducted an astute and intensive marketing campaign.
Strata Community Australia Chief Executive Officer Mark Lever said more than 70 percent of residents in many Sydney local government areas live in apartments, as do more than 50 percent in North Sydney.
So, he added, that while many resident were interested in installing solar panels to lessen energy costs, the federal and state governments had sufficiently considered their wishes when designing rebate schemes.
''Corporate entities are not eligible for federal renewable energy certificates and then they have to deal with the fact the Tax Office regards any income to the body corporate from solar schemes as mutual income that is taxable in the hands of individual owners," Lever said.
Strata, also known as "Strata Title," is a political mechanism introduced into Australia in 1961 for handling the legal ownership of a "portion" of a building or structure.
Bowing to increasing public interest in the issue, Ausgrid has begun publishing details of solar panel installations and other data on its Web site to allow councils, consumers and other interested parties to evaluate patterns of electricity usage.
Australia's climate is ramping up electricity demands, as in the past decade percentage of houses in New South Wales, Myors said, with air conditioning use in New South Wales soaring from 30 percent to 70 percent, placing additional strains on the electrical grid.


(Source:http://www.solardaily.com/reports/Solar_use_in_Sydney_soars_999.html)

Wednesday 3 August 2011

Solar Energy – The Best Choice for Our Future!

The earth’s natural resources are getting scarcer everyday and we need to look for environmentally safe alternatives that are plentiful and cheap. I can think of no other than Solar Energy. Solar energy produces no negative by-products that effect the environment like coal or nuclear and is not in short supply.
Best of all it’s free to everyone. For example home owners can harness the abundant energy from the sun by installing solar panels on their roof or an open space that is exposed to the rays of the sun. Solar panels easily capture the sun’s energy and coverts it to electricity to be used to run everything from your hot water heater to your TV. Even in areas of the world where the sun’s rays are unavailable or insufficient everyday, powerful battery technology can store the surplus when the sun is shining and use it when needed.
With the demand increasing expect to see many breakthroughs in solar energy technology over the next few years. This will no doubt create a huge demand for certified solar trained professionals in many different positions around the world. When considering solar training look first to eRenewable Resource Institute Providing ISPQ Accredited* Hands-On Solar Installation Training located in sunny Phoenix Arizona. All eRenewable students qualify for ARG STAFFING’s free “green staffing machine,” services that include assistance with job placement and career enhancement. Classes are limited so call today, visit the website, www.eRenewableResouce.com, for a complete list of available classes and dates. *ISPQ accreditation, issued by The Interstate Renewable Energy Council, is not a recognized accrediting body by the US Department of Education.

(Source:http://erenewableresourcegroup.wordpress.com/2011/03/30/solar-energy-the-best-choice-for-our-future/)

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