Tucked between a row of stalls is the solar-powered car ‘Advay II’, designed by a team of 16 engineering students from the Netaji Subhash Institute of Technology, Delhi University. Built over a year, this car’s yellow body does not bear resemblance to any current car model in production.
“We call this an aerofoil design, which offers [...]
Posts Tagged ‘solar’
‘Advay II’ Solar car designed by students Showcase at Auto Expo 2010
January 9th, 2010 |
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Germany’s solar subsidies: Fed up
January 7th, 2010 |
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Germany’s support for solar power is becoming ever harder to afford
AMID the unexploded bombs, rockets and poison-gas shells that litter a former Soviet military training ground in eastern Germany, a forest of silicon has sprouted. Solar cells here at Lieberose, Germany’s biggest photovoltaic plant, produce enough electricity (at peak output) to power a small town. In the nearby city of Frankfurt/Oder, the factory that made the solar cells used at Lieberose, owned by First Solar, an American firm, cannot keep up with demand as one sheet of glass after another rolls down its production line.
In Germany this is seen as vindication of an industrial policy that has nurtured solar power for almost a decade with incentives known as feed-in tariffs. These oblige utilities to buy all the electricity generated from renewable sources such as windmills and solar panels at a high price (currently six to eight times the market rate) for a long period. The costs are passed to consumers in the form of higher electricity bills. Each year the tariff offered to new installations falls slightly, to encourage rapid development. Feed-in tariffs have been adopted in many European countries and beyond. Yet the country that pioneered them seems unable to agree on a formula for them that is generous enough to spur investment without being so lavish that it overburdens consumers. …
The rise of thin-film solar power: Leaner and cheaper
October 22nd, 2009 |
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The future of solar power is not only bright but also thin
THE modernist box that won this year’s Solar Decathlon, a contest for solar-powered houses sponsored by America’s Department of Energy, had solar panels of the conventional, crystalline sort on its roof. But the walls were covered in solar cells made with thin coatings of silicon and other materials in the place of expensive slices of crystal. Thin film, as this technology is known, is still less popular than crystalline cells and its move to the mainstream has been a year or two away for a decade. But its time may have come at last.
There are many exotic ideas involving thin film, from the solar shingles recently unveiled by Dow, a big chemical company, (a roof’s worth costs $27,000) to experimental prototypes of power-generating clothes, roads and cars. But most thin film comes in the form of panels that resemble crystalline ones. They are roughly half as efficient (meaning that a panel must be twice as big to generate the same amount of power), but a third cheaper, watt for watt. So in places where there is no shortage of space, they are the natural option. …
Google Plans New Mirror for Cheaper Solar Power
September 10th, 2009 |
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Google, which has been looking for a number of new green technologies to invest in, is developing its own mirror technology that could reduce the cost of building solar thermal plants.
– SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Google is disappointed with the lack of
breakthrough investment ideas in the green technology sector but the
company is working to develop its own new mirror technology that could
reduce the cost of building solar thermal plants by a quarter or more.
quot;We’ve been lo…
Solar power’s bright future in Japan: Land of the rising subsidy
August 27th, 2009 |
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Japanese makers of solar panels are well placed to endure the present glut
UNTIL five years ago Japan made around half of the world’s solar cells, thanks to its thirst for native energy and its expertise in the related fields of computer chips and flat screens for televisions. Sharp, which alone has made a quarter of all the solar cells ever produced, dominated the industry. But as solar technology matured and demand grew, new companies emerged, notably in China and Taiwan, eroding Japanese firms’ share of the market to around 20%. Sharp slipped to fourth place among manufacturers in 2008, after Q-Cells of Germany, First Solar of America and Suntech of China.
Factories have mushroomed all over the world in recent years, on the assumption that subsidies and loans for solar power would continue to grow, along with the world economy. Chinese manufacturers’ share grew sixfold from 2004 to 2008, capturing more than one-third of the global market. This prompted fears that Japan’s strength in solar would go the way of computer chips and television screens, in which Japanese firms have lost their dominance over rivals from elsewhere in Asia. …
Steering sunbeams
August 7th, 2009 |
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Solar power is becoming less of a luxury
JUST below your correspondent’s hillside home in southern California, a house is being rebuilt with all the latest thinking in materials technology and construction codes. Much has changed in the eight years since your correspondent did the same. Most strikingly, the house below has a gleaming white roof of fireproof chippings embedded in a mastic undercoating. With summer temperatures in the nineties (32ºC and up), these new reflective coatings are said to reduce air-conditioning bills by 20% or more. Not content with that, the owner has added a five-kilowatt bank of solar panels.
Eighteen months ago, your correspondent ran the numbers to see what it would cost to use photovoltaic solar panels to replace the 8,300 kilowatt-hours of electricity he buys annually from the grid. Economically, solar turned out to be a dud. The 6.4 kilowatts of capacity needed would have cost $48,000 for the panels alone—and half as much again by the time the mounting frames, switching modules, power controller, fault protector, DC-to-AC inverter, service panel and installation charges had been included. …
Solar energy in Israel: It’s a knockout
July 23rd, 2009 |
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Two novel approaches to making electricity from sunlight
ISRAEL is a country with plenty of sunshine, lots of sand and quite a few clever physicists and chemists. Put these together—having first extracted the oxygen from the sand, to leave pure silicon—and you have the ingredients for an innovative solar-power industry. Shining sunlight onto silicon is the most direct way of turning it into electricity (the light knocks electrons free from the silicon atoms), but it is also the most expensive. The scientists are what you need to make the process cheaper. And that is what two small companies based in Jerusalem are trying, in different ways, to do.
The physicists and chemists at GreenSun Energy, led by Renata Reisfeld, think the way is to use less silicon. Traditional solar cells are made of thin sheets of the element covered by glass plates. In GreenSun’s cells, though, only the outer edges of the glass plates are covered by silicon, in the form of thin strips. The trick is to get the light falling on the glass to diffuse sideways to the edges, so that the silicon can turn it into electricity. Dr Reisfeld’s team do this by coating the glass with a combination of dyes and sprinkling it with nanoparticles of a metal whose nature they are not yet willing to disclose. …
Asia watches long solar eclipse
July 22nd, 2009 |
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People in Asia have seen the longest total solar eclipse this century, with large areas of India and China plunged into darkness. Amateur stargazers and scientists travelled far to see the eclipse, which lasted six minutes and 39 seconds at its maximum point.
Longest 21st century solar eclipse wows millions
July 22nd, 2009 |
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A total solar eclipse began its flight on Wednesday across a narrow swathe of Asia, where hundreds of millions of people watched the skies darken despite thick summer clouds. The longest total solar eclipse of the 21st century was visible along a roughly 250 km-wide (155 miles) corridor,
Longest 21st century solar eclipse wows millions
July 22nd, 2009 |
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A total solar eclipse began its flight on Wednesday across a narrow swathe of Asia, where hundreds of millions of people watched the skies darken despite thick summer clouds. The longest total solar eclipse of the 21st century was visible along a roughly 250 km-wide (155 miles) corridor,