All About Solar | Green Energy News

July 10, 2005 – Vol.10 No.16

ALL ABOUT SOLAR.

This week’s news...

While solar photovoltaics (turning photons of light directly into electricity) always hits center stage, solar thermal energy is used every day to generate power.

The allure of solar photovoltaics is strong because it seems so simple: Put a panel in sunlight and it makes electricity. But solar photovoltaics are complex, at least in their manufacturing processes and materials needed to make them, both of which keep costs high.

Yet there’s nothing particularly exotic in the manufacturing of solar thermal power generation equipment, so costs should be lower.

And, solar thermal for power generation has another interesting advantage over photovoltaics. The source of heat need not be only from sunlight. Hybrid systems could be built that use a combination of thermal sources - geothermal/ solar, biofuel/solar for instance. Hybrid solar/whatever power generation systems could be built that would operate after the sun goes down, or on cloudy, rainy, or snowy days.

WOW Energies has announced it has developed a solar thermal power generation system the company calls the Cascading Closed Loop System (CCLC)(sm). With the system, concentrated solar thermal energy targets a working fluid which expands, spins turbines and then generates electricity.

The company uses off-the-shelf components to build the systems, which should keep costs low, lower than wind-generated electricity, WOW says. CCLC is scalable, so small or large systems can be built.

The same CCLC process can be used to generate electricity from waste heat or flue gases ordinarily sent up a chimney. The multipurpose technology leads to the notion of solar hybrid power generation systems. Visit WOW Energies at http://www.wowenergies.com/

It’s assumed that every solar panel that is manufactured gets sold and put into service converting sunlight into electricity.

(Though we know that assume really means (makes an a** out of...), this editor has never heard of solar photovoltaic panels stacking up in warehouses unused, unsold, at least for long. It’s a growing industry after all.)

So if each panel that is manufactured is put into service, generating electricity (measured in watts or kilowatts), the generating capacity of each cell or panel that leaves the factory door becomes the output of that factory as well as the amount of new solar generating capacity on the planet measured on an annual basis.

Thus when Evergreen Solar announces that it has broken ground in Germany for a new 30-megawatt per year solar wafer, cell and module plant it will also have announced it will be adding to the world’s solar energy capacity by 30 megawatts per year once the plant reaches full production.

The new Evergreen Solar plant, actually built by the joint venture of Q-Cells Ag and Evergreen known as EverQ, will make products based on Evergreen’s String Ribbon (tm) wafer technology and Q-Cells solar cell technology.

When the $75 million EverQ plant in Thalheim is complete in 2006 it is expected to hire 350-400 new employees. The plant was built with help from the German government in the amount of $34 million. Visit Evergreen at http://www.evergreensolar.com/ and Q-Cells at http://www.q-cells.com/