All About Solar | Green Energy News

February 12, 2006 – Vol.10 No.47

All ABOUT SOLAR.

This week’s news...

To date the bulk of the largest solar photovoltaic projects on the planet are in not-known-for-its-sunshine Germany. The 10-megawatt Bavaria Solarpark and the under-construction 12-MW Solarpark Gut Erlasse come to mind.

Soon the honor of having the single largest solar photovoltaic power plant will shift to the U.S. and the state of Nevada. (Actually known for its sunlight.)

SunEdison and Powered by Renewables (PBR) have partnered to build an 18-megawatt solar project in Clark County. The $105 million project will get more than $13 million in tax credits from the state over ten years .

All of the power will be sold to Nellis Air Force Base, and Nevada Power Co. is negotiating a contract for renewable energy credits from the project. The utility will be able to use the credits toward satisfying the state’s renewable portfolio standard (RPS) of 20 percent renewables by 2015. Five percent of that must be solar.

SunEdison and Powered by Renewables are planning an additional 36 megawatts of solar photovoltaic projects in the state. Visit SunEdison at http://www.sunedison.com/ , Powered by Renewables at http://www.pbrcorp.com/ .

Recently BP announced that it would build its second hydrogen-fueled power plant. The 500-megawatt facility in California would run on hydrogen extracted from coke. Carbon dioxide from the extraction process would be pumped into older oil wells to help boost output and sequester the carbon dioxide, more or less permanently. The plant will cost $1 billion.

Compare that project with Energy Conversion Devices (ECD) latest announcement.

ECD said that by 2010 its wholly owned subsidiary, United Solar Ovonic, will be capable of producing 300 megawatts per year of solar modules. (Given the growth rate and demand for solar products, they will probably be shipping that amount each year.)

To put ECD’s announcement in perspective with BP’s, every 20 months ECD will be producing the equivalent of a 500-megawatt power plant. It will continue to do so as long as solar demand stays high and the company remains in business. The company makes its own thin-film products and is not affected by the worldwide shortage of polycrystalline silicon, so production should never slow.

The increase in capacity will begin with the construction of a third manufacturing facility. The new shop will have a capacity of 50 megawatts per year of solar products. Visit ECD at http://ovonic.com/

Solar photovoltaic cells convert visible light into electricity with the use of semiconductors. Solar thermal energy power generation uses heated fluids and conventional mechanical power generation equipment to make electricity.

Another way to turn sunlight into electricity is to use semiconductors to convert the Sun’s thermal energy directly into electricity without the middleman of mechanical generation equipment.

Bandwidth Semiconductor, a subsidiary of solar-company Spire, has received a Small Business Innovation Research grant (SBIR) from NASA to develop a thermophotovoltaic (TPV) power cell that produces electricity directly from heat. The heat - infrared radiation - can be from any source from the heat of combustion to sunlight.

The company will develop the cells using a combination of indium, gallium and arsenide which is also used in some photovoltaic cells.

Extracting electricity directly from heat is nothing new, thermocouples, which have been commercialized for decades, convert thermal energy directly into electrical energy utilizing two dissimilar metals. They are common in items such gas-fired domestic hot water heaters as a safety device to shut off gas supply to a pilot light should it blow out.

Visit Spire at http://www.spirecorp.com/

There are seemingly endless ideas on ways to convert the light of the sun to electricity.

SolFocus has announced that it has partnered with the Palo Alto Research Center to further develop a solar concentrator photovoltaic device. The concept molds a number of mirrored lenses into a single sheet of glass to focus sunlight an equal number of small photovoltaic cells.

By concentrating light and focusing the light via two sets of mirrors on the glass very small solar cells can be used to cut the cost of the final product, up to a half they say.

The technology needs to be pointed directly into the Sun with a tracking device for optimal performance. The solar panel to be developed is in its second generation. Visit PARC at http://www.parc.com/cpv