All About Solar | Green Energy News

November 19, 2006 – Vol. 11 No. 35

ALL ABOUT SOLAR.

This week’s news.

Currently there’s one predominant way to convert the Sun’s heat to electricity: long parabola-shaped reflective troughs that concentrate solar heat on a working fluid running inside a pipe. The working fluid gets hot enough to spin a turbine and generate electricity.

Coming up next will be large parabolic shaped dishes mounted on a pedestal that will concentrate heat on a Stirling engine. The solar heat will cause the engine to run and thus generate electricity. Stirling Energy Systems has a contract to generate power from hundreds of these machines, so full commercialization of this technology is in the near future.

Now there could be a variation on the Stirling Energy’s system. This new technology would use a cone to concentrate solar heat to run a Stirling engine rather than a parabolic dish.

Open Energy of Solana Beach, California has signed an agreement with Infinia Corporation of Kennewick, Washington to develop a solar concentrating power system (CSP) using Open Energy’s SunCone design and Infinia’s Stirling engine technology.

As quoted from the Open Energy website: “SunCone(tm) CSP utilizes non-imaging optical cones made of reflective composites to concentrate sunlight on rods at the base of each cone. The cones stay cool, but the fluid flowing through the base is superheated, generating steam to drive a turbine and produce electricity.”

(Instead of turbine, of course, solar thermal energy would drive a Stirling engine. Stirling engines run on most any external heat source.)

The joint project will be to build a 1-kilowatt version. A larger version to be used for distributed generation will be the goal after that. Visit Open Energy at http://www.openenergycorp.com/ Infinia at http://www.infiniacorp.com/ , Stirling Energy Systems at http://www.stirlingenergy.com/

The traditional method of growing ingots of silicon was developed for the silicon semiconductor industry, not the silicon solar industry. Now that the solar industry is on its own feet - not needing semiconductor hand-me-downs - it is developing new technologies to grow single crystal silicon ingots and make wafers made from them specific for the needs of the solar industry. Read that as meaning developing ways to make silicon ingots and wafers quickly and cheaply to help cut the cost of solar. The cost reduction of silicon cells is vital to the growth of solar energy.

Solaicx, of Santa Clara, California, has a system to speed up the process of growing silicon crystals that includes a continuous Czochralski (CZ) process crystal grower that is five times more productive than traditional CZ growers. Including in-house slicing, slabbing, surfacing, ingot cropping and waste silicon recycling, the company will be able to provide high-quality solar wafers to meet customer specifications at a reduced cost. (Just how much less is wait and see.)

Wanting to invest in the solar industry and impressed with the possibilities of Solaicx, Applied Ventures, the venture capital fund of Applied Materials, Inc., has invested $3.0 million in Solaicx. Solaicx will use the funds to expand its business to a second manufacturing site that could be online sometime in 2007.

Applied Ventures invests in early stage companies that could be considered a technological extension of Applied Materials core business of advanced materials.

Visit Solaicx at http://www.solaicx.com/ and Applied Ventures at http://www.appliedventures.com/

Building integrated solar systems - such as thin-film solar products applied permanently to roofing materials - can have the advantage of being more aesthetically pleasing than solar systems that are applied as an add-on to a building. They also have no additional hardware and add little weight to a roof.

Their major disadvantage is that should roofing material fail beneath the solar-integrated product repairs involving its removal would be difficult at best.

That’s why roofing materials where solar is to be integrated (permanently affixed) should be new or reasonably new and have an expected long life span - decades. Standing seam metal roofing is one of those materials.

United Solar Ovonic has announced it has supplied 420-kilowatts of Uni-Solar triple-junction photovoltaic laminates to 3rd Rock Systems and Technologies for two solar school projects in California. The projects used a total of more than 3500 Uni-Solar triple junction peel-and-stick field-applied photovoltaic laminates.

Both school projects will feature 3rd Rock Systems proprietary Internet-based solar electric monitoring system which can be used as a teaching tool. Visit United Solar at http://www.unisolar.com/ and 3rd Rock at http://www.3rdrock.us/