How to Use this Web Log

1. Browse through articles by clicking on "Older Posts" below each article in the center column.
2. Search through the Blog Archive at the lower right-hand column.

3. Read Editor's articles to the right.
4. Get Technical help in the lower left hand column.
5. Efficiency and low-waste strategies in the lower right column.

Friday, September 20, 2013

Help Me to Save the Planet

Help me to save the planet. I know that sounds like an extreme statement, but the climate problems we are now confronting everywhere in the world call for bold action.

We do not have to self-destruct in an endless cycle of the pollution of land, air and water. What can be done? What can you do?

At this moment, everywhere in the world where electricity costs more than 22 cents/kWh, like California and many other states as well as Germany and Japan, it is already cheaper to install integrated solar PV systems with batteries for your electricity needs. I know, because this is my work. Now, I am looking for finance to manufacture and deploy SunPax, a micro integrated PV module with all power control electronics, 20+ year batteries and a micro-computer to monitor and control all functions. The costs of these components already allows a profitable product to be built and distributed. Please look at a synopsis of SunPax at http://lightontheearth.blogspot.com/p/shedding-light-on-solar.html

I have been living off the grid for most of the past 30 years, as I am now. I have never had a power outage. I have discovered the solution that can save our planet from climate catastrophe while also providing affordable electricity and user-friendliness. I have been working with an eminent scientist to do all the analysis and to make sure I have not overlooked any hidden factors. Well, the word is in - SunPax is the solution. I am not some inventor claiming some kind of "free-energy" device. I have a Masters Degree in Business and have been designing, building, installing and using such integrated solar energy systems for 30 years. But now is the time to take the next step - micro-integration of all the components.

However, I have thus far been unable to make contact with visionary investors capable of providing the relatively mid-range business investment required to bring this product to market. So if we want to save the world, it is going to be up to us.

It is calculated that there are only six people that separate us from each and every person in the world, if we only knew the way to connect the dots. I need to find my way to people who have financial resources and care about the fate of the world. You can help by forwarding this message to all the people you know who want this energy madness to stop.

Please go to my web log post listed above and you will see that I am a very serious person. I can be contacted at the email address at the bottom of the SunPax description. Anyone with any ideas is welcome to submit them to me. I also have detailed technical analysis and business projections to demonstrate this is not some flight of fancy. Please help if you can!


Jonathan Cole - Founder - Light on the Earth Systems

Wednesday, September 18, 2013

Saving the World from Climate Catastrophe

Clean Energy Least Costly to Power America's Electricity Needs

Sep. 17, 2013 — Findings show carbon pollution from power plants can be cut cost-effectively by using wind, solar and natural gas
It's less costly to get electricity from wind turbines and solar panels than coal-fired power plants when climate change costs and other health impacts are factored in, according to a new study published in Springer's Journal of Environmental Studies and Sciences.
In fact -- using the official U.S. government estimates of health and environmental costs from burning fossil fuels -- the study shows it's cheaper to replace a typical existing coal-fired power plant with a wind turbine than to keep the old plant running. And new electricity generation from wind could be more economically efficient than natural gas.
The findings show the nation can cut carbon pollution from power plants in a cost-effective way, by replacing coal-fired generation with cleaner options like wind, solar, and natural gas.
"Burning coal is a very costly way to make electricity. There are more efficient and sustainable ways to get power," said Dr. Laurie Johnson, chief economist in the Climate and Clean Air Program at the Natural Resources Defense Council. "We can reduce health and climate change costs while reducing the dangerous carbon pollution driving global warming."
Johnson co-authored the study, "The Social Cost of Carbon: Implications for Modernizing our Electricity System," with Chris Hope of the Judge Business School, University of Cambridge; and Starla Yeh in NRDC's Center for Market Innovation. Power plants are the nation's single largest source of such pollution, accounting for 40 percent of our national carbon footprint.
"And yet, there are no federal limits on the amount of carbon pollution our power plants may release," said Johnson. "That's wrong. It doesn't make sense. It's putting our future at risk. We limit the amount of mercury, arsenic, soot, and other harmful pollution from these plants. It's time to cut this carbon pollution."
President Obama has vowed to do that, using his authority under the Clean Air Act to set the first federal limits on the amount of carbon pollution power plants may release. Critics claim that could raise costs. But, in fact, it can reduce the total cost of electricity generation, the new study finds.
Carbon pollution imposes economic costs by damaging public health and driving destructive climate change. Working together, the White House Office of Management and Budget, the Treasury Department, the Department of Energy and eight other federal agencies put a dollar value on those damages, in an official figure called the "social cost of carbon" (SCC).
The SCC is used to calculate the benefits (i.e., avoided climate damages) of carbon pollution reduction. The administration puts the best estimate at $33 per ton of carbon pollution emitted in 2010.
The study also included government damage estimates from sulfur dioxide, a pollutant released simultaneously with carbon. Every year, sulfur dioxide causes thousands of premature deaths, respiratory ailments, heart disease and a host of ecosystem damages.
"Already, climate change is contributing to record heat waves, floods, drought, wildfires and severe storms," Johnson said. Such extreme weather caused more than $140 billion in damages in 2012. American taxpayers picked up nearly $100 billion of those costs, according to an NRDC report released in May, 2013.
"These damages are only likely to increase if nothing is done to reduce carbon pollution," concluded Johnson.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/09/130917124817.htm

Wednesday, August 14, 2013

Giant Solar Wave On Its Way



Chart: 2/3rds of Global Solar PV Has Been Installed in the Last 2.5 Years 

And capacity will nearly double in the next 2.5 years.

Stephen Lacey: August 13, 2013
If you want to understand why people so often compare deployment trends in solar photovoltaics (PV) to Moore's law in computing, consider this statistic: two-thirds of all solar PV capacity in place worldwide has been installed since January 2011.
Let's put that into perspective. It took nearly four decades to install 50 gigawatts of PV capacity worldwide. But in the last 2 1/2 years, the industry jumped from 50 gigawatts of PV capacity to just over 100 gigawatts. At the same time, global module prices have fallen 62 percent since January 2011.
Even more amazingly, the solar industry is on track to install another 100 gigawatts worldwide by 2015 -- nearly doubling solar capacity in the next 2 1/2 years.
Those statistics and the chart below, courtesy of GTM Research Senior Analyst MJ Shiao, illustrate the exponential growth in the global PV market.

Source: GTM Research
And as Shiao's second chart below shows, the U.S. distributed solar market is on pretty much the same growth trajectory. More than two-thirds of America's distributed PV (everything except for utility-scale projects) has been installed since January 2011. And by 2015, the country's distributed PV market is expected to jump by more than 200 percent.

Chart: GTM Research/SEIA U.S. Solar Market Insight
There are a few key takeaways from these figures.
First, utilities still dismissing solar as inconsequential or "cute" may soon be in for a rude awakening. According to the Solar Market Insight report from GTM Research and SEIA, the national average for residential system prices fell another 18 percent last year; non-residential prices fell 13.3 percent.
The falling cost and price of installation is starting to open up new markets without incentives. As Shayle Kann, vice president of GTM Research, pointed out recently, roughly 3,000 residential solar systems were installed in California without the use of any state incentives in the first quarter of this year.
"This is emblematic of a sea change in the solar industry, and even more importantly, in the energy industry," wrote Kann.
But this rapid increase in installations won't create challenges for just utilities -- it will also create challenges for the solar industry itself. Since the solar market is still at the beginning of a steep growth curve, it's hard to say whether the business models and technologies we know today are going to be successful in the future.
This will likely mean more bankruptcies and more consolidation. It will also test the reliability of products operating in the field.
Because two-thirds of PV capacity in the field today was only installed in the last couple of years, a majority of the products are still very new. Solar is a multi-decade investment, and there is uncertainty around how new hardware will perform over the long term, explained Shiao.
"We're really at the beginning stages of understanding PV in terms of products in the field, viable business models, and effects on the grid, especially when you consider that PV is being sold many times as a twenty-year asset. Now is the time to look deeper into issues surrounding product reliability, market sustainability and O&M business models."
The boom in distributed solar is underway. And we've only just begun to understand the implications.
http://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/chart-2-3rds-of-global-solar-pv-has-been-connected-in-the-last-2.5-years 

Friday, July 26, 2013

Climate Time Bomb - Rapid Deployment of Solar Needed

Cost of Arctic Methane Release Could Be 'Size of Global Economy', Experts Warn

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/07/130724134256.htm
July 24, 2013 — Researchers have warned of an "economic time-bomb" in the Arctic, following a ground-breaking analysis of the likely cost of methane emissions in the region.

Economic modelling shows that the methane emissions caused by shrinking sea ice from just one area of the Arctic could come with a global price tag of 60 trillion dollars -- the size of the world economy in 2012.
Writing in a Comment piece in the journal, Nature, academics argue that a significant release of methane from thawing permafrost in the Arctic could have dire implications for the world's economy. The researchers, from Cambridge and Rotterdam, have for the first time calculated the potential economic impact of a scenario some scientists consider increasingly likely -- that methane from the East Siberian Sea will be emitted as a result of the thaw.

This constitutes just a fraction of the vast reservoirs of methane in the Arctic, but scientists believe that the release of even a small proportion of these reserves could trigger possibly catastrophic climate change. According to the new assessment, the emission of methane below the East Siberian Sea alone would also have a mean global impact of 60 trillion dollars.

The ground-breaking Comment piece was co-authored by Gail Whiteman, from Erasmus University; Chris Hope, Reader in Policy Modelling at Cambridge Judge Business School, University of Cambridge; and Peter Wadhams, Professor of Ocean physics at the University of Cambridge.
"The global impact of a warming Arctic is an economic time-bomb," Whiteman, who is Professor of sustainability, management and climate change at Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University (RSM), said.

Wadhams added: "The imminent disappearance of the summer sea ice in the Arctic will have enormous implications for both the acceleration of climate change, and the release of methane from off-shore waters which are now able to warm up in the summer. This massive methane boost will have major implications for global economies and societies."

Most discussion about the economic implications of a warming Arctic focuses on benefits to the region, with increased oil-and-gas drilling and the opening up of new shipping routes that could attract investments of hundreds of billions of dollars. However, the effects of melting permafrost on the climate and oceans will be felt globally, the authors argue.

Applying an updated version of the modelling method used in the UK government's 2006 Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change, and currently used by the US Environmental Protection Agency, the authors calculate the global consequences of the release of 50 gigatonnes of methane over a decade from thawing permafrost beneath the East Siberian Sea.

"The methane release would bring forward the date at which the global mean temperature rise exceeds 2 degrees C by between 15 and 35 years," said Chris Hope. "In the absence of climate-change mitigation measures, the PAGE09 model calculates that it would increase mean global climate impacts by $60 trillion."
If other impacts such as ocean acidification are factored in, the cost would be much higher. Some 80% of these costs will be borne by developing countries, as they experience more extreme weather, flooding, droughts and poorer health, as Arctic warming affects climate.

The research also explored the impact of a number of later, longer-lasting or smaller pulses of methane, and the authors write that, in all these cases, the economic cost for physical changes to the Arctic is "steep."
The authors write that global economic institutions and world leaders should "kick-start investment in rigorous economic modelling" and consider the impacts of a changing Arctic landscape as far outweighing any "short-term gains from shipping and extraction."

They argue that economic discussions today are missing the big picture on Arctic change. "Arctic science is a strategic asset for human economies because the region drives critical effects in our biophysical, political and economic systems," write the academics. Neither the World Economic Forum nor the International Monetary Fund currently recognise the economic danger of Arctic change.

According to Whiteman, "Global leaders and the WEF and IMF need to pay much more attention to this invisible time-bomb. The mean impacts of just this one effect -- $60 trillion -- approaches the $70-trillion value of the world economy in 2012."

Story Source:
The above story is based on materials provided by University of Cambridge. The original story is licensed under a Creative Commons Licence.
Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. For further information, please contact the source cited above.

Journal Reference:
  1. Gail Whiteman, Chris Hope, Peter Wadhams. Climate science: Vast costs of Arctic change. Nature, 2013; 499 (7459): 401 DOI: 10.1038/499401a

Thursday, April 11, 2013

The Solar Evolution Already in the Pipeline


  http://grist.http://grist.org/climate-energy/solar-panels-could-destroy-u-s-utilities-according-to-u-s-utilities/org/climate-energy/solar-panels-could-destroy-u-s-utilities-according-to-u-s-utilities/

Solar panels could destroy U.S. utilities, according to U.S. utilities


Solar power and other distributed renewable energy technologies could lay waste to U.S. power utilities and burn the utility business model, which has remained virtually unchanged for a century, to the ground.
That is not wild-eyed hippie talk. It is the assessment of the utilities themselves.
Back in January, the Edison Electric Institute — the (typically stodgy and backward-looking) trade group of U.S. investor-owned utilities — released a report [PDF] that, as far as I can tell, went almost entirely without notice in the press. That’s a shame. It is one of the most prescient and brutally frank things I’ve ever read about the power sector. It is a rare thing to hear an industry tell the tale of its own incipient obsolescence.
I’ve been thinking about how to convey to you, normal people with healthy social lives and no time to ponder the byzantine nature of the power industry, just what a big deal the coming changes are. They are nothing short of revolutionary … but rather difficult to explain without jargon.
So, just a bit of background. You probably know that electricity is provided by utilities. Some utilities both generate electricity at power plants and provide it to customers over power lines. They are “regulated monopolies,” which means they have sole responsibility for providing power in their service areas. Some utilities have gone through deregulation; in that case, power generation is split off into its own business, while the utility’s job is to purchase power on competitive markets and provide it to customers over the grid it manages.
This complexity makes it difficult to generalize about utilities … or to discuss them without putting people to sleep. But the main thing to know is that the utility business model relies on selling power. That’s how they make their money. Here’s how it works: A utility makes a case to a public utility commission (PUC), saying “we will need to satisfy this level of demand from consumers, which means we’ll need to generate (or purchase) this much power, which means we’ll need to charge these rates.” If the PUC finds the case persuasive, it approves the rates and guarantees the utility a reasonable return on its investments in power and grid upkeep.
Thrilling, I know. The thing to remember is that it is in a utility’s financial interest to generate (or buy) and deliver as much power as possible. The higher the demand, the higher the investments, the higher the utility shareholder profits. In short, all things being equal, utilities want to sell more power. (All things are occasionally not equal, but we’ll leave those complications aside for now.)
Now, into this cozy business model enters cheap distributed solar PV, which eats away at it like acid.
First, the power generated by solar panels on residential or commercial roofs is not utility-owned or utility-purchased. From the utility’s point of view, every kilowatt-hour of rooftop solar looks like a kilowatt-hour of reduced demand for the utility’s product. Not something any business enjoys. (This is the same reason utilities are instinctively hostile to energy efficiency and demand response programs, and why they must be compelled by regulations or subsidies to create them. Utilities don’t like reduced demand!)
It’s worse than that, though. Solar power peaks at midday, which means it is strongest close to the point of highest electricity use — “peak load.” Problem is, providing power to meet peak load is where utilities make a huge chunk of their money. Peak power is the most expensive power. So when solar panels provide peak power, they aren’t just reducing demand, they’re reducing demand for the utilities’ most valuable product.
But wait. Renewables are limited by the fact they are intermittent, right? “The sun doesn’t always shine,” etc. Customers will still have to rely on grid power for the most part. Right?
This is a widely held article of faith, but EEI (of all places!) puts it to rest. (In this and all quotes that follow, “DER” means distributed energy resources, which for the most part means solar PV.)
Due to the variable nature of renewable DER, there is a perception that customers will always need to remain on the grid. While we would expect customers to remain on the grid until a fully viable and economic distributed non-variable resource is available, one can imagine a day when battery storage technology or micro turbines could allow customers to be electric grid independent. To put this into perspective, who would have believed 10 years ago that traditional wire line telephone customers could economically “cut the cord?” [Emphasis mine.]
Indeed! Just the other day, Duke Energy CEO Jim Rogers said, “If the cost of solar panels keeps coming down, installation costs come down and if they combine solar with battery technology and a power management system, then we have someone just using [the grid] for backup.” What happens if a whole bunch of customers start generating their own power and using the grid merely as backup? The EEI report warns of “irreparable damages to revenues and growth prospects” of utilities.
Utility investors are accustomed to large, long-term, reliable investments with a 30-year cost recovery — fossil fuel plants, basically. The cost of those investments, along with investments in grid maintenance and reliability, are spread by utilities across all ratepayers in a service area. What happens if a bunch of those ratepayers start reducing their demand or opting out of the grid entirely? Well, the same investments must now be spread over a smaller group of ratepayers. In other words: higher rates for those who haven’t switched to solar.
That’s how it starts. These two paragraphs from the EEI report are a remarkable description of the path to obsolescence faced by the industry:
The financial implications of these threats are fairly evident. Start with the increased cost of supporting a network capable of managing and integrating distributed generation sources. Next, under most rate structures, add the decline in revenues attributed to revenues lost from sales foregone. These forces lead to increased revenues required from remaining customers … and sought through rate increases. The result of higher electricity prices and competitive threats will encourage a higher rate of DER additions, or will promote greater use of efficiency or demand-side solutions.
Increased uncertainty and risk will not be welcomed by investors, who will seek a higher return on investment and force defensive-minded investors to reduce exposure to the sector. These competitive and financial risks would likely erode credit quality. The decline in credit quality will lead to a higher cost of capital, putting further pressure on customer rates. Ultimately, capital availability will be reduced, and this will affect future investment plans. The cycle of decline has been previously witnessed in technology-disrupted sectors (such as telecommunications) and other deregulated industries (airlines).
Did you follow that? As ratepayers opt for solar panels (and other distributed energy resources like micro-turbines, batteries, smart appliances, etc.), it raises costs on other ratepayers and hurts the utility’s credit rating. As rates rise on other ratepayers, the attractiveness of solar increases, so more opt for it. Thus costs on remaining ratepayers are even further increased, the utility’s credit even further damaged. It’s a vicious, self-reinforcing cycle:
EEI: vicious cycle of disruptive forces
EEI
One implication of all this — a poorly understood implication — is that rooftop solar fucks up the utility model even at relatively low penetrations, because it goes straight at utilities’ main profit centers. (It’s already happening in Germany.) Right now, distributed solar PV is a relatively tiny slice of U.S. electricity, less than 1 percent. For that reason, utility investors aren’t paying much attention. “Despite the risks that a rapidly growing level of DER penetration and other disruptive challenges may impose,” EEI writes, “they are not currently being discussed by the investment community and factored into the valuation calculus reflected in the capital markets.” But that 1 percent is concentrated in a small handful of utility districts, so trouble, at least for that first set of utilities, is just over the horizon. Utility investors are sleepwalking into a maelstrom.
(“Despite all the talk about investors assessing the future in their investment evaluations,” the report notes dryly, “it is often not until revenue declines are reported that investors realize that the viability of the business is in question.” In other words, investors aren’t that smart and rational financial markets are a myth.)
Bloomberg Energy Finance forecasts 22 percent compound annual growth in all solar PV, which means that by 2020 distributed solar (which will account for about 15 percent of total PV) could reach up to 10 percent of load in certain areas. If that happens, well:
Assuming a decline in load, and possibly customers served, of 10 percent due to DER with full subsidization of DER participants, the average impact on base electricity prices for non-DER participants will be a 20 percent or more increase in rates, and the ongoing rate of growth in electricity prices will double for non-DER participants (before accounting for the impact of the increased cost of serving distributed resources).
So rates would rise by 20 percent for those without solar panels. Can you imagine the political shitstorm that would create? (There are reasons to think EEI is exaggerating this effect, but we’ll get into that in the next post.)
If nothing is done to check these trends, the U.S. electric utility as we know it could be utterly upended. The report compares utilities’ possible future to the experience of the airlines during deregulation or to the big monopoly phone companies when faced with upstart cellular technologies. In case the point wasn’t made, the report also analogizes utilities to the U.S. Postal Service, Kodak, and RIM, the maker of Blackberry devices. These are not meant to be flattering comparisons.
Remember, too, that these utilities are not Google or Facebook. They are not accustomed to a state of constant market turmoil and reinvention. This is a venerable old boys network, working very comfortably within a business model that has been around, virtually unchanged, for a century. A friggin’ century, more or less without innovation, and now they’re supposed to scramble and be all hip and new-age? Unlikely.
So what’s to be done? You won’t be surprised to hear that EEI’s prescription is mainly focused on preserving utilities and their familiar business model. But is that the best thing for electricity consumers? Is that the best thing for the climate?
We’ll dig into those questions in my next post.
8

Tuesday, March 5, 2013

Global Solar Hits Parity Next Year, No Subsidies Needed

Because of strong demand for rooftop solar forecast this year in key markets and further drops in pricing, Deutsche Bank believes the solar industry will transition from subsidized to sustainable in 2014.
The industry passed the 100 gigawatt (GW) threshold in 2012 and because of strong demand expected this year, the Bank expects solar to grow 20% - to 30 GW this year. China, for example, is set for astounding growth.
By Jeff Spross

Deutsche Bank just released new analyses concluding that the global solar market will become sustainable on its own terms by the end of 2014, no longer needing subsidies to continue performing.
The German-based bank said that rooftop solar is looking especially robust, and sees strong demand in solar markets in India, China, Britain, Germany, and the US. As a result, Deutsche Bank actually increased its forecast for solar demand in 2013 to 30 gigawatts - a 20% increase over 2012.
Here's Renew Economy with a summary of Deutsche Banks's logic:
The key for Deutsche is the emergence of unsubsidised markets in many key countries. It points, for instance, to India, where despite delays in the national solar program, huge demand for state based schemes has produced very competitive tenders, in the [12 cents per kilowatt hour] range. Given the country's high solar radiation profile and high electricity prices paid by industrial customers, it says several conglomerates are considering large scale implementation of solar for self consumption.
"Grid parity has been reached in India even despite the high cost of capital of around 10-12 percent," Deutsche Bank notes, and also despite a slight rise in module prices of [3 to 5 cents per kilowatt] in recent months (good for manufacturers).
Italy is another country that appears to be at grid parity, where several developers are under advanced discussions to develop unsubsidized projects in Southern Italy. Deutsche Bank says that for small commercial enterprises that can achieve 50 percent or more self consumption, solar is competitive with grid electricity in most parts of Italy, and commercial businesses in Germany that have the load profile to achieve up to 90 percent self consumption are also finding solar as an attractive source of power generation.
Deutsche bank says demand expected in subsidised markets such as Japan and the UK, including Northern Ireland, is expected to be strong, the US is likely to introduce favourable legislation, including giving solar installations the same status as real estate investment trusts, strong pipelines in Africa and the Middle east, and unexpectedly strong demand in countries such as Mexico and Caribbean nations means that its forecasts for the year are likely to rise.
As Renew Economy also points out, this is the third report in the past month anticipating a bright future for the global solar market: UBS released a report that concluded an "unsubsidized solar revolution" was in the works, "Thanks to significant cost reductions and rising retail tariffs, households and commercial users are set to install solar systems to reduce electricity bills - without any subsidies." And Macquarie Group argued that costs for rooftop solar in Germany have fallen so far that even with subsidy cuts "solar installations could continue at a torrid pace."
Here in America, solar power installations boomed over the course of 2011 and 2012, even as the price of solar systems continued to plunge. To a large extent, the American solar boom has been driven by third party leasing agreements - which are heavily involved in rooftop installation.
Meanwhile, on the international scene, the cost of manufacturing solar panels in China is expected to drop to an all-new low of 42 cents per watt in 2015, and power generated from solar is predicted to undercut that produced by both coal and most forms of natural gas within a decade.


http://www.sustainablebusiness.com/index.cfm/go/news.display/id/24628

Saturday, January 19, 2013

Huge Solar Breakthrough!!!

 http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/01/130118064733.htm

Thin Film Solar Cells: New World Record for Solar Cell Efficiency

Jan. 18, 2013 — In a remarkable feat, scientists at Empa, the Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology, have developed thin film solar cells on flexible polymer foils with a new record efficiency of 20.4% for converting sunlight into electricity. The cells are based on CIGS semiconducting material (copper indium gallium (di)selenide) known for its potential to provide cost-effective solar electricity. The technology is currently awaiting scale-up for industrial applications.
To make solar electricity affordable on a large scale, scientists and engineers the world over have long been trying to develop a low-cost solar cell, which is both highly efficient and easy to manufacture with high throughput. Now a team at Empa's Laboratory for Thin Film and Photovoltaics, led by Ayodhya N. Tiwari, has made (yet another) leap ahead. They achieved a record 20.4% energy conversion efficiency for thin film CIGS solar cells on flexible polymer substrates, a massive improvement over the previous record of 18.7% achieved by the same team in May 2011. Tiwari’s team has been investigating and developing various thin film solar cell technologies for some time. Over the years the laboratory has boosted the photovoltaic conversion efficiency of flexible CIGS solar cells time and again, from 12.8% in 1999 – the group’s first world record – to 14.1% in 2005, 17.6% in 2010 and 18.7% in 2011.
Closing the efficiency gap to silicon wafer cells
The latest in the series of records has been achieved, thanks to innovative ideas and excellent team work in the lab, especially by PhD students Adrian Chirila and Fabian Pianezzi. The team has succeeded in modifying the properties of the CIGS layer, grown at low temperatures, which absorbs light and contributes to the photo-current in solar cells. The cell efficiency value was independently certified by the Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems (ISE) in Freiburg, Germany. What’s more, Empa’s new record efficiency for flexible solar cells now even exceeds the record value of 20.3% for CIGS solar cells on glass substrates – and equals the highest efficiencies for polycrystalline silicon wafer-based solar cells. "We have now – finally – managed to close the "efficiency gap" to solar cells based on polycrystalline silicon wafers or CIGS thin film cells on glass", says Tiwari.
Thin film, lightweight and flexible high-performance solar modules are attractive for numerous applications such as solar farms, roofs and facades of buildings, automobiles and portable electronics and can be produced using continuous roll-to-roll manufacturing processes that offer further cost reductions compared to standard silicon technologies. In other words, they have the potential to enable low-cost solar electricity in the near future. “The series of record efficiencies for flexible CIGS solar cells developed at Empa demonstrates that thin film solar cells can match the excellent performance of polycrystalline silicon cells. Now it is time for the next step, the scale-up of the technology to cover large areas in a cost-efficient roll-to-roll manufacturing process with an industrial partner”, says Gian-Luca Bona the Director of Empa. For this purpose, Empa is collaborating with Flisom, a start-up company involved in industrialization of flexible CIGS solar cells.
The research work has been supported over the years by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF), the Commission for Technology and Innovation (CTI), the Swiss Federal Office of Energy (SFOE) and the EU Framework Programmes.
Story Source:
The above story is reprinted from materials provided by Empa.
Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. For further information, please contact the source cited above.

Friday, January 18, 2013

Solar (PV) Energy For Cars Better Than BioFuels

 http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2013-01/uoc--pbb011613.php

Photovoltaics beat biofuels at converting sun's energy to miles driven

New study shows solar power is not only better in terms of energy efficiency, land use, and greenhouse gas emissions -- but cost competitive, too

In 2005, President George W. Bush and American corn farmers saw corn ethanol as a promising fossil fuel substitute that would reduce both American dependence on foreign oil and greenhouse gas emissions. Accordingly, the 2005 energy bill mandated that 4 billion gallons of renewable fuel be added to the gasoline supply in 2006. That rose to 4.7 billion gallons in 2007 and 7.5 billion in 2012.
Since then, life cycle assessments (LCAs) have shown that corn ethanol has modest if any effect on reducing CO2 emissions and may actually increase them, while posing a threat to natural habitats and food supplies, as food stocks are turned to fuel and marginal lands are put under the plough to keep up with demand. In 2010, fuel ethanol consumed 40 percent of U.S. corn production, and 2012 prices are at record highs. Since the U.S. also accounts for 40 percent of the world's corn, U.S. ethanol production has affected corn prices around the planet.
As electric vehicles (EVs) increasingly enter the market and charging stations are built to serve them, EVs are competing with alternative-fuel vehicles. Using electricity generated by coal-fired plants to power the cars defeats the purpose to some extent, but what if the energy comes from the ultimate clean and renewable source – the sun itself? How would that compete with ethanol in terms of land use, life-cycle emissions, and even cost?
The question, says UCSB Bren School of Environmental Science & Management Professor and LCA expert Roland Geyer, is which makes more sense, growing fuel crops to supply alternative-fuel vehicles with ethanol and other biofuels or using photovoltaics (PV) to directly power battery electric vehicles (BEV)?
"The energy source for biofuels is the sun, through photosynthesis," he says. "The energy source for solar power is also the sun. Which is better?"
To find out, Geyer joined former BrenSchool researcher David Stoms and James Kallaos, of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, to model the relative efficiencies of the technologies at converting a given amount of sunlight to miles driven.
The results, which appear in a paper titled "Spatially Explicit Life Cycle Assessment of Sun-to-Wheels Transportation Pathways in the U.S." and published in the Dec. 26 issue of the journal Environmental Science & Technology, showed photovoltaics (PV) to be much more efficient than biomass at turning sunlight into energy to fuel a car.
"PV is orders of magnitude more efficient than biofuels pathways in terms of land use – 30, 50, even 200 times more efficient – depending on the specific crop and local conditions," says Geyer. "You get the same amount of energy using much less land, and PV doesn't require farm land."
The researchers examined three ways of using sunlight to power cars: a) the traditional method of converting corn or other plants to ethanol; b) converting energy crops into electricity for BEVs rather than producing ethanol; and C) using PVs to convert sunlight directly into electricity for BEVs.
Because land-use decisions are local, Geyer explains, he and his colleagues examined five prominent "sun-to-wheels" energy conversion pathways – ethanol from corn or switchgrass for internal combustion vehicles, electricity from corn or switchgrass for BEVs, and PV electricity for BEVs – for every county in the contiguous United States.
Focusing the LCA on three key impacts – direct land use, life cycle greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, and fossil fuel requirements – the researchers identified PV electricity for battery electric vehicles as the superior sun-to-wheels conversion method.
"Even the most efficient biomass-based pathway…requires 29 times more land than the PV-based alternative in the same locations," the authors write. "PV BEV systems also have the lowest life-cycle GHG emissions throughout the U.S. and the lowest fossil fuel inputs, except in locations that have very high hypothetical switchgrass yields of 16 or more tons per hectare."
PV conversion also has lower GHG emissions throughout the life cycle than do cellulosic biofuels, even in the most optimistic scenario for the latter. "The bottleneck for biofuels is photosynthesis," Geyer says. "It's at best 1-percent efficient at converting sunlight to crop, while today's thin-film PV is at least 10-percent efficient at converting sunlight to electricity.
Finally, while cost was not a key component of the study, Geyer says, "The cost of solar power is dropping, and our quick calculations suggests that with the federal tax credit, electric vehicles are already competitive."
What does this mean for the future?
“What this research taught me is that biomass is simply not a good way of harvesting sunlight,” Geyer explains. “Not because of immature technologies but because of a fundamental physical constraint, the inefficiency of photosynthesis. This fundamental disadvantage will just get worse as PV-powered EVs are getting cheaper and more efficient in the years to come. A search for a silver bullet is under way in energy research, be it artificial photosynthesis or third-generation biofuels. But if there is a silver bullet, I think it is photovoltaics.”