THIN FILM SOLAR PANELS

Archive for March, 2010

Environment America (EA) released a report titled “Building a Solar Future” this week stating that the US should aim to obtain 10% or more of its total energy consumption from the sun by 2030.

Environment America found that “a comprehensive suite of public policy strategies can remove many of the common barriers to solar energy development and help to make this vision a reality.”

And if you look at where the US sits compared to other nations on solar energy and solar technology, you can see that it really needs to put these policies into practice.

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California has taken strong action to promote or require renewable energy. It is the national leader on this front. Currently, it’s renewable energy standard is 33% by 2020.

However, with the passage of new legislation in Colorado, Colorado is now nipping close at its heels.

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A new industry poll published in E&P, the world’s leading publication for oil and gas professionals, reveals that worldwide concern about climate and economic risks from fossil fuels is very high.

These are quite different results  from a Gallup poll on a reduction in climate concerns widely publicized yesterday, showing that conservatives’ belief that climate change is occurring has dropped a full 20 points in the last year to just 30%, obscuring a relatively minor rise of 2% as liberals concern levels rose to 74%.

The threat to the climate is a great concern globally at 83%, with 76% of respondents worrying about future fossil energy shortages. The rising cost of fossil fuels is the biggest worry overall with 90% of the 9,000 respondents in 22 countries.

A large majority of the respondents support more government intervention to build more renewable energy to solve climate change and reduce the cost of extracted energy. (more…)

Starting at an amusement park in South Korea, but perhaps expanding much further in the future, a new type of large electric vehicle magnetically pulls power out of buried electrical strips under the road (or “recharging roads”).

This online electric vehicle (OLEV) may be “one of the most significant technical gains in the 21st century” according to its creators at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST).

The vehicle was launched at Seoul Grand Park in southern Seoul this week. If all goes well, it will soon be tried out on a bus route in Seoul as well. After that, who knows?

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Moser Baer says it has upped the conversion efficiency of its amorphous silicon single-junction thin-film modules from 6% to 7.3%, which translates into a module wattage improvement of 400W/panel from 340W/panel (for full-size 5.7m² .......