THIN FILM SOLAR PANELS

Archive for May, 2010

Until this year, California homeowners have usually arranged to have their solar installations slightly undersized, because it didn’t pay to get stuck with excess “roll-over” kilowatt hours at the true-up period at the end of each year. But that will change in six months.

If voters are not tricked by Big Oil into repealing California’s AB32 climate bill; starting in 2011,  Californians will be paid for excess renewable power they make at the end of each year – or they can choose to roll-over extra kilowatt hours and use them later.

As part of meeting the renewable energy requirements to reduce greenhouse gases, the CPUC is scheduled to decide by January 2011 what exact amount will be paid – per kilowatt hour – to individual homeowners and businesses that produce an annual excess of solar or wind power for the grid.

To help policy makers with fine-tuning this decision – to a Goldilocks-like just-right fairness to both sides – Bernard Chabot, the French expert in Feed-in Tariff policy design is offering an advanced Feed-In Tariff workshop in San Francisco  on July 13th. Investors and other interested parties are welcome, and it is free. (more…)

The U.S. EPA is working on new rules for the disposal of coal fly ash, which is the stuff left over when coal is burned at power plants.  And not a moment too soon!  For the past few weeks attention has been focused on British Petroleum’s devastating oil spill, but it wasn’t too long ago that a manmade lake holding 5.4 million cubic yards of coal ash slurry gave way in Tennessee and released a flood of coal ash that smashed through 300 acres of rural neighborhoods and into the Emory River.

Cleanup for the Tennessee disaster alone is estimated to total about $1.2 billion over the next few years and with about 900 other coal ash landfills and liquid impoundments peppered across the U.S., that’s a lot of expensive accidents waiting to happen.  The race is on for EPA to establish some kind of order in what has been a regulatory free-for-all.

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3M, the company behind Post-it among many other products, has teamed up with the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) to rev up the development of its low cost thin film solar energy and concentrating solar energy technologies. The $7.33 million partnership, which also includes biofuels technology development, is the second big renewable energy announcement by 3M this week.

The company has also announced that will contribute its high efficiency ceramic-fiber and aluminum cables to the ambitious Desertec solar energy project, which envisions a network of solar power plants in Africa supplying renewable energy to Europe.  On top of that, 3M execs had some nice things to say about the importance of having a federal government platform to help take the company’s technology to market sooner rather than later.  Hey, does that mean corporate giant 3M is for – gasp – socialism?

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In what could be very good news for the nascent electric vehicle industry, a survey by the Shelton Group – which polled 1,312 consumers across the US – found that 20.1 percent of Americans say they will “reduce their gas consumption in response” to the news about the oil gushing from the sea floor in the Gulf of Mexico.

“For years our research has shown America is a see-it-to-believe-it nation. Before we
make changes, we need to see things with our own eyes or have a personal connection
to something, said Suzanne Shelton, president of Shelton Group. “If Americans start seeing a lot of oil-covered pelicans or dying dolphins, these numbers will likely go even higher,”

The combined impact of the oil spill and the recent mine disaster in West Virginia has caused over 40 percent of Americans to think about the “human and environmental costs” associated with their own energy consumption, according to the Shelton Group poll. (more…)

Bringing bioengineering to architecture, UCBerkeley Professors Luke Lee in Bioengineering and Maria-Paz Guttierez in the architecture department are pioneering a new type of thin film building membrane, creating a material structured at the nano and micro scale that can substitute for energy used for climate control in buildings.

In a project recently proposed to the National Science Foundation, they are working on a “skin” that works like nature’s skins to control humidity, light and heat in buildings the same way that nature does in our skin, without the use of electricity or mechanical elements.

Their prototype lense for use in their biomimic Self-Activated Building Envelope Regulation (SABER), reacts to changes in the building’s atmosphere by  triggering microscopic openings in the membrane.