THIN FILM SOLAR PANELS

Archive for December, 2010

This is a guest post by the guys from TestFreaks.com, a great product reviews aggregator.

Sports cars are known to be the playthings of the elite. You can often find the expensive dream machines ripping it up along hidden valley roads or stored in pristine garages. But a new breed of exotic sports car is now on the market, and this one is actually helping to pave the way for a vehicle revolution.

That sports car is known as the Tesla Roadster, 2.5 and instead of gulping fossil fuels the beast runs on electricity. It doesn’t require imported electricity to run either, but simple house juice feeds it. In fact, if we step back and take a look at the overall operations of the $128,000 vehicle, it appears that this is a good model for the future of vehicles. But let’s take a look.

How is a Tesla Roadster Different?

The Tesla Roadster does not rely on a gas-powered engine. Instead it gets it power from 6,831 Panasonic built lithium ion cells, the type of cells that are not unlike those in many consumer devices. The cells give the car a 245-mile travel range per charge. And the power is silent, unlike a comparable gas engine. Instead of tearing down the boulevard in a loud display of power, the Tesla will silently slip by, stealing its way into the night.

Is it practical?

Outside of the initial sticker shock (we did mention the $128k, right?), ownership of the Tesla is not expensive. A full charge will cost on the average around $8, which is much cheaper than the gasoline counterpart. And it will not take a full evening’s charge to top off the Tesla’s electrical tank, either. A charge will require from 4 to 6 hours, depending on whether the source power is 110v or 220v. This makes it easy to drive the 200+ miles to grandma’s, visit for pie and catch up while charging, then drive back. Tesla is in talks with retailers, hotels, and restaurants about installing recharger stations, allowing you to foray much farther from home and still have it conveniently topped off while you do other things.

Of course, this is not as quick as pulling into a gas station and filling it up, but technology is under development to allow high speed charging from a commercial source. For now it does require a little advance route planning, but the savings in fossil fuel is probably worth it. Not to mention the quiet ride. In fact, it is such a quiet ride that you could consider checking out portable DVD player reviews to pick a great player and let a passenger watch a show for the ride back home.

National Power Grid Impact

The Tesla also shows that the impact to the nation’s power grid for electric vehicle ownership is very minor. For example, charging a Tesla Roadster is about the equivalence of running four plasma screen TVs. According to Camille Ricketts, communications manager for Tesla,

We don’t see the grid being overtaxed. There’s plenty of evidence to suggest that even if everyone on your block has one of these, there’s nothing that would have to be changed about how you receive your electricity. I don’t foresee the need for new coal-powered plants to power electric vehicles.

Research by Duke Energy, based in North Carolina, adds to this by stating that ownership of plug-in vehicles by every household would only increase the demand by 10 percent. And according to Connecticut Light and Power President Jeff Butler,

With electric vehicles, our existing electric system offers our customers an alternative fuel source for a more sustainable transportation solution

So it appears that the growth and adoption of plug-in electric vehicles would not force an undue strain on the existing national power grid. The Tesla shows this to be true today. And, in case you were curious, the on-board battery packs last for seven to ten years before replacement is required.

Tesla Making Inroads

Obviously, an expensive electric sports car is something that may not find a waiting market in today’s economy, but it is making inroads into its niche. You will find over 1,300 Teslas on the roads today in over 30 countries, but that is just since the first delivery in 2008. And Panasonic, the maker of the battery cells for the vehicle, has invested $30 million into the company since 2003.

But it isn’t just the manufacturing partners that are investing in the Tesla concept. Vehicle manufacturing giant Toyota has invested $50 million into the company, and they also have a contract with Tesla to help develop a plug-in version of their own RAV4 crossover vehicle. The companies are seeing the practicality and success of the Tesla, and are betting on its platform.

Electric Vehicles are the Future

Of course, it isn’t just Tesla and Toyota that are betting big on electric cars. General Motors is producing the hybrid plug-in Chevy Volt, and Nissan is scheduled to release its Leaf vehicle next year. And the market for slightly more affordable, working-class electric cars is already in place. In fact, General Electric plans to buy over 25,000 such vehicles by 2015 to replace its aging fossil fuel driven fleet.

As the Tesla acceptance and ease of ownership shows, having an electric vehicle can make life easier for the owner. You would never have to leave the house without a fully-charged vehicle, as long as you remember to put it on charge when you park it. But why are they better?

Efficiency is the Key

The simple reason for electric vehicle ownership comes down to one word – efficiency. The typical internal combustion engine only manages to extract about 5 to 10 percent of the energy in its fuel. By comparison, an electric motor can extract upwards of 70 to 80 percent from its power source.

In the end equation, such a difference in operational efficiencies can lead to better use of resources. Of course, it should be noted that the electric car has to be more efficient to overcome the difference in energy storage per pound between liquid fuel and batteries. But it is that efficient and more, making it one in our favor.

It is great to think that when future generations look back at the time we shifted from fossil fuel driven vehicles to clean electric ones, it was a battery-driven sports car that led the way for the change. This proves once again that the value of toys, especially the clever, fun ones, cannot be overstated. In fact, they might even need to be studied.

Michael Kanellos at Greentech media has a story about an interesting concept for energy reduction that is new to me: switching a data center to DC power.

SAP is making some energy retrofits to save money, and while the three biggest savers are the usual ones that we all know about (substitute a solar array for utility power, switch lighting to LEDs, cut airfares by videoconferencing, ) the fourth caught my attention. SAP is converting their data center to DC.

Solar panels make power in DC current, and they lose some efficiency by having to be converted (that’s what inverters do) to AC. So this will leverage the investment they are also making in solar: about $1.2 million. Like most businesses who get their own renewable power, they will save big time just by making their own energy with solar.

But, their planned solar array would produce about 15% more if it could be used without an inverter by being delivered directly in its native DC current. A 24 KW DC system will deliver about 20 KW of power once converted to AC. Conversion to AC loses about 15%.

They figure that with this move to go DC in the data center, if the solar was able to deliver its DC current straight to the data center without any losses due to conversion to AC, that would save as much as 40 percent of their power consumption.

Without their own solar, but just regular utility AC, they calculate conversion to DC for the data center would save only 15 to 20 percent.

This is an exciting experiment. Nobody has tried this, to my knowledge, at least not on this scale. Off-gridders and RV-ers use DC appliances so that one tiny solar panel can more efficiently power a computer and a fridge etc, but SAP is on a different scale.

Alternatively, just to convert the data center to DC current, without going solar, would involve installing a ” rectifier” that can convert grid AC power to DC to run the computers and storage equipment. DC rectifiers save power by reducing the number of times power gets converted from AC to DC and vice versa before it powers a server.

But if they could eliminate the step of converting to AC, using solar off the roof, the DC rectifier could take a nap and just take raw solar power in its natural state: DC. This would save money twice: no $128,000 rectifiers to convert grid AC to DC, plus no inverters to convert the roof solar to AC, before it gets “rectified” again back into DC.

Worth taking a look at how this could be done: an exciting experiment.

Image: Daniel Howherd

Susan Kraemer@Twitter

The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, otherwise known as DARPA, has been developing next generation solar technology and a slew of other game-changing innovations designed to drive the military into a more sustainable future. The latest example is a new kind of  bioplastic made from yeast. And what, you may ask, does bioplastic have to do with national defense?

Bioplastic and National Defense

As it turns out, bioplastic has everything to do with national defense.  Disposing of waste is part and parcel of the “logistical nightmare” and troop risk equation that fossil fuels pose for overseas bases. Whether trucked off site to landfills or burned on site, the disposal operation requires fuel and plenty of it. Just to give you some idea of the volume involved, a couple of years ago the military’s Strategic Environmental Research and Development Program (SERDP) estimated that the 135,000 U.S. troops stationed in Iraq were generating 446 million pounds of plastic waste annually.

Bioplastic and Composting

Now, if all that plastic was bioplastic, composting would be an option. And if you don’t think the U.S. military is interested in all that hippy-dippy composting stuff, guess again. They’ve been investigating both food waste and sewage sludge composting (pdf), so bioplastic composting is the next logical step. It sure beats soaking solid waste in diesel fuel and putting it in a burn box, which is the conventional practice.

Bioplastic and Yeast

DARPA’s contribution to all this is in the form of a company called SyntheZyme, which it selected to develop a new form of bioplastic. Lead researcher Richard Gross of New York University’s Polytechnic Institute came up with a unique, low cost  fermentation process to produce the omega-hydroxyfatty acids that form the building blocks of bioplastic, using plant oils and a common form of yeast called Candida tropicalis. The process does not require fossil fuel energy, and the result is an all-biodegradable, durable, moisture-resistant bioplastic that can be used for different kinds of packing films, bags, and gloves.

Bioplastic and Flexible Logistics

Interestingly, the idea is to use the bioplastic as packaging material, then break it down and use it for biodiesel on site rather than composting it. That part of the research is still under way, and if successful it demonstrates multipurpose flexibility that DARPA and other Department of Defense agencies envision for the fighting force of the future, in which energy is harvested or scavenged from a variety of renewable resources, including garbage. Let’s hope that certain politicians change their head-in-the-sand position on climate change and start adapting this mindset for civilian life, too.

Image: Yeast by eddie.welker on flickr.com.

A unique high tech financing organization called Shrink Nanotechnologies is putting its money behind a new kind of electronic glue that could help bring about a significant improvement in photovoltaic cells. The “glue” is actually a means of switching molecules on the surface of nanocrystals, in order to achieve a significant increase in their ability to transfer electrons from one to the other.

Electronic Glue and Low Cost Solar Energy

Nanocrystals are emerging as a promising format for the next generation of solar cells, but there is a catch. Though they are good at collecting energy in the form of light, they are not very adept at transferring that energy anywhere else. The culprit is the bulky organic molecules on the surface of nanocrystals. The new technology, developed by Dr. Dmitri Talpin of the University of Chicago, consists of engineering nanocrystals capped with inorganic molecules. This increases the “electronic coupling” between nanocrystals. It’s somewhat analogous to gluing individual crystals together into one continuous mass, hence the name “electronic glue.”

Benefits of Nanocrystals

If commercially successful, electronic glue could lower the cost of photovoltaic cells. Cells made from the new nanocrystals would be easier (and cheaper) to manufacture, because they could be made through a printing process. They could use alternative low-cost materials instead of larger, more expensive crystals such as silicon, and they could use nanocrystals that capture a broader spectrum of light.

Shink Nanotechnologies

Cleantechnica covered Shrink last year, when the company formed a subsidiary to commercialize a new nanocrystal solar film technology based on a concept inspired by Shrinky Dinks. The new product will be developed by a new subsidiary called BlackBox Semiconductor.

Image: Glue on by Harmony on flickr.com.

By far the greatest threat coal poses is to future climate.  But even regulations that only seek to reduce its more immediate health threats could cut coal plants in the US by 20%, according to a report from coal industry consulting firm The Brattle Group, via Electricity Forum.

Even aside from regulations specifically to lower greenhouse gas emissions, if the EPA mandates further reductions in sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxide, particulates, mercury and other harmful emissions by 2015, 40 to 55 Gigawatts will likely be retired.

Another  11-12 Gigawatts would be shut down, if cooling towers are required, with 75% of the reduction coming from the oldest, dirtiest coal plants, that are mostly in the Midwest.

New mandates in combination would reduce the number of coal power plants by about 20%. This would be even without greenhouse gas regulation.

To replace coal power from the oldest dirtiest plants, natural gas power plant conversions would likely increase.

However, since 2009, renewable energy and particularly wind power has been the fastest growing new power on the grid.

The Recovery Act is responsible, with one provision in particular, Section 1603 cash grants covering 30% of the project costs for companies and organizations  unable to take a tax credit.

At this rate, we could replace coal with 60 Gigawatts of wind by 2020:
According to Clean Energy States, as of early 2010, wind has received 87% of the nearly $3.6 billion in Section 1603 cash grants that were awarded in 2009, and the tax provision was responsible for getting 6.2 Gigawatts of new wind on the grid in its first year.

This and other expiring provisions of The Recovery Act are to be voted on in the final version of the tax bill Monday.

Image: Artist Jason de Caires Taylor

Susan Kraemer@Twitter