THIN FILM SOLAR PANELS

Archive for August, 2011

Piezoelectric Buzzer. Image obtained with thanks from Gophi on the English Wikipedia. Click image to view larger version of it.

MicroGen Systems has been working on electricity-generating chips designed to power wireless sensors like those used to monitor tire pressure and environmental conditions.

These chips convert the mechanical energy of vibrations into electricity, which is then used to charge a small battery, which in turn powers the sensors.

If the chips are capable of generating adequate electrical energy, then they could mostly (or maybe even completely) eliminate the need to replace the batteries.

The core of MicroGen’s chips is a 1 cm2 array of silicon cantilevers that oscillate when the chip is jostled. At the base of the cantilevers is a bit of piezoelectric material: when it’s strained by vibrations, it produces a voltage that can be used to generate electrical current. Voltage is what causes current to flow.

The array of cantilevers is mounted on top of a postage-stamp-sized, thin-film battery that it charges. The current passes from the piezoelectric array through an electrical device that converts the current to an appropriate DC current that is suitable for charging the battery. When the chip is shaken by the vibrations of a rotating tire, for example, it can produce about 200 microwatts of power.

An efficient vibration-energy-harvesting device has the potential to be very beneficial because there are so many vibrating devices, such as mechanical machines, in general, including automobiles, generators, engines in general, and fans, as well as humans walking, arm and hand movements, and much more.

David Culler, chair of computer science at the University of California, Berkeley said: ”If you can get it down to a small size, 200 microwatts is potentially quite useful.”

Robert Andosca, the founder and president of MicroGen Systems, said that what sets this technology apart from other piezoelectric generators is the fact that it is made of a non-toxic material known as PZT.

200 microwatts of power might not be much, but if it is small enough, it could be very beneficial to tiny sensors that need to be integrated into small places.

h/t Technology Review

The days of using lightbulbs as a political football may be drawing to a swift and un-melodramatic close, now that the company Lighting Science Group has announced the development of a new 60-watt equivalent LED lightbulb that will retail for under $15.00. The sub-$15 price point is critical, because given that the new bulb uses about 85% less electricity than a conventional incandescent bulb, the payback is a mere eight months. On top of that, the life expectancy of the new LED lightbulb is about 8 years compared to whatever for those pesky conventional bulbs that keep burning out, so there is the potential for a quick and widespread breakthrough into the mass market within the next few years.

Coal Power and High Efficiency LED Lightbulbs

The new bulb will be introduced globally, starting with India this year, and it was designed specifically for the Indian power grid’s variable quality. It may also prove to be a key factor in India’s management of greenhouse gas emissions from coal fired power plants. According to a press release from Lighting Science, India plans to build 80 new coal plants to keep up with energy demand over the next five years, but a full switch to LED lighting could reduce that load by up to 40 percent.  If that figure seems a bit high, check out this lightbulb infographic to get a picture of the impact that lightbulbs have on energy consumption in the U.S.

Even Cheaper LED Lighting

Meanwhile, over in the U.S.A researchers at the University of Florida are on to a new LED lightbulb design that could result in an even cheaper LED. The new approach is based on semiconductors composed of layers of different materials including quantum dots, which are tiny nanoscale crystals. Though this hybrid composition results in a more efficient LED, until now the catch has been that different processes are needed to apply the different kinds of layers, and that adds up to a more expensive LED lightbulb. The  Florida team has developed a way to design the structure so that only one process is needed. As an added bonus, the new design is more efficient and has a longer lifespan that conventional LED lightbulbs.

Lightbulb War Fizzles Out

At the beginning of this summer the majority party in Congress was still dead set on clinging to incandescent lightbulbs, but the hullabaloo seems to be dying quickly. Little wonder, because Lighting Science is not the only company introducing low-cost, high efficiency lighting alternatives.It’s not just the consumer market, either; LEDs are popping up all over the place, from modestly scaled designs for  U.S. Navy bunk lights to gigantic airport parking garages. Some legislators are still carrying a torch for incandescents, but the rest of the world is moving on.

Image: Cash register by seanmcmenemy on flickr.com.

Tina Casey on Twitter: @TinaMCasey

Even though I wrote these two stories “Solyndra Spells Disaster for DOE Loan Guarantee Program,” (Nov. 2010) and “Was the DOE Loan Guarantee for Solyndra a Mistake?” (May 2010), I was still shocked by the news this morning that Solyndra plans to file for bankruptcy. It’s about the worst outcome possible for a company that the Department of Energy has touted as a game-changing solar tech company, and which received an unusual amount of government support and attention.

The DOE gave Solyndra a flagship $535 million loan guarantee in 2009, and in September 2009, held a press conference and ground-breaking ceremony with speeches by Vice President Joe Biden, then-California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, and DOE Secretary Steven Chu (see photo above). Biden said to the audience back then: “These are jobs that won’t be exported,” and “You guys have figured it out” to Solyndra execs. Fast-forward about two years to this morning, and neither of those things are true.

A half-year after Solyndra’s ground breaking ceremony in 2009, President Obama visited the company’s factory in the spring of 2010. That was actually the spark for my original article wondering: If Solyndra has one of the highest manufacturing costs of its solar peers, and Obama attaches his administration to the company, what happens if those costs never come down? Something bad. We’ll start to see the full blow-out of that choice over the coming weeks, but it immediately means a whole lot of finger-pointing by the Republicans at President Obama, the DOE, the DOE’s clean power support programs, and in particular, the DOE’s loan guarantee program.

Loan guarantee program

The loan guarantee program by its nature picks winners and losers, in contrast to other subsidies programs that provide incentives for general sectors and not individual companies. Loan guarantees essentially serve as a promise by the government to make good on a loan if the company can’t, and typically enable better interest rates and lower costs than would otherwise be available to a company for project financing. Often, these loan guarantees have turned into a loan from the Treasury.

Even before the Solyndra disaster, the loan guarantee program has come under attack for a variety of reasons like that it hasn’t been keeping electronic records as detailed as it should. The Inspector General found earlier this year that the loan guarantee program could “not readily demonstrate … how it resolved or mitigated relevant risks prior to granting loan guarantees.” In other words, it couldn’t explain how it decided one company would be a more successful technology that should receive funding, vs, say, a competitor.

Frustratingly, the DOE hasn’t answered many questions about Solyndra. DOE loan chief Jonathan Silver previously maintained in interviews with us that the Solyndra deal was a solid one (see video of his talk at Green:Net 2011 below). And the DOE has also decided to not disclose much about the review process or terms of the Solyndra deal.

I predict that, unfortunately, Solyndra could be the nail in the coffin for the DOE loan guarantee program. The program itself is already controversial and is facing budget cuts by Republicans, and Solyndra’s bankruptcy is the perfect weapon to be used to make that cut.

Republican outcry

Solyndra has also been the target of an investigation by House Republicans, spearheaded by the Energy Committee’s Republican chair, Rep. Fred Upton. Upton started an investigation into the DOE loan guarantee to Solyndra back in February. And in July of this year, the Committee approved a resolution to move forward with a subpoena for the Office of Management and Budget to get access to documents about the Department of Energy’s $535 million loan guarantee to Solyndra.

Upton is now loudly saying the equivalent of “I told you so.” In a statement released on Wednesday, he writes:

We smelled a rat from the onset. As the highly celebrated first stimulus loan guarantee awarded by the DOE, the $535 million loan for Solyndra was suspect from day one. Our investigation to protect American taxpayers has revealed that in the rush to get stimulus cash out the door, despite repeated claims by the Administration to the contrary, some bets were bad from the beginning. . . It is clear that Solyndra was a dubious investment, but DOE doubled down in March of this year and restructured the loan, possibly further increasing taxpayers’ liability. That is a question we want answered. In this time of record debt such disregard for taxpayer dollars cannot be tolerated.

Obama was supposed to talk about clean energy in a speech next week, and Vice President Joe Biden said at the National Clean Energy Summit in Las Vegas this week that the state of the clean power industry in the U.S. “is at a crossroads.” I am very interested to see how exactly the DOE will explain such a high-profile bad bet, that some in the media like myself, clearly saw as a mistake.

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Wind turbines currently supply seven percent of all electricity in Kansas

Polling data shows the percentage of Americans concerned about climate change is falling, down 12 percent over the past 10 years, according to a recent Gallup Poll, and in some parts of the country the term “global warming” is practically taboo. So why, then, are some of the states with the biggest populations of “global-warming skeptics” also some of the states making the biggest investments in renewable energy?

energyNOW! correspondent Lee Patrick Sullivan visited Kansas, where some clean energy advocates say they’ve figured out what it takes to convince climate-change skeptics to invest in renewables and energy efficiency. Their advice: stop talking about global warming and change the conversation to energy conservation. You can watch the full video below:

“Almost half of all Kansans don’t really buy into the whole global warming idea,” said Dorothy Barnett of the Climate and Energy Project, a group working to reduce fossil-fuel use in Kansas. “They don’t buy the climate science.” But Barnett’s group is avoiding the climate change controversy by offering cash incentives for communities to reduce energy use.

The new approach seems to be working, says one town competing for the $100,000 top prize in the Climate and Energy Project’s “Take Charge!” challenge to lower energy use. Goodland, a small town located in western Kansas, has reduced its energy use by five percent. “I would say primarily the motivation here is people who want to help their pocketbook, maybe earn the community some cash on the back end and also have a good competition with their neighbors,” said city manager Douglas Gerber.

Saving money isn’t the only motivator to cutting energy use in the state — religious faith is also playing a big role. The Kansas Interfaith Power and Light Initiative has signed up more than 10,000 congregations who pledge to incorporate creation stewardship and energy efficiency measures into their practices since 2008. But the effort has run into resistance because of its acceptance of the theory of global warming, says one of the initiative’s founders.

“I did bring it (the IPL pledge) to my Pastoral Council, but we couldn’t get it signed,” said Father Kerry Ninemire, of St. Mary’s Church in Salina, Kansas. His parishioners refused to sign it, he said, because of the climate change language contained in the pledge. Father Ninemire was able to convince his parish to take the Initiative’s energy efficiency advice, and reduced energy use in the church and high school 10 percent by switching to efficient lighting and programmable thermostats.

This shift in thinking isn’t limited to conservation, however. Wind energy is growing across the state, creating green jobs and emission-free electricity. Kansas currently gets seven percent of its electricity from wind, and the state has the second-highest wind energy potential in the U.S. behind Texas. To many Kansans, all those potential electrons from the near-constant wind look like dollar signs. “We don’t need to produce wind energy, necessarily, for anything other than the economic side of it,” said Mark Richardson of the Reno County Wind Energy Task Force.

Remember that whole debate over whether moving to cloud computing is a greener option? Well, data center monitoring startup Sentilla is introducing an analytics tool that can predict whether moving your company’s IT to cloud computing (both private and public) is a smart play from an energy bill perspective.

Sentilla’s tool drills down into all of the cost metrics for a potential cloud customer — like buying equipment, personnel costs, maintenance fees, software licensing, as well as power consumption — and helps the customer determine whether adopting cloud computing is a good decision or not. But given the tool is granular enough to drill down into the effects of the cost of power consumption on the overall decision, it will be a valuable way to highlight how energy-efficient or not cloud computing can be on an individual basis.

Many people think cloud computing is a more energy-efficient choice in general compared to running in-house IT operations. Data center energy expert Jonathan Koomey has pointed out on our site that cloud computing is more efficient than in-house IT for reasons of economies of scale, diversity and aggregation, and flexibility among other reasons.

According to a report, created by research firm Verdantix and sponsored by AT&T, cloud computing could enable companies to save $12.3 billion off their energy bills. That translates into carbon emission savings of 85.7 million metric tons per year by 2020. Last year, Pike Research found that cloud computing could lead to a 38-percent reduction in worldwide data center energy use by 2020, compared to what the growth of data center energy consumption would be without cloud computing. And another study from Microsoft, Accenture and WSP Environment and Energy last year found that moving business applications to the cloud could cut the associated per-user carbon footprint by 30 percent for large, already-efficient companies and as much as 90 percent for the smallest and least efficient businesses.

Other studies have also found that cloud computing isn’t always the most energy-efficient computing option, and in certain instances, the cloud can be more energy-intensive than traditional in-office computing. A report from University of Melbourne researcher Rod Tucker and his team, which I wrote about for GigaOM Pro (subscription required), found that cloud computing can indeed save energy when it leads simply to the consolidation of servers, but looking at three different applications of cloud computing — storage, software and processing —  energy efficiency savings are negated in some scenarios.

Computing and the Internet consume a significant amount of the world’s electricity. According to Koomey’s latest research, the total electricity use by data centers in 2010 was 1.3 percent of all electricity use for the world, and 2 percent of all electricity use for the U.S. That wasn’t even as much of a growth as anticipated by many researchers, thanks to both the recession and data center operators embracing more energy-efficient choices like virtualization.

Image courtesy of The Planet.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
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