Thin Film Solar Panels Are Here
Egypt, moving forward in its effort to have 20% of its energy from renewable resources by 2020, just announced plans to build a $700 million 100 MW solar power plant in Kom Ombo.
The project is part of a 5-year plan from 2012-2017 geared at making Egypt one of the top generators of solar energy in North Africa, according to electricity ministry undersecretary Aktham Abou el-Ella.
By 2020, we will use more energy storing all of our virtual lives “on the cloud” than we will by flying in airplanes. As we all add more and more of all of our all-too-easily-uploaded data to humanity’s ever growing attic where all our virtual stuff is stored, the need to add more data storage in an environmentally friendly way becomes crucial, because data servers use more and more energy.
But a data center or server farm doesn’t just use energy. It also can actually generate electricity. Data centers generate heat. Heat can be harnessed to create two forms of energy we need; both electricity, and district heat as well (co-generation, or combined heat and power or CHP).
A data center can actually be a source of both valuable heating and create actual megawatts of electricity, just from doing its thing, and storing our virtual stuff.
The Indian government has decided to levy the Clean Energy Cess, or coal tax, on all the coal mined in the country or imported from July 1, 2010. The energy cess was announced by the finance minister Mr. Pranab Mukherjee in this year’s union budget which presented in February.
The Indian government announced the coal tax in order to generate funding for the research, development and deployment of cleaner and renewable energy technologies. A tax of Rs. 50 would be levied on every tonne of coal mined in the country as well as that imported from abroad.
As of April 1 2009, India’s coal reserves stood at 267 billion tonnes. There has been a steady increase in the coal production over the years. The government has a target of mining 461 million tonnes in 2007-08 as against the actual production of 430 million tonnes in 2006-07. Thus the domestic coal mining sector would contribute about $500 million annually while the rest $150 million would be contributed through the import of coal in order to fulfill the demand of 600 million tonnes.
California’s PG&E has just invested $100 million in SunRun, which offers solar power purchase agreements, (in addition to its earlier $61 million investment in Solar City’s solar lease), through its investment arm, Pacific Energy Capital. Some of the California utility investment will help homeowners in other states, like Texas, get $0 down solar.
PG&E’s profits are “decoupled” from electricity sales, in accordance with California state mandates. As a decoupled utility, it earns more by saving electricity than by selling more. When a utility’s profits depend on its customers buying less energy, not more, the motivation is created to help customers shed electrons, or even better, actually send power to the grid. Then PG&E doesn’t have to build as many new gas-fired electric power plants.
Despite the ranting on the Right against decoupling utility profits, it is quite possible for a utility to make very decent money as a decoupled utility. PG&E brings in $13 billion a year, and even the lowliest customer service call center person on their solar line not only has been afforded the training needed to answer solar questions competently, but also makes $25 an hour.
There’s a lot of great solar news out of California this week. Susan wrote about a small town in the Mojave desert the other day that is going 85% solar and now we have this news out of Mendota, California.
We hear it over and over that one of the biggest limitations to solar and wind energy is its intermittent nature. Research recently put out by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, however, indicates that the electric grid can accomodate much more renewable energy than it currently does.
To follow up on that, a new solar project in California — the CalRENEW-1 project built by Meridian Energy near Mendota — is making it clear that this is true in the real world as well. This 5MW project is the first solar farm in California to be connected to the transmission grid. Every other solar project, no matter how big, is connected to distribution lines.
What Meridian had to go through to get this project up, however, is rather ridiculous.
The International Energy Agency (IEA) presented two new solar energy analyses in Valencia, Spain this week, a Solar Photovoltaic Energy Technology Roadmap and a Concentrating Solar Power Technology Roadmap.
The key finding from these is that 20-25% of global electricity production could be from solar energy by 2050.
In a blog post on our sister site, One Block Off the Grid, I just discussed how the United States and how rooftop solar fit into this. Below, mostly from the reports themselves, is a short discussion of what government’s role in all of this needs to be.
French startup McPhy Energy may be making a fortune soon due to a hydrogen storage system it has just developed that could solve problems posed by the intermittent nature of renewable energy.
It isn’t technically feasible to have renewable energy supply us with 100% of our electricity needs, right? Wrong. Renewable energy is prohibitively expensive, right? Wrong.
A new report just put out this week, Roadmap 2050: a practical guide to a prosperous, low-carbon Europe, gets into technical and economic details surrounding these important issues. The report includes contributions from world leading economists and renewable energy experts, including people from McKinsey, KEMA, Imperial College London and Oxford Economics.
The report claims to be the most comprehensive assessment of the viability of zero carbon power supplies available today (focused on Europe).
Researchers at Stanford University have engineered an ultrasharp nanoscale electrode made of gold that can be used to harvest a small electric current from individual algae cells. In experiments so far, the algae cells survive the intrusion, which could mean that larger electric currents could someday be drawn from entire algae colonies.
Algae have been emerging as the biofuel heroes of a sustainable future and the Stanford development could bring it to a new level, by bypassing the carbon footprint of harvesting plants and processing liquid biofuels.
New official stats from China show that renewable energy capacity is growing faster than coal now.
By the end of 2010, hydro, nuclear and wind power should account for 26% of the country’s electricity generation, providing about 250 GW of capacity. “Thermal power”, largely coal-fired power stations, accounts for about 700 GW of capacity. However, 96 GW of the China’s 178 GW of new power capacity will be from renewables in 2010, compared to 80 GW from thermal power. So, the tide may be changing.