You are probably familiar with concentrating solar power (CSP), but a new type of CSP plant, a molten salt CSP plant, has just gotten rolling and you may not yet know why that is important.
THIN FILM SOLAR PANELS
Thin Film Solar Panels Are Here
3M Competes to Make Solar Thermal Cheaper With a Thin Film
Posted in April 20th, 2010
Now even 3M is getting into the solar biz. The huge Minnesota company is famous for the Post-It Note and other mainstays of Western civilization, but now their excellent materials scientists have been put to work creating a reflective foil that can be used to make the (already rather cheap) mirrors in solar thermal trough technology – even cheaper, through mass production.
They are not the first midwestern US giant of industry to enter this field. Alcoa also has a way to make the mirrors in solar thermal trough technology cheaper, through the use of aluminum for the mirror.
3M’s solution is to make a sticky-backed polymer sheath that protects a micro-layer of highly reflective copper and silver. Their new film would reflect more light than traditional mirrors, increasing power output in a given area.
Solar Panels Plus to Install Evacuated Solar Thermal for Green Builder Los Ebanistas
Posted in March 16th, 2010
Solar thermal collectors from Solar Panels Plus, a designer/manufacturer for solar water heating collectors, solar electricity, air conditioning and heating systems are being installed on homes being built in Northern New Mexico by Los Ebanistas Construction.
“We have already installed two solar water heating systems from SPP and have orders for five more,” said Mark Johnson, owner, Los Ebanistas. “The system works extremely well considering the cold climate of Northern New Mexico, and it can easily produce 120ºF water in a snowstorm or on a cloudy day.”
Los Ebanistas Construction is a residential home builder that has long specialized in craftsman adobe homes – a traditional form of green building that utilizes local resources (earth) with a very low carbon footprint.
“We’ve been building homes for thirty years and we are now officially ‘green builders.’” Johnson noted with irony.
Could Mixing Solar + Gas Speed Utility-Scale Solar Deployment?
Posted in March 8th, 2010
A Florida Power and Light hybrid of solar and gas at the Martin Next Generation Solar Energy Center in Florida could provide a road map for helping shepherd utility-scale solar past regulatory roadblocks. Perhaps by combining solar with fossil energy plants (that are always somehow on the fast-track ) we can finally ease utility-scale solar into the marketplace.
At the hybrid gas/solar plant in Martin, a relatively modest 70 MW heliostat solar thermal power plant – but which is nevertheless second in size only to its much larger US heliostat solar thermal prototype that totals 354 MW – SEGS, that has operated since the ’80’s in California’s Mojave – is to be grafted onto an existing natural gas plant; one that is itself the largest in the US.
The capacity of the natural gas plant has been gradually built up over the years. It comprises three 800 MW steam-generating units, two 450 MW combined-cycle units and two 160 MW combustion turbine peaking units, and now totals 3,800 MW.
However, the solar portion is large enough so that because of the size of each source, this pilot project will definitively answer the question: “But is this doable at full-scale?” Small solar projects already sometimes use a small gas turbine for cloudy days backup, but this is a first at this scale.
Larger similar heliostat-based solar thermal projects Brightsource (440 MW) Solar Reserve (150 MW) and Abengoa (250 MW) are currently bogged down in the regulatory review pipeline in California. The difference? Theirs are not married to natural gas plants.
BrightSource Gets Department of Energy Loan Guarantee if Tortoise Issue Solved
Posted in February 24th, 2010
by Susan Kraemer in California, PG&E, grid, policy, solar, solar energy, solar thermal, utilities, utility-scale solar
BrightSource got a boost from the Department of Energy this week with a loan guarantee of $1.37 billion to help build three concentrated solar thermal power plants producing 400 MW of clean solar power in the Mojave Desert of southeastern California.
However, it is predicated upon BrightSource meeting the environmental requirements before closing on the loan, and it is precisely those environmental requirements that have bogged it down. The desert tortoise has held up approval so far. The Bureau of Land Management is leading a federal review of the project with support from DOE.
Feinstein Expands 30% Solar Tax Credit to Include Public Swimming Pools
Posted in December 26th, 2009
When the 30% tax credits as cash grants were instituted with the American Recovery Act, I was doing solar estimates for a small solar start-up in California. I was surprised to find that the 30% solar tax credit (available as a cash grant for businesses) was available for solar thermal - only when it was not used for heating swimming pools. Heating water for showers, dishes, radiant heating system in buildings with solar thermal was eligible, but swimming pools were excluded.
Yet I found that heating the swimming pool was the greatest need that the apartment owners I was contacting had, and it was such a staggering source of greenhouse gas emissions, that I wrote up my suggestion that “like heating apartment pools” should be instated as the measure we use when we say doing something is like taking some number of “cars-off-the-road” to “measure” carbon reduction.
There Oughta Be A Law - Solar Thermal On Every Home
Posted in December 17th, 2009
People typically don’t think of installing solar thermal when they build or retrofit their homes. Most people just don’t follow renewable energy news and have just have never thought of it. (Just like most of us wouldn’t know to build our homes to be earthquake-proof either if it wasn’t in our building code.)
A requirement to add solar thermal into building codes can be the best driver of change that has benefits for everybody, by reducing fossil energy use by from 60% to 80%.
Abengoa Solar to Supply PG&E From 250 MW in Mojave Desert
Posted in October 27th, 2009
A contract has just been signed to deliver 600 gigawatthours a year of solar power between the US division of Spain’s giant Abengoa, and PG&E in California. Abengoa Solar hopes to succeed where BrightSource recently failed to overcome local NIMBY issues and Senator Feinstein, in its plan to site a 250 MW solar thermal plant in the made-for-solar Mojave Desert.