Lifeboat Foundation

The combination of rooftop and utility scale solar met 100 per cent of demand in South Australia for the first time on Sunday, reaching a milestone that will surely be repeated many times over – and for longer periods – in the future.

The milestone was reached at 12.05pm grid time (Australian eastern standard time), with rooftop solar providing 992MW, or 76.3 per cent of state demand, and utility scale solar providing a further 315MW – meaning all three of the state’s big solar farms, Bungala 1m Bungala 2 and Tailem Bend were operating at full capacity.

Huanghe Hydropower Development has connected a 2.2 GW solar plant to the grid in the desert in China’s remote Qinghai province. The project is backed by 202.8 MW/MWh of storage.

Chinese state-owned utility Huanghe Hydropower Development has finished building the world’s largest solar power project in a desert in the northwestern Chinese province of Qinghai.

Chinese inverter manufacturer Sungrow, which supplied the inverters, said that the 2.2 GW solar plant was built in five phases. It involved an investment of RMB15.04 billion ($2.2 billion) and includes 202.8 MW/MWh of storage capacity. The company announced the storage system as a solar+storage project in mid-May, but at the time it did not reveal that it was to be connected to a giant solar plant.

Continue reading “World’s largest solar plant goes online in China” »

Organic photovoltaics are a third-generation solar cell technology made of electron donor and electron acceptor materials instead of conventional semiconductor p-n junctions. The performance of this alternative solar cell technology has improved significantly over the past few years and it is now comparable to that of classical inorganic solar cells, both in terms of charge carrier yields (i.e., electrical current generation) and solar spectrum matching.

The only feature of organic photovoltaics that still lags behind traditional solar cells is its achievable voltage (V_OC, which stands for open circuit voltage). As electrical power is the product of voltage and current, however, the poor V_OC of organic solar cells currently prevents their successful commercialization.

Researchers at the Institute of Materials for Electronics and Energy Technology (i-MEET) in Germany and the National Hellenic Research Foundation (NHRF) in Greece have been investigating specific features of materials used to build organic photovoltaics that could enable greater efficiencies and achievable voltages. Their paper, published in Nature Energy, shows that materials with long exciton lifetimes could be particularly promising for the creation of efficient organic solar cells.

The unlikely association of Japan’s Self-Defense Forces with adorable anime characters could reflect a deep-seated discomfort with the nation’s military history.

Research on solar cells to secure renewable energy sources are ongoing around the world. The Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI) in South Korea succeeded in developing eco-friendly color Cu(In, Ga)Se2 (CIGS) thin-film solar cells.

CIGS thin-film solar cells are used to convert sunlight into electrical energy and are made by coating multiple thin films on a glass substrate. They have a relatively higher absorption coefficient among non-silicon based cells, resulting in high conversion efficiency and long stability. Also, they require less raw materials compared to silicon-based cells; hence less process and material costs.

One downside has been the difficulty in commercialization as they use the buffer layer which contains toxic heavy metal, cadmium. Thus, the ETRI team replaced the cadmium sulfide (CdS) buffer layer with zinc (Zn) based materials — which is not harmful — and managed to achieve approximately 18% conversion efficiency; thus eliminating the obstacle to commercialization.

While the future of the clean energy proposal remains uncertain, the majority of Americans have been reading from the same page regarding what needs to be done: Dramatically cutting down the country’s reliance on fossil fuels over the next two decades is critical to lowering greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and address climate change, with six in 10 U.S. adults saying they would favor policies with this energy goal. Thankfully, scientists have been researching alternative energy solutions like wind and solar power for decades, including lesser-known sources that may seem a little unusual or even downright ridiculous and unrealistic.

You can chalk up harvesting energy from blackholes to the latter category.

Fifty years ago, British mathematical physicist, Roger Penrose, proposed a seemingly absurd idea how an alien society (or future humans) could harvest energy from a rotating black hole by dropping an object just outside its sphere of influence also known as the ergosphere where it could gain negative energy. Since then, nobody has been able to verify the viability of this seemingly bizarre idea— that is until now.

Circa 2011 could be used for spaceships and rebreather spacesuits.

Solar cell bonded to recently developed catalyst can harness the sun, splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen.

David L. Chandler, MIT News Office

Continue reading “‘Artificial leaf’ makes fuel from sunlight” »

Scientists claim to have found the first known extraterrestrial protein in a meteorite.

Team’s goal is to take the aircraft up into the icy stratosphere to 25km above the Earth.

Researchers in Korea have successfully developed a large-area, organic-solution-processable solar cell with high efficiency. They achieved their breakthrough by controlling the speed at which the solution of raw materials for solar cells became solidified after being coated. The team, led by Dr. Hae Jung Son from the Photo-electronic Hybrids Research Center of the Korea Institute of Science and Technology (KIST), have identified the difference in the mechanism of film formation between a small area and a large area of organic solar cells in a solution process, thereby making possible the development of high-efficiency, large-area organic photovoltaics.

If a photovoltaic material is made in the form of paint that can be applied to any surface, such as the exterior of a building or a car, it will be possible to achieve energy self-sufficiency and provide low-cost, eco-friendly energy to regions suffering from energy poverty. Such technology would provide easy installation of photovoltaics, even on urban buildings, and the photovoltaic panels could be maintained by re-applying the “paint.”

Solution-processable solar cells, which work by coating the surface with the solar cell solution, are not yet feasible for industry. Currently, such large-area photovoltaics present reduced performance and production difficulties due to material- and process-related limitations, and this has been an obstacle to commercialization.