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How a Country With One of the World's
Largest Economies Is Ditching Fossil Fuels
Tara DePorte writes that the German energy transformation called "Energiewende" has all the signs of a modern miracle: a commitment from all political parties, from the most conservative to the most liberal, to shift the world's fourth largest economy to 80% renewable energy by 2050. While Germany has nowhere near the wind and solar resources of Minnesota, it expects to reach 35% renewable power by 2020 and could reach 40%.
Germans who install solar panels can sell surplus power back into the power grid at a rate guaranteed for 20 years. This guaranteed payment, called a "feed in tariff" engages the German public in the transition to clean energy, while creating a more decentralized system of energy production and increasing the energy independence of Germany. While the U.S. media continues to ignore climate science consensus and debates the existence of manmade climate change, the German media and public are on the road to energy independence and rapidly cutting their climate impacts. Find out what has enabled Germany to make remarkable progress on transitioning to a clean energy economy in these two articles:
"How a Country with One of the World's Largest Economies is Ditching Fossil Fuels"
"What Germany Can Teach Americans about Transforming our Energy Systems"
To learn how Germany has made this remarkable progress toward clean energy, and how Minnesota could too, read Clean Break by Journalist Osha Gray Davidson. Clean Break is the story of how German citizens led the transition to clean energy from the bottom up and democratized the electric system in the process. 65% of Germany's renewable energy is owned by individuals, cooperatives, or communities. Download this inspiring story for $1.
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Not long ago, solar energy was considered to be too expensive to be a serious energy contender. No longer. Solar energy is now a cost competitive source of energy in states with higher electricity rates and higher solar energy potential and is expected to be cost competitive soon in many other states. Economist Paul Krugman writes that we are on the cusp of an energy transformation, driven by the rapidly falling cost of solar power, that is solar PV, the photo voltaic panels placed on rooftops. Photo voltaic panels convert the sun's rays directly to electricity.
The Open Neighborhoods organization in Los Angeles recently arranged a group purchase of photo voltaic solar panels that will bring the cost of solar energy close to the cost of grid power. John Farrell, who maintains the Energy Self Reliant States blog notes the enormous savings of the group purchase, $2.00 off the usual price per kilowatt hour of $4.40. His chart illustrates the slightly greater cost of solar over grid at the beginning of the 25 year life expectancy of the solar panels that then results in great savings over the life of the panels.
Watch a brief news report on how California schools are saving big on their energy costs by placing solar PV canopies over their parking lots.
John Farrell points out that 60 million Americans live in areas where solar energy costs are competitive with retail energy prices. For example, New York City could supply 14 percent of its total electricity from rooftop solar alone, transform over 50,000 homes and businesses into energy producers, and create over 40,000 jobs. Because the city has good sun and high electricity prices, switching to solar would save New Yorkers millions of dollars on their electric bills.
In Washington, DC, electricity production from rooftop solar could supply 20 percent of the city's electricity, save $250 million in electricity costs. boost the local economy by up to $1.5 billion, and create over 14,000 jobs.
The following chart shows the sharp drop in cost for installed solar photo voltaic panels in Germany over the past 5 years. The 2011 price for solar PV panels is about half of what it was in 2006 and is expected to drop further.
What is driving the cost of solar PV energy down? Contributing to lower costs is increased installation which has led to economies of scale in Australia, China, Germany, and in Los Angeles, Boulder, and New York. Research by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory and private corporations has led to a decrease in the cost of producing solar panels as well as increases in the amount of electricity produced by a panel as are shown in the examples which follow. In addition, subsidies of the solar industry by the Chinese government, as well as currency exchange rates have contributed to low prices for solar panels from China. The fall in the price of solar panels has led to a rapid growth in solar installations. David Crane, CEO of NRG, owner of nuclear and coal energy, states that the installed cost of solar panels at $2.50 per watt translates into an electricity cost of 12.5 cents per hour, cheaper than the grid in 20 states, and the cost comparison doesn't count CO2 emissions' environmental effects and coal emissions' harm to people's health.
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Concentrating solar power uses mirrors to concentrate and reflect solar rays to produce heat that is then used to make electricity usually through steam driven turbines. It is still considerably more expensive than fossil fuels. The advantage of concentrating solar power is that the heat can be stored, usually in tanks with molten salt. It is then is available for use during nighttime hours.
From "Solar Power and the Electric Grid," National Renewable Energy Laboratory
See the three minute YouTube from the U.S. Department of Energy that explains concentrating solar power.
Concentrating Solar Power has the disadvantage of using large amounts of water, often not available in sunny desert locations and not good for the environment. The water use chart from Energy Self Reliant States compares forms of solar energy to nuclear and fossil fuels.
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 Senator Al Franken recently held a Minnesota Renewable Energy Summit at Metropolitan State University in St. Paul. Arun Majumdar, head of the Department of Energy's Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy, stated that the United States is approaching a “Sputnik moment” in renewable energy, and Minnesota is one place that could help it meet that challenge. "We have to work toward . . . getting the cost of producing solar energy down to 5 cents per kilowatt hour, so that it can be sold without subsidies.”
Researchers around the world are working on just this effort to reduce the cost of solar energy. Giles Parkinson writes in The Climate Spectator that "significant new technology developments promise to take solar much closer to the cost of coal than anyone would have expected, even just a few years ago, and at a quicker rate." At the Australian National University, Research Fellow Dr. Kylie Catchpole leads a team using nano-particles – devices so small that 50 of them could fit on the width of a human hair - to create a plasmonic light trap. See a 2 1/2 minute video on her work.
The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) recently announced a $60 million investment over 3 years for applied scientific research to advance cutting-edge concentrating solar power (CSP) technologies. The goal of the research is to reduce the cost of solar energy 75 percent to make it cost-competitive with other forms of energy by the end of the decade. At this point, CSP has not had a dramatic drop like that in the cost of solar photovoltaic panels, but a new version of CSP that combines concentrating solar power with photovoltaic cells looks like it's on the way to achieving that goal.
 The Concentrated Photovoltaic (CPV) Solar Power Generator, developed by Amonix and the U.S. Department of Energy's National Renewable Energy Laboratory costs much less than concentrating solar power generators because it uses efficient small solar cells. It delivers more "energy per acre" than anything yet available in the solar energy world.
The public-private partnership won a 2010 R&D 100 award at the annual event honoring the greatest breakthroughs in technology, often called "The Oscars of Invention." NREL's partnerships with industry, such as this one with Amonix, are key to reaching aggressive White House goals including lowering solar energy's installed cost to $1 a watt, which would make America a leader in renewable energy.
The Amonix Concentrated Photovoltaic (CPV) Solar Power Generator uses acrylic Fresnel lenses to concentrate sunlight up to 500 times its usual intensity and direct it onto 7,560 tiny, highly efficient PV cells. For more details on how the CPV Solar Power Generator works, see: Super-Efficient Cells Key to Low-Cost Solar Power
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The Federal Laboratory Consortium for Technology Transfer’s (FLC) Mid-Continent Region recently recognized the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) and its partners with three awards for excellence in technology transfer.
Innovalight Silicon Ink Process
Silicon Ink Boosts Quality and Cost Savings. NREL’s Photovoltaic (PV) Technology Incubator, created by DOE’s Solar Energy Technologies Program, focuses on developing prototype PV components and systems and reducing market barriers for 2012 commercialization. Under the incubator program, NREL scientists teamed with Innovalight, Inc., to adapt Silicon Ink, a liquid form of silicon, and develop its use in solar cells.
This marks the first time that silicon has been sold as a liquid. The new product can boost the bottom line of a typical solar production plant by 20 percent, which for an average-size factory is $100 million. It also can boost the efficiency of the cells by 6 percent. Five of the world's leading solar cell producers have signed licenses to use Silicon Ink in their production lines. Innovalight Silicon Ink was recently named among this year’s most significant innovations by R&D Magazine with the prestigious 2011 R&D 100 Award.
Electrochromic Windows
 NREL’s electrochromic window technology stands apart from other window options by reflecting sunlight, reducing heat gain, and ultimately keeping buildings cooler. The technology inspired entrepreneur Loren Burnett to form a new company called US e-Chromic, LLC, in Boulder, Colorado to further advance the technology. As licensing discussions progressed with Burnett, an opportunity arose that the new project fit perfectly — The Department of Energy's America's Next Top Energy Innovator program.
The America's Next Top Energy Innovator program allowed NREL to give Burnett a reduced price on an option agreement for the electrochromic technologies and helped reduce paperwork. Within a month, the deal was closed. It was the first in the country under the new DOE program. This innovative technology transfer drew attention from the White House. Vice President Joe Biden announced the finalized e-Chromic agreement during a May visit at NREL.
Watch the 2 minute explanation of electrochromic windows on YouTube:
NREL Electrochromic Window Research Wins Award
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 The US Department of Energy has recently completed testing on something called the Optical Cavity Furnace, which it says has the potential to reduce the cost of producing solar cells by nearly three-quarters. By using optics to more efficiently focus visible and infrared light, the Optical Cavity Furnace can heat silicon wafers used in solar cell production much more precisely and uniformly than previous forms of solar cell manufacture. The resulting solar cells are stronger, more efficient, and have fewer impurities.
In addition, the Optical Cavity Furnace itself is cheaper than traditional equipment used to produce cells. As the cost of manufacturing solar cells goes down, the accessibility of solar cells is likely to soar. Solar's power will then spread to many industries in a clean energy domino effect.
The White House has challenged the solar industry to produce clean electricity at $1 per watt. It has also set an ambitious national goal to achieve 80 percent clean energy use by 2035.
Read The Coolest New Solar Manufacturing Technology You've Never Heard Of
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National Renewable Energy Laboratory scientists teamed with Tau Science Corporation to develop “Flash Quantum Efficiency System for Solar Cells,” a method that evaluates the quality of solar cells at a speed that is about 1,000 times faster than previous methods. What used to take 20 minutes can now can be done in a second.
That means every cell on a manufacturing line can be assessed, and each cell can be sorted by its spectral response. Cells that respond best to, say, red light can be connected together to form a solar module. That way, a mismatched blue-response cell on a module won’t put the brakes on all the work the red-response cells are doing. As a result, photons can be converted more efficiently into electricity at sunrise and sunset when the red wavelengths predominate.
FlashQE™was named among this year’s 100 most significant innovations by R&D Magazine. |
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