A Solar Grand Plan

Scientific American:

* A massive switch from coal, oil, natural gas and nuclear power plants to solar power plants could supply 69 percent of the U.S.’s electricity and 35 percent of its total energy by 2050.
* A vast area of photovoltaic cells would have to be erected in the Southwest. Excess daytime energy would be stored as compressed air in underground caverns to be tapped during nighttime hours.
* Large solar concentrator power plants would be built as well.
* A new direct-current power transmission backbone would deliver solar electricity across the country.
* But $420 billion in subsidies from 2011 to 2050 would be required to fund the infrastructure and make it cost-competitive.

Green is good for business

Remember the old canard about environmental responsiblity being bad for business and jobs? Well, as CNN reports:

Venture investment in energy technology firms reached new highs this year, more than tripling the investment recorded for 2005, according to data released Wednesday by Thomson Financial and the National Venture Capital Association.

In the first three quarters of 2007, nearly $1.7 billion, or 7.4% of U.S. venture capital investments, was put into American companies developing technologies that conserve energy and resources, protect the environment, or eliminate harmful waste. The majority of this year's clean technology investment was made in companies based in California, Massachusetts, and Texas, with the solar energy and biofuel industries receiving the bulk of the investment dollars.

"This is a remarkable share of the venture capital pool when you consider that less than five years ago clean technologies represented less than 1%," says Rodrigo Prudencio, a partner with Nth Power, a California-based venture capital firm that backs early stage energy technology companies.

Annual venture investments in clean-technology companies went from $469.7 million in 2005 to $1.4 billion in 2006, and this year's total through September has already seen a 21% increase over last year. The number of investments made has also increased, with 149 deals made in the first nine months of this year, as compared to 129 deals at the end of 2006.

"Long term, this is an area that is going to be as important to the venture capital community as biotech and IT have been in the last twenty years," says Mark Heesen, NVCA president.

Here Comes The Sun

CNN:

Proponents of CSP say you don't need to use up much of the desert space to make CSP effective. A solar farm taking up 92 by 92 miles of desert could power the entire U.S., for example, according to Green Wombat, referring to a calculation made by the chairman of solar company Ausra, David Mills.

Over in Europe, however, a group of scientists, politicians and renewable energy experts who call themselves The Trans-Mediterranean Renewable Energy Cooperation (TREC) have made claims on a much bigger scale and with far bigger ramifications.

TREC is backing an ambitious project straddling Europe, the Middle East and North Africa (EU-MENA), which is based on the calculation that an area less than 0.3% of the Sahara Desert filled with CSP plants could power the entire region -- and could slash the EU's electricity-generated greenhouse gas emissions by 70% in the process.

The CSP-generated electricity would be transmitted around the region via a "supergrid" of high voltage direct current (HVDC) transmission lines. The CSP plants, TREC says, would "generate enough electricity and desalinated seawater to supply current demands in EU-MENA, and anticipated increases in those demands in the future."

Here Comes The Sun

Reuters:

Solar power could be the world's number one electricity source by the end of the century, but until now its role has been negligible as producers wait for price parity with fossil fuels, industry leaders say.

Once the choice only of idealists who put the environment before economics, production of solar panels will double both next year and in 2009, according to U.S. investment bank Jefferies Group Inc, driven by government support especially in Germany and Japan.

Similar support in Spain, Italy and Greece is now driving growth in southern Europe as governments turn to the sun as a weapon both against climate change and energy dependence.

Subsidies are needed because solar is still more expensive than conventional power sources like coal, but costs are dropping by around 5 percent a year and "grid parity," without subsidies, is already a reality in parts of California.

Very sunny countries could reach that breakeven in five years or so, and even cloudy Britain by 2020.

Note that there is no mention of American government support. Wonder why...

Solar becoming more affordable

Industry Week:

Colorado State University's method for manufacturing low-cost, high-efficiency solar panels is nearing mass production. AVA Solar Inc. will start production by the end of next year on the technology developed by mechanical engineering Professor W.S. Sampath at Colorado State. The new 200-megawatt factory is expected to employ up to 500 people. Based on the average household usage, 200 megawatts will power 40,000 U.S. homes.

Produced at less than $1 per watt, the panels will dramatically reduce the cost of generating solar electricity and could power homes and businesses around the globe with clean energy for roughly the same cost as traditionally generated electricity.

More on Solar breakthroughs

Inside Greentech:

South Korean scientists, working in conjunction with American researchers, say they have reached a new level of efficiency in an organic solar cell by using a tandem design.

Scientists at South Korea's Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology worked together with Nobel laureate Alan Heeger, professor of physics at U.C. Santa Barbara, to create the new tandem cells under a South Korean-led project started in May, 2006.

Tandem solar cells, in which two solar cells with different absorption characteristics are linked, can convert a wider range of the solar spectrum.

The result of the new architecture was a power conversion efficiency of 6 per cent.

The Problem With Solar Power

Is that the government isn't adequately funding research and development. This New York Times article discusses the issue, including the incredible lack of government support; but it also ignores many of the recent technological breakthroughs. Read the article, then click the label below. There's plenty of reason to believe that enough government support could make solar power a major energy producer.

More Fun With The Sun

Science Daily:

The global search for a sustainable energy supply is making significant strides at Wake Forest University as researchers at the university’s Center for Nanotechnology and Molecular Materials have announced that they have pushed the efficiency of plastic solar cells to more than 6 percent.

In a paper to be published in an upcoming issue of the journal Applied Physics Letters, Wake Forest researchers describe how they have achieved record efficiency for organic or flexible, plastic solar cells by creating “nano-filaments” within light absorbing plastic, similar to the veins in tree leaves. This allows for the use of thicker absorbing layers in the devices, which capture more of the sun’s light.

Efficient plastic solar cells are extremely desirable because they are inexpensive and light weight, especially in comparison to traditional silicon solar panels. Traditional solar panels are heavy and bulky and convert about 12 percent of the light that hits them to useful electrical power. Researchers have worked for years to create flexible, or “conformal,” organic solar cells that can be wrapped around surfaces, rolled up or even painted onto structures.

Before 2005, the highest efficiency from organic cells was 3 percent. That year, the Wake Forest team produced almost 5 percent. Now, they've reached six. In just two years, they've doubled the efficiency. Imagine what scientists could do if they were given serious support from the federal government. Imagine.

Another Solar Power Breakthrough

Science Daily:

Unique three-dimensional solar cells that capture nearly all of the light that strikes them could boost the efficiency of photovoltaic (PV) systems while reducing their size, weight and mechanical complexity.

The new 3D solar cells capture photons from sunlight using an array of miniature "tower" structures that resemble high-rise buildings in a city street grid. The cells could find near-term applications for powering spacecraft, and by enabling efficiency improvements in photovoltaic coating materials, could also change the way solar cells are designed for a broad range of applications.

"Our goal is to harvest every last photon that is available to our cells," said Jud Ready, a senior research engineer in the Electro-Optical Systems Laboratory at the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI). "By capturing more of the light in our 3D structures, we can use much smaller photovoltaic arrays. On a satellite or other spacecraft, that would mean less weight and less space taken up with the PV system."

Solar Power Breakthrough!

Science Daily:

Solar cell technology developed by Massey University’s Nanomaterials Research Centre will enable New Zealanders to generate electricity from sunlight at a 10th of the cost of current silicon-based photo-electric solar cells....

“The refining of pure silicon, although a very abundant mineral, is energy-hungry and very expensive. And whereas silicon cells need direct sunlight to operate efficiently, these cells will work efficiently in low diffuse light conditions,” Dr Campbell says.

“The expected cost is one 10th of the price of a silicon-based solar panel, making them more attractive and accessible to home-owners.”

The Sun Shines, And The Wind Blows

The sun shines, the wind blows, and if the human race is to survive, it will be because it has learned enough to respect nature and not treat it like a commodity.

The New York Times is reporting that the consequences of global warming will be suffered most severely by the poorest nations. As I've previously linked, Spiegel Online got a preview of the second part of the report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which concludes that climate change is worse and more extensive than previously believed, with twenty to thirty percent of all species facing a high risk of extinction, while:

Several hundred million people in densely populated coastal regions -- particularly river deltas in Asia -- are threatened by rising sea levels and the increasing risk of flooding. More than one-sixth of the world's population lives in areas affected by water sources from glaciers and snow pack that will "very likely" disappear, according to the report.

And as I've also previously linked, the editors of the leading science journal, Nature, perfectly summarized the conclusions of the first part of the IPCC report:

Until quite recently (perhaps even until last week), the general global narrative of the great climate-change debate has been deceptively straightforward. The climate-science community, together with the entire environmental movement and a broad alliance of opinion leaders ranging from Greenpeace and Ralph Nader to Senator John McCain and many US evangelical Christians, has been advocating meaningful action to curtail greenhouse-gas emissions. This requirement has been disputed by a collection of money-men and some isolated scientists, in alliance with the current president of the United States and a handful of like-minded ideologues such as Australia's prime minister John Howard.

The IPCC report, released in Paris, has served a useful purpose in removing the last ground from under the climate-change sceptics' feet, leaving them looking marooned and ridiculous.

There is no more debate. There is only the question of what we will do about it. Our rapacious use of fossil fuels is a geopolitical and environmental disaster; and despite the shilling of nuclear industry lobbyists, that vile technology would not solve the problem of global warming.

From the Natural Resources Council White Paper on Commercial Nuclear Power:

While nuclear power plants and their fuel cycle facilities emit little carbon dioxide, they are neither necessary nor sufficient to avoid dangerous global warming. U.S. electricity needs could be met while reducing emissions by 70 percent or more through a combination of increased end-use efficiency, wind power, solar power, integrated gasification combined-cycle coal plants with carbon capture and storage, and high-efficiency natural gas combined cycle turbines. These technologies are cheaper than new nuclear plants, and they can be built or installed much more quickly, without the serious security, public health, and environmental dangers that accompany nuclear power.

Moreover, unless plug-in hybrid, all-electric, or fuel-cell-powered vehicles, or electric trains are commercialized on a large scale, nuclear power has virtually no role to play in reducing emissions from the transportation sector, which currently depends on petroleum for more than 95 percent of its energy needs. Far more promising, at least for the next several decades, is significantly improving fuel economy through such technologies as gasoline- or diesel-electric hybrid vehicles and biofuels made from energy crops, forest products, and agricultural waste. For nuclear power to have any appreciable impact on global warming, nuclear capacity globally—now about 440 plants—would have to be increased severalfold over the next few decades. This would mean adding a dozen or so new uranium enrichment plants worldwide, a similar number of Yucca Mountain–type geologic repositories for spent nuclear fuel, and a significant expansion of uranium mining. Current international arrangements are insufficient to prevent a non-weapon state, such as Iran, from suddenly changing course and using “peaceful” uranium enrichment or spent-fuel reprocessing plants to separate nuclear material for weapons. Finally, there is not one single long-term geologic repository for spent nuclear fuel in operation anywhere in the world.

And speaking of storing spent fuel, we are already going to need to spend 26.9 billion dollars to store the waste we already have, for just the next sixteen years! Imagine the cost- not to mention the sheer impossibility of storing waste from another 440 nuclear plants!

Little wonder that the scientists and academics of the Oxford Research Group concluded that:

The surge in political popularity of nuclear power as a quick-fix, zero-carbon solution to global warming is misguided and potentially highly dangerous, a group of academics and scientists said on Monday.

In its report "Secure energy, civil nuclear power, security and global warming", the Oxford Research Group said there was not enough uranium available and nuclear nations would therefore tend to opt for reprocessing spent fuel to obtain plutonium.

As former German environment and nuclear safety minister Juergen Trittin wrote in the report's forward:

"One of the worst ideas, circulating in many corners of the global discussion, is the call for an expansion of nuclear power as a means of climate protection."

And as the European Union's Commissioner for the Environment, Stavros Dimas, explained to Spiegel Online:

SPIEGEL: The proponents of nuclear power plants say that they produce cheap electricity without emitting any greenhouse gases. Is this incorrect?

Dimas: Yes, because it isn't the whole story. First of all, the disposal of radioactive waste remains an unresolved issue. Second, the eventual demolition and safe removal of nuclear facilities is not only an ecological, but also a significant economic problem. Third, it is unclear how we can guarantee the safety of nuclear waste over the course of many generations. Who will pay for it, and who will manage it?

SPIEGEL: The industry has established billions in reserves specifically for that purpose.

Dimas: It will hardly be sufficient. We are talking about centuries in which we will have nuclear waste. Besides, nuclear energy is just as non-renewable as oil or gas, because uranium reserves are also limited.

SPIEGEL: What is your recommendation when it comes to the energy mix?

Dimas: The expansion of renewable forms of energy, such as biomass, solar, wind and water, seems inevitable to me.

Ah, yes- the clean, renewable bounty nature has so generously provided.

For one glorious moment, a couple weeks ago, wind power generated more energy for Spain than did any other source of power. As reported by Australia's The Age:

TAKING advantage of a particularly gusty period, Spain's wind energy generators this week reached a record high in electricity production, exceeding power generated by all other means.

At 5.40pm on Tuesday, wind power generation rose to contribute 27 per cent of the country's total power requirement, said Spanish company Red Electrica.

At that moment wind power contributed 8375 megawatts to the nation's power consumption of 31,033.

As CNN reported, on March 20, wind power is also good business:

Vestas, the world's biggest wind turbine maker, on Tuesday turned in a full-year 2006 operating profit of €201 million ($267.4 million) on the back of booming demand for clean energy and maintained its 2007 sales and margin outlooks.

And the AP reported that a new wind farm to be built in North Dakota will include:

100 wind turbines, capable of generating 150 megawatts of power.

Meanwhile, Spain is building the largest solar energy park in the world:

At present, the little Spanish place Beneixama is scene for the construction of the biggest photovoltaic park of the world. In the back-country of the Costa Blanca (province Alicante) City Solar sets up 200 individual equipments with 100 KWp each – a mega project which was started in August 2006 and will be finalized in the late summer of 2007.

Portugal just opened a solar plant that Spiegel Online reported:

...has a capacity of 11 megawatts, and will deliver electricity to around 8,000 households.

Even Russia's getting into the solar act! Russia!

From Ria Novosti:

A recent conference organized by the Science and High Technologies committee of the State Duma, the lower house of the Russian Parliament, discussed legislative support for the national photovoltaic power industry.

Nobel Prize winner Zhores Alfyorov, vice-president of the Russian Academy of Sciences, who chaired the conference, said Russia needs substantial legislative support in order to even begin to set up a domestic consumer market. "This will encourage the market's development, as well as expand scientific research and production," Alfyorov told RIA Novosti.

"We have good scientists and long-standing traditions in this field and have managed to preserve some operational research centers and production facilities in spite of serious problems," Alfyorov said. He added that the world is now focusing on solar power because the sun, a mere yellow dwarf among the 150 billion G-2 class stars in the Galaxy, is a natural thermonuclear reactor saturating the Earth with tremendous amounts of energy. According to Alfyorov, environmentally friendly converted solar energy has the potential to solve humankind's energy problems for centuries to come and eliminate the heat pollution caused by the rapidly expanding global power industry.

And our own Nevada Solar One is set to come online this month! As described by the Las Vegas Business Press:

The third-largest solar plant in the world, the 64-megawatt Nevada Solar One will sell its power to Nevada Power and Sierra Pacific under a 20-year contract. The plant will produce enough energy to supply 48,000 homes.

The Potential for solar energy is greater than we even yet realize. The March issue of Physics Today has an article, which is described on the
PhysOrg website:

Opportunities to increase solar energy conversion as an alternative to fossil fuels are addressed in the Physics Today article, co-authored by George Crabtree, senior scientist and director of Argonne's Materials Science Division, and Nathan Lewis, professor of Chemistry at Caltech and director of its Molecular Materials Research Center.

Currently, between 80 percent and 85 percent of our energy comes from fossil fuels. However, fossil fuel resources are of finite extent and are distributed unevenly beneath Earth's surface. When fossil fuel is turned into useful energy through combustion, it often produces environmental pollutants that are harmful to human health and greenhouse gases that threaten the global climate. In contrast, solar resources are widely available and have a benign effect on the environment and climate, making it an appealing alternative energy source.

"Sunlight is not only the most plentiful energy resource on earth, it is also one of the most versatile, converting readily to electricity, fuel and heat," said Crabtree. "The challenge is to raise its conversion efficiency by factors of five or ten. That requires understanding the fundamental conversion phenomena at the nanoscale. We are just scratching the surface of this rich research field."

Instead of wasting hundreds of thousands of lives, and hundreds of billions of dollars, on oil wars; and instead of wasting time, energy and tens of billions of dollars on nuclear; it is time to refocus our efforts onto the only possible means of providing safe, clean, renewable sources of energy for the future. We must have a Manhattan Project-type urgency! We must insist that our political leaders listen! We must demand answers! Do they get it? Will they take us into a sustainable future, or will they equivocate, waffle, and perpetuate an obsolete paradigm that threatens our very survival?

Going Solar

Ria Novosti:

A recent conference organized by the Science and High Technologies committee of the State Duma, the lower house of the Russian Parliament, discussed legislative support for the national photovoltaic power industry.

Nobel Prize winner Zhores Alfyorov, vice-president of the Russian Academy of Sciences, who chaired the conference, said Russia needs substantial legislative support in order to even begin to set up a domestic consumer market. "This will encourage the market's development, as well as expand scientific research and production," Alfyorov told RIA Novosti.

"We have good scientists and long-standing traditions in this field and have managed to preserve some operational research centers and production facilities in spite of serious problems," Alfyorov said. He added that the world is now focusing on solar power because the sun, a mere yellow dwarf among the 150 billion G-2 class stars in the Galaxy, is a natural thermonuclear reactor saturating the Earth with tremendous amounts of energy. According to Alfyorov, environmentally friendly converted solar energy has the potential to solve humankind's energy problems for centuries to come and eliminate the heat pollution caused by the rapidly expanding global power industry.

Going Solar

Spiegel Online:

Some countries are just better suited to wean themselves off fossil fuels than others. Sun-kissed Portugal is one of the lucky ones when it comes to potential for solar power generation, and the country has now opened one of the world's largest solar energy plants -- even though a plant in cloudy Germany has a higher capacity.

The plant, which is located in Serpa in Portugal's underdeveloped Alentejo region, opened on Wednesday. It has a capacity of 11 megawatts, and will deliver electricity to around 8,000 households. The Alentejo is one of Europe's sunniest locations, receiving as many as 3,300 hours of sunlight a year.

The Serpa plant was originally intended to have the highest capacity of any solar plant in the world, but has since been overtaken by the Gut Erlasse plant in Bavaria, Germany, which will have a capacity of 12 megawatts. However, the plant's management believe the Portuguese plant will overtake its German rival once actual operation begins.