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April 13, 2012

* Germany has invested over $130 billion in solar subsidies, yet solar power has only been able to generate 0.3% of Germany's total energy, and the country is still reliant on importing energy from others (like nuclear power plants in France).

Source: Simit Patel, "Cheap Natural Gas Won't Destroy The Nuclear Power Industry", Seeking Alpha, April 12, 2012

February 27, 2012

China Tier 2 PV Modules already at 80 to 96 cents per watt

MIT Technology Review identifies early-stage technologies that, if employed together, could reduce the cost of making solar panels to 52 cents per watt.

Source: Aol Energy

March 17, 2008

* Regulating wind turbines and solar panels

February 12, 2008

This is from the front page of today's Tri-City Herald, of Richland, Washington.

January 30, 2008

This is from the front page of today's The Denver Post, of Colorado.

February 17, 2007

Will copper thieves leave your solar panels alone?

I was browsing the front pages of newspapers at Newseumtoday, and a story about copper theft in Alabama caught my eye ("Thieves rip apart rural churches for copper wiring", by Marty Roney, Montgomery Advertiser). Five rural churches were hit this past week: "The suspects started out cutting the copper tubing on the propane tanks", according to investigator for County Sheriff's Office. "They've gotten bolder in the more recent cases, breaking into the churches and even going up in the attics to get copper." I wondered how widespread this type of theft is, and a google news search showed hundreds of recent stories about copper thievery in diverse places in US, Canada and UK. Seven thieves in the US were so careless that they were electrocuted last year in the course of ripping out copper wiring. In many buildings, the ripping out of copper pipes and wiring does thousands of dollars in damage (even $100,000 in damage to a single building has been reported), and the thieves presumably get to sell the copper for the going rate of $3 a pound. Miles of darkened streets are that way because thieves have taken the wiring from street lights. 20 miles of freeway dark in Dallas. No mileage figures from Hawaii, but $320,000 is the damage total along freeways in the Central and West O'ahu corridor from copper thieves there since last May. Lots of stories about sports fields, like Little League baseball fields, being stripped. What does this have to do with solar cells? Well, one of the articles mentioned that "Solar cells rely on copper, and the next generation of solar panels promises to require even more copper". It seems to me that if thieves are willing to climb 200-foot tall cell phone towers to steal copper, they won't find it so daunting a prospect to climb up your roof and destroy your solar power collector in their quest for copper.

August 6, 2005

* Chemist Tries to Solve World's Energy Woes
Brian Bergstein, AP/The New Albany Tribune (IN)

Caltech chemist Nathan Lewis calculates that power demands in 2050 will be so great that just to keep carbon dioxide emissions at twice preindustrial levels, a nuclear plant would have to be built every two days. There's not enough room on the planet's surface for other widely touted solutions such as wind and biomass to have much impact. Only the sun is the answer, Lewis argues. Enough energy from sunlight hits the earth every hour to supply the world for months. The challenge is harnessing it and storing it efficiently, which existing solar technologies do not do.

The central figure in this article is another U.S. chemist, Daniel Nocera, 48, who is working on using sunlight to split water into its basic components, hydrogen and oxygen. The elements could then be used to supply clean-running fuel cells or new kinds of machinery. Or the energy created from the reaction itself, as atomic bonds are severed and re-formed, might be harnessed and stored. "This is nirvana in energy. This will make the problem go away," Nocera said one morning in his office at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where the Grateful Dead devotee has a "Mean People Suck" sticker on his window. "If it doesn't, we will cease to exist as humanity." Lots of people have explored this challenge, but Nocera had a big breakthrough when he used light to coax multiple hydrogen atoms out of liquid. The key was figuring out the right chemical catalyst. Nocera's 2001 paper on the process in the journal Science, written with graduate student Alan Heyduk, turned heads. Venture capitalists rang his phone off the hook offering to fund him in an alternative-energy company. The achievement, and its revolutionary prospects, won Nocera this year's Italgas Prize, a $100,000 award given annually by an Italian utility to a top energy researcher. "Dan is even-money (odds) to solve this problem," says Harry Gray, a renowned California Institute of Technology chemist who was Nocera's graduate adviser. Nocera believes it might be 20 years before engineers might design systems based on his work. And he frets that too few scientists are exploring the problem, with many top minds instead focused on biomedical research.

Many energy technologies being explored -- including improved ways of storing electricity and different kinds of fuel cells. Critics of dire projections say some will come online in the next few decades and throw off today's extrapolations about the future. Arno Penzias, who won the Nobel Prize for confirming the Big Bang and now invests in alternative energy startups for New Enterprise Associates, contends there are dozens of ideas more promising than ones involving hydrogen. When told about Nocera's project, Penzias gets heated, saying it is unlikely to be practical. "It is so far from being revolutionary that it's not even worth mentioning," Penzias says. "It will be a big yawn."

June 5, 2004

* Australia - 50,000 solar houses in 5 years is target suggested by Greens MLA

March 12, 2004

* Virginia - not that great for solar, sez Dominion

October 9, 2003

France - lots of new solar and nuclear capacity expected

French industry minister Nicole Fontaine will advise prime minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin to adopt the EPR nuclear reactor. Fontaine claims that the EPR, which was developed by France and Germany, is ten times safer, less expensive to operate and generates less nuclear waste than current nuclear power stations. The new reactor could be attached to the existing distribution network in 2012. French electricity group EDF will develop the basic model and start standard production.

Fontaine also favors building wind power stations with a production capacity of 10,000 megawatts by 2010.