Siemens, Bosch, and Spain: Just Say No to Desertec

The ambitious plan to build huge solar power plants in North Africa to feed into the European power grid, has suffered some significant setbacks recently. Industrial giants Siemens and Bosch, as well as the government of Spain, are indicating that they are no longer interested in the expensive boondoggle.

An ambitious plan to provide 15% of Europe's power needs from solar plants in North Africa has run into trouble.

The Desertec initiative hoped to deliver electricity from a network of renewable energy sources to Europe via cables under the sea.

But in recent weeks, two big industrial backers have pulled out. And the Spanish government has baulked at signing an agreement to build solar power plants in Morocco.

...According to Dr Daniel Ayuk Mbi Egbe, a professor at the University of Linz in Austria and an expert on African solar resources, this is not good news.

"Siemens and Bosch are very big companies," he told BBC News, "if they don't want to support this initiative it is going to be difficult for Desertec.

...Prof Peter Droege is the head of Eurosolar, the European association for renewable energy: ... "I think it is struggling to find a reason to continue - It is clear it's lost its original purpose, it is looking for a new direction," he commented..._BBC

Grand and exorbitant schemes of this type do hold a certain appeal -- until one begins to look more closely at the details. Eventually it will dawn on almost everyone that such schemes are impractical, "feel-good" scams, run for the benefit of developers and administrators of the projects themselves. In the end, taxpayers always lose when forced to pay for intermittent unreliable sources of energy.

Spain's and Germany's Green Blunders;

RCE Solar Jacks Up German Electricity Prices

Spain's economy is in dire straits, in large part due to its government support and subsidies for big wind and big solar power.

During the first two years of his administration, President Barack Obama and top officials praised Spain as a successful model to create employment and improve energy security. So did everyone else, for that matter, but it’s time to heed the lessons.

For over a decade Spain has accumulated nearly 25 billion euro in debt –equivalent to more than half of the urgent capitalization needs of its distraught financial system- mostly in the form of subsidies for wind and solar energy.

...Spain’s generous subsidies already attracted more than twice as much installed capacity than its peak demand of 40 GW, and much cheaper fossil fuel and nuclear generators are being left idle to pay for renewable output. In this context, the country has no choice but to pull the plug on its renewable experiment. More than a decade of robust Spanish growth ended in 2008 as a construction boom went bust leaving millions without a job and as the global economic crisis further undermined the economy.

...Spain is the worst example, but not the only. A recent International Energy Agency outlook of renewable power this decade suggests how Spain’s model embodies the “wrongs” of unconditionally supporting the industry.

Now its renewable revision is going to eliminate thousands of jobs and billions in investment, and more critically become another agonizing drag on the economy.

Many countries overdid it, plain and simple. Renewable industries in OECD reached maturity and have become an economic drain, which is why countries are quietly backtracking, as the data shows. _EnergyTribune

These are sobering lessons for anyone who is paying attention. Unfortunately, it does not appear that the US Obama administration is paying attention to anything except those internal voices which never seem to waver or quieten.

Now, Germany is following the same devastating path that led Spain over the fiscal cliff. Even worse, Germany is shutting down its safe, affordable, and reliable nuclear plants in favour of exorbitantly expensive intermittent unreliables!

As far back as 1990, Germany enacted a feed-in tariff that guaranteed providers of solar electricity a price well above market level. Consequently, it has been very easy for solar producers to make a profit. The idea was to foster domestic industries but much of transfer has ended up going to Chinese firms.

The less obvious downside, however, is that consumers end up paying more for electricity. The high solar prices are averaged in with all other sources and consumers end up paying the bill, both as taxpayers and consumers.

... the German solar industry is about to suffer now that Germany has found it too expensive to maintain the feed-in tariffs. They say Spain has had a worse experience, with $50 billion in wind and solar-related debt now floating around the country. Spain's solar bubble, which soon popped, has played a large role in its overall debt crisis as well. _RCE

Denmark power customers pay the highest cost for energy in Europe, due largely to government support for big wind power.

Now it looks as if the UK may be tumbling down the same energy policy avalanche.

And if US President Obama is re-elected in November, you can expect his administration to double down on the stupid energy policies of Spain et al.

What is it about green politicians and bureaucrats that makes them so destructive to the countries they are supposed to serve?

Two New Methods of Utility Scale Electrical Storage

Electrical storage technology is long overdue for significant innovations and breakthroughs. Applications from electric vehicles, to scalable emergency power backup systems, to power grid load leveling could all benefit immensely from improvements in energy storage. We take a look at two promising prospects below:

Brian Westenhaus takes a look at a new combination of supercapacitors and scalable flow cell batteries, as a possible future means of utility load leveling.

The Drexel’s team of researchers is putting forward a plan to integrate into the grid an electrochemical storage system that combines principles behind the flow batteries and supercapacitors that power our daily technology.

The team’s research has yielded a novel solution that combines the strengths of batteries with supercapacitors plus taking away the scalability problem. Their new “electrochemical flow capacitor” (EFC) consists of an electrochemical cell connected to two external electrolyte reservoirs – a design similar to existing redox flow batteries which are used in electrical vehicles.

The Drexel team’s new technology is unique because it uses small carbon particles suspended in the electrolyte liquid to create a slurry of particles that can carry an electric charge. The uncharged slurry is pumped from its tanks through a flow cell, where energy stored in the cell is then transferred to the carbon particles. The charged slurry can then be stored in reservoirs until the energy is needed, at which time the entire process is reversed in order to discharge the EFC.

The EFC design allows it to be constructed on a scale large enough to store large amounts of energy and allows for rapid disbursal of the energy when the demand load needs it. _NewEnergyandFuel

A distinctly different approach to utility scale electrical storage is taken by General Electric, with its new ceramic electrolyte battery:

The key to the technology is a ceramic electrolyte material that separates the electrodes. During charging, chloride ions are released from sodium chloride and combine with nickel to form nickel chloride. The sodium ions that remain move through the electrolyte into a reservoir. When the battery produces power, the ions move back through the electrode and the reaction is reversed. The process takes place at about 300 °C, inside an insulated container.

...The batteries are more expensive per kilowatt-hour than lead-acid batteries, but they're expected to last longer, especially in applications in which the batteries are deeply discharged on a frequent basis, which damages lead-acid batteries. In some applications, lead-acid batteries might last only six months. Designed to be deeply discharged at least 3,500 times, GE's sodium-nickel batteries could last through a decade of daily charging.

...GE will have strong competition for new grid battery technologies from companies such as Aquion Energy and Liquid Metal Battery, the manufacturing giant clearly has high ambitions for its technology, recently forming a new business unit to commercialize the battery technology. Indeed, at the factory opening, the company announced an additional $70 million investment to increase its capacity to help meet a backlog of orders. "The cost of electricity over time is going to go down because [GE's battery] is going to give utilities the ability to use a multitude of different technologies at the same time," GE CEO Jeffrey Immelt told a group of reporters at the plant opening.

The first applications will be somewhat less ambitious. GE's first customer is a South African company—Megatron Federal—that will use the batteries to power cell-phone towers in Nigeria. Those are usually powered by diesel generators. Pairing the generators with the new batteries can help them run far more efficiently. "You save 53 percent on fuel, 45 percent on maintenance, and about 60 percent on diesel generator replacements," says Brandon Harcus, division manager for telecommunications for Megatron Federal. "For our Nigerian application, the savings are substantial, about $1.3 million over 20 years per cell tower. You use a lot less fuel and produce a lot less carbon."

For this application, the battery has two primary advantages over the lead-acid batteries that sometimes back up the generators. They can charge faster—over two hours compared to 10 hours for lead-acid batteries. And unlike many other batteries, GE's new battery doesn't require air conditioning, which helps reduce fuel consumption at the site.

Besides powering cell-phone towers, the batteries could also be used to store power from wind turbines and solar panels to even out fluctuations in these power sources. GE also says they could be used in microgrids, small grids that are often the size of a village or military base and are designed to operate independently of the larger electrical grid while still getting grid-quality electricity. _TechnologyReview

These are very interesting technologies, and deserve to be tested in the real world to see what they can do.

Unfortunately, they are being promoted as technologies which can remedy the faults of intermittent unreliable approaches to energy, such as big wind and big solar. The swings of intermittency in big wind and big solar are unfortunately too large to allow for the affordable use of energy storage for large grid backup, with these or any other technologies currently in the pipeline.

Much better to promote these useful technologies for what they can do, rather than to promise things which cannot be delivered for many decades yet. And by then, people will wonder why anyone would be willing to go to so much work and expense for the sake of inherently flawed approaches to energy production, such as big wind and big solar.

The Great and Devastating German Green Energy Folly

German electricity consumers are paying the second highest power rates in all of Europe, second only to Denmark. Germany is losing industrial plants to other countries with more reasonable electricity rates, and jobs are fleeing the country along with the plants.

What was the German government thinking in 2004, when it offered a subsidy, known as a feed-in tariff, that guaranteed investors as much as €0.57 per kilowatt-hour for the next two decades of photovoltaic generation? At the time, the average price for electricity from other sources was about €0.20/kWh; by comparison, the average U.S. electricity price in 2004 was 7.6 cents, or about €0.06/kWh. With subsidies like that, it was no wonder that Bavaria Solarpark was just the beginning of a rush to build photovoltaic plants in Germany. By the end of 2011, Germany’s PV installations had a capacity of nearly 25 gigawatts, which was more than a third of the global total. If you subsidize something enough, at first it can seem almost reasonable; only later does reality intervene. This past March, stung by the news that Germans were paying the second highest electricity rates in Europe, the German parliament voted to cut the various solar subsidies by up to 29 percent.

Such generous subsidies are by no means a German peculiarity. They have been the norm in the new world of renewable energies; only their targets differ. Spain also subsidized wind and PV generation before cutting its feed-in tariff for large installations by nearly 50 percent in 2010. China’s bene­fits to its wind-turbine makers were so generous that the United States complained about them to the World Trade Organization in December 2010. _Vaclav Smil in IEEE

Big wind and big solar are not economical without massive and ruinously expensive government subsidies, mandates, tax breaks, and other special favours -- often given to developers who happen to be political cronies of the party in power.

The most ardent supporters of solar, wind, and biomass argue that these sources can replace fossil fuels and create highly reliable, nonpolluting, carbon-free systems priced no higher than today’s cheapest coal-fired electricity generation, all in just a few decades. That would be soon enough to prevent the rise of atmospheric carbon dioxide from its current level of 394 parts per million to more than 450 ppm—at which point, climatologists estimate, the average global temperature will rise by 2 °C. I wish all these promises would come true, but I think instead I’ll put my faith in clear-eyed technical assessments.

...But other analyses refute the claims of cheap wind electricity, and still others take into account the fact that photo­voltaic installations require not just cells but also frames, inverters, batteries, and labor. These associated expenses are not plummeting at all, and that is why the cost of electricity generated by residential solar systems in the United States has not changed dramatically since 2000. At that time the national mean was close to 40 U.S. cents per kilowatt­-hour, while the latest Solarbuzz data for 2012 show 28.91 cents per kilowatt-hour in sunny climates and 63.60 cents per kilowatt-­hour in cloudy ones. That’s still far more expensive than using fossil fuels, which in the United States cost between 11 and 12 cents per kilowatt-hour in 2011. The age of mass-scale, decentralized photovoltaic generation is not here yet. _Vaclav Smil in IEEE

Wind and solar power supporters invariably undestimate the costs of their favourite forms of energy, because they never take into account the costs of intermittency, or the costs of ancillary infrastructure which must be built to support and back up the intermittent unreliable forms of energy they prefer.

Projections of wind-power generation into the future have been misleadingly optimistic, because they are all based on initial increases from a minuscule base. So what if total global wind turbine capacity rose sixfold between 2001 and 2011? Such high growth rates are typical of systems in early stages of development, particularly when—as in this case—the growth has been driven primarily by subsidies.

And a new factor has been changing the prospects for wind and solar: the arrival of abundant supplies of natural gas extracted by hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, from shales. Fracking is uncommon outside the United States and Canada at the moment, but it could be used in many countries in Europe, Asia, and Latin America, which also have large shale deposits. Some countries, such as France and Germany, have banned the technology for fear of possible environmental effects, but such concerns accompany all new energy technologies, even those touted for their environmental virtues. And natural gas can be used to generate electricity in particularly efficient ways. For example, combined-cycle gas plants exploit the heat leaving the gas turbine to produce steam and generate additional electricity using a steam turbine. What’s more, gas turbine modules with up to 60 megawatts of capacity can be up and running within a month of delivery, and they can be conveniently sited so as to feed their output into existing transmission lines.

The siting of massive wind farms is also becoming increasingly contentious—many people don’t like their look, object to their noise, or worry about their effect on migrating birds and bats [see “Fixing Wind Power’s Bat Problem,” in this issue]. This has become a problem even for some offshore projects. For example, a vast project off Martha’s Vineyard island, in Massachusetts, which was supposed to be the first offshore wind farm in the United States, has been stalled for years because of local opposition. The intermittence of the wind makes it hard to estimate how much electricity can be generated in a few days’ time, and the shortage of operating experience with large turbines introduces even greater uncertainty over the long term. We’ll just have to wait to see how reliable they’ll be over their supposed lifetimes of 20 to 30 years and how much repair and maintenance they will require.

And, of course, you can’t use wind turbines unless you’re prepared to hook them to the grid by building lots of additional high-voltage transmission lines, an expensive and typically legally challenging undertaking. _Vaclav Smil in IEEE

Germany is just beginning to pay the price for its impetuous descent into a reliance on intermittent unreliable green forms of energy. The final costs to Germany and Europe will by much higher than anyone -- even the most pessimistic analyst -- has yet anticipated.

And so, naturally, US President Obama wishes to take the United States down the same destructive energy decline as the greens in Europe have chosen. Obama had best hope that US voters do not catch on to his foolish agenda before the next US national election.

Green Energy: Popular Delusion, Deadly Diversion from Reality

Solar farm operators and homeowners with solar panels on their roofs collected more than €8 billion ($10.2 billion) in subsidies in 2011, but the electricity they generated made up only about 3 percent of the total power supply, and that at unpredictable times.

The distribution networks are not designed to allow tens of thousands of solar panel owners to switch at will between drawing electricity from the grid and feeding power into it. Because there are almost no storage options, the excess energy has to be destroyed at substantial cost. German consumers already complain about having to pay the second-highest electricity prices in Europe. _DerSpiegel

Der Spiegel
There is a strong sentimental appeal to getting one's electrical power from the wind and the sun. All natural, free for the taking! What could be better?

"The demand for subsidies is growing and growing," says RWI expert Manuel Frondel. If all commitments to pay subsidies so far are added together, Frondel adds, "we have already exceeded the €100 billion level."

The RWI also expects the green energy surcharge on electricity bills to go up again soon. It is currently 3.59 cents per kilowatt hour of electricity, a number the German government had actually pledged to cap at 3.5 cents. But because of the most recent developments, RWI expert Frondel predicts that the surcharge will soon increase to 4.7 cents per kilowatt hour. For the average family, this would amount to an additional charge of about €200 a year, in addition to the actual cost of electricity. Solar energy has the potential to become the most expensive mistake in German environmental policy. _DerSpiegel

But no! Wind energy is destined to occupy that position, Mein Herr!

In fact, all German solar energy systems combined produce less electricity than two nuclear power plants. And even that number is sugarcoated, because solar energy in a relatively cloudy country like Germany has to be backed up with reserve power plants. This leads to a costly, and basically unnecessary, dual structure. Figures indicating the peak performance of solar energy systems are easily misunderstood, a report by the German Physical Society says. "Essentially," the report concludes, "solar energy cannot replace any additional power plants."

In Germany, solar is by far the most inefficient technology among renewable energy sources, and yet it receives the most subsidies. Some 56 percent of all green energy subsidies go to solar systems, which produce only 21 percent of subsidized energy. _DerSpiegel

Spain, of course, receives far more solar illumination than Germany, yet Spain has been forced to slash solar subisdies due to their ruinous drain on the treasury. And yet, we continue to read this kind of rah! rah! drivel about the golden prospects for the solar power industry.

Populations of the modern west are divided between the fashionable urbanistas who buy into "carbon hysteria" and damn all hydrocarbons and nuclear power -- and the more practical people who must actually do the work and get vital things done.

The deeper a society dives into the green energy dream and delusion, the more devastating the cost when reality finally sets in.

China has invested deeply in wind and solar energy production facilities. But that was mainly to meet demand that China saw arising in the west. For its own needs, China is building up its coal, nuclear, and unconventional gas infrastructures as quickly as it can.

In China's eyes, it is fine to let western nations bankrupt themselves with big wind and big solar. And if they buy the suicidal infrastructure of decline from China, all the better. China does not want to remain an exporting nation for the duration. China's leaders see a far greater destiny for the celestial kingdom.

So if Mr. Obama wants to prohibit Canadian oil sands, offshore oil, arctic oil, coal, nuclear power, oil shales, etc., and divert diminishing resources to his political backers who have invested in big wind and big solar -- who is to complain? Certainly not the US media, who have been "all in" for Obama from the early 2008 primaries.

Americans, Europeans, Japanese, Australians: If you want the energy that will allow you and your progeny to have a future, you must do something about the energy starvationists who have worked their way to the top of your society's decision structure. This deadly diversion from reality can have only one end, if allowed to proceed.

The Problem with Levelised Cost Comparisons of Energy Generation

“Levelized cost” is a way to compare different electrical generation technologies. It is calculated by converting all of the capita costs and ongoing expenses for the project into current dollars, and dividing that by the amount of energy produced over the lifetime of the plant. For the mathematically inclined there’s a discussion of the various inputs and calculations here. Levelized cost is the all-up cost per kilowatt-hour of generated power. The levelized costs in Fig. 1 include transmission costs but not the costs of backup for intermittent sources. _WUWT

USEIA
The featured article today was written by Willis Eschenbach and published on the excellent climate website Watts Up With That. One should read the article in its entirety (follow the links provided at the end of each excerpt) to understand that Willis' main point is that solar power will not be economical within the foreseeable future.

He provides a large graphic of levelised costs comparing a wide range of different power sources, which appears to suggest that wind power has already become economical based upon its levelised cost. But as Willis explains, levelized costs leave out some critical factors which a wise energy planner would never neglect to include in his calculations.

The costs for backing up wind power, and the extra maintenance costs of big wind, are just the beginning of the problems with wind power compared with gas, nuclear, and coal -- and just two critical factors ignored by "levelised cost comparisons." John Droz clarifies these points more thoroughly in his slideshare presentation -- well worth viewing.

....this doesn’t include the fact that when you add an intermittent source like solar to an electrical grid, you have to add conventional power for backup as well. This is so you will be sure to still have power during the time when the sun doesn’t shine. Even if you never use it, the backup power will increase the cost of the solar installation by at least the capital cost of the gas plant, which is about two cents per kWh. That brings the levelized cost of solar, IF panels dropped to a levelized cost of only one penny per kWh, and IF the backup generation were never used, to 19¢ per kWh … and that’s way more than anything but offshore wind and solar thermal.

However, it gets worse from there. The cost of fuel for the gas advanced cycle power plant is only about 4 cents per kWh. So even if gas prices triple (which is extremely unlikely given the advent of fracking), the gas plant cost will still only be about 14¢ per kWh, which is still well below even the most wildly optimistic solar costs.

...I suspect that the maintenance costs for wind power are underestimated in the report, that in fact they are higher than the EIA folks assume. For example, both wind and water are free, and the EIA claims that wind and hydro have the same operation and maintenance cost of about one cent per kWh.

But with hydro (or almost any other conventional technology) you only need to maintain one really big generator on the ground.

With wind, on the other hand, to get the same amount of power you need to maintain dozens and dozens of still plenty big separate generators, which are stuck way up at the top of really tall separate towers … and also have huge, hundred-foot (30 m) propeller blades whipping around in the sky. You can imagine the trek you’ll have when you forget to bring the size #2 Torx head screwdriver …

Do you really think those two systems, both feeding the same amount of power into the grid, would cost the same to maintain? Check out the windfarms and count how many of the fans are not turning at any given time … _WUWT

There is no way of compensating a utility for the fact that a wind farm rarely produces its nameplate capacity when it is needed -- during peak load times. It happens less than 10% of the time -- which makes a mockery of the claimed "capacity factor" for wind of between 0.2 and 0.3.

Required power backup for intermittent sources is far more expensive than just the capital and operating costs of the plants themselves. You must also factor in the costs to the utility of balancing the intermittent sources plus the dispatchable sources plus the baseload sources with the ever-changing demand. It is a tricky business, and the government mandated requirements to use expensive and unreliable wind and solar makes it that much trickier. Finally, you must include the costs to the economy as a whole, as the quality and reliability of provided power declines.

Maintenance costs for wind are also higher than even Willis suggests. Machines typically do not last to the designed lifespan, and those that do last that long typically require multi-million dollar replacements of expensive bearings, gearboxes, electronics, etc. somewhere along the way. Quite a bit of bother for machines that one can rely on for peak load power less than 10% of the time.

As for Willis' argument against big solar power, it is likely that the genuinely disastrous aspects of investing in big solar will be discovered along the way. We do not have as much experience with the utter futility of big solar power as we do with big wind. But we will. Oh yes, thanks to the carbon hysterics and dieoff.orgy lefty-Luddites, we most certainly will.

Electrofuels: The Best Way to Turn Sunlight to Energy?

Electrofuels are made with energy from the sun and renewable inorganic feedstocks such as carbon dioxide and water in processes facilitated by nonphotosynthetic microorganisms or Earth-abundant metal catalysts.

“The electrofuels concept is an effort to decouple the production of liquid fuels from fossil fuels and land use, which is starting to constrain our daily lives,” said Gregory Stephanopoulos, a chemical engineering professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and leader of the conference’s organizing committee. _CEN

CEN
Bypassing photosynthesis allows engineers to devise alternative means to create chemical energy out of sunlight, at higher efficiencies than photosynthesis might allow. The image above portrays both chemical and biological catalysts being energised by sunlight to facilitate the synthesis of multiple fuels and chemicals. The use of entire biological micro-organisms which have been gene-engineered to use more efficient, non-photosynthetic pathways for synthetic production of high value chemicals and fuels, is one likely approach.

“The name of the game for electro­fuels is to find more efficient ways to capture solar radiation in a form that’s usable for transportation,” commented Eric J. Toone, a chemistry professor at Duke University and deputy director of ARPA-E. The agency was created in 2009 with funding from the American Recovery & Reinvestment Act to boost development and commercialization of technologies that reduce U.S. dependence on foreign energy sources.
“When looking at the amount of solar energy that is captured by a plant and the net amount of that energy it can harness, the value is on the order of 0.1 to 0.2%,” Toone said. “On the other hand, we know we can capture and convert solar energy to electricity at higher efficiency, on the order of 20% for current silicon photovoltaic cells. In the electrofuels approach, we’ve tried to bring together the best of both worlds, to develop catalytic systems capable of highly efficient energy assimilation from inorganic molecules for the direct production of fuels.”

...Stephanopoulos’ group at MIT has an electrofuels project under way that taps two customized microbes: One produces acetate from waste CO2 and H2 from sunlight-driven water electrolysis and the second microbe converts the acetate into a triglyceride that can be processed into a fatty acid methyl ester, which is the primary component of biodiesel.
Reporting on another technology, microbiologist Derek R. Lovley of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, described a lab-scale electromicrobiology approach to electrofuels that takes advantage of some microbes’ ability to make electrical contacts with materials. His team is growing Geobacter or Clostridium bacteria on iron(III) oxide films on carbon electrodes. The microbes consume electrons released from the electrode as their energy source and metabolize CO2. Differently engineered bacteria can produce compounds such as acetic acid or butanol. _CEN

And this is just the beginning. We cannot expect accomplished bio-revolutionaries such as Craig Venter, to reveal all the details of their latest projects. Nor can we expect rapid up-and-comers such as Jay Keasling to openly discuss everything on his mind.

The sun has always been an enormous influence on human civilisations and cultures. It is likely that as soon as humans discover the best ways to utilise the energies of the sun -- and to copy the physical processes that drive the sun in labs -- a new revolution in human existence will be incited.

A Gallery of Solar Capture Technologies

The Earth is deluged with vast amounts of energy from the sun on a constant basis. Humans have utilised solar energy from their earliest days, living on the proceeds of photosynthesis either directly or indirectly. As humans discovered fire, they cleverly enlarged their utilisation of solar energy to keeping warm on cold winter nights.

Modern humans have set their sites on powering a large part of their commercial and industrial infrastructure with solar energy, and have become extremely ingenious toward that end. Pictured below are several unconventional approaches to solar energy, which go beyond the simple silicon photovoltaic approach:

Plasmonic Photovoltaics

“The greatest significance thus far is to show an alternative method to rectennas and PV devices for IR and visible light conversion,” Melosh [Stanford U.] told PhysOrg.com. “The conversion efficiencies aren't amazingly high compared to a PV in visible, so it’s not going to replace PVs, but it could be used for energy scavenging later on.”

The new device’s MIM architecture is similar to that of a rectenna. However, whereas rectennas operate with long-wavelength light such as microwaves and radio waves, the new device operates with a broad spectrum of infrared to visible wavelengths. _Physorg

Northwestern U. Plasmonic via Brian Westenhaus
Another type of plasmonic super-absorption device comes from Northwestern U. Brian Westenhaus has more.

Nanowire Photovoltaics

The [U. Illinois] researchers found conditions for growing nanowires of various compositions of the III-V semiconductor indium gallium arsenide. Their methodology has the advantages of using a common growth technique without the need for any special treatments or patterning on the silicon wafer or the metal catalysts that are often needed for such reactions.

The nanowire geometry provides the additional benefit of enhancing solar cell performance through greater light absorption and carrier collection efficiency. The nanowire approach also uses less material than thin films, reducing the cost. _Physorg

Solar Antennas
A promising approach to solar antennas from Caltech
Another approach to solar antennas from Stanford

Super Light Absorber Nanotube Coating

The team of engineers at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., reported their findings recently at the SPIE Optics and Photonics conference, the largest interdisciplinary technical meeting in this discipline. The team has since reconfirmed the material's absorption capabilities in additional testing, said John Hagopian, who is leading the effort involving 10 Goddard technologists.

"The reflectance tests showed that our team had extended by 50 times the range of the material’s absorption capabilities. Though other researchers are reporting near-perfect absorption levels mainly in the ultraviolet and visible, our material is darn near perfect across multiple wavelength bands, from the ultraviolet to the far infrared," Hagopian said. "No one else has achieved this milestone yet."

The nanotech-based coating is a thin layer of multi-walled carbon nanotubes, tiny hollow tubes made of pure carbon about 10,000 times thinner than a strand of human hair. They are positioned vertically on various substrate materials much like a shag rug. The team has grown the nanotubes on silicon, silicon nitride, titanium, and stainless steel, materials commonly used in space-based scientific instruments. _Physorg

Thin Film Nanopillar

The cells designed by Solasta are built on a substrate forested with long, thin, vertically arrayed nanopillars. The pillars are coated first with metal, then with a thin layer of semiconducting material such as amorphous silicon, and then with a layer of transparent conductive oxide. Though the silicon layer is thin, a photon still has a relatively long path to travel down the length of the nanopillars, and a good chance of transferring its energy to an electron. Freed electrons then travel perpendicularly over a very short path to the metal at the core of each pillar, and shimmy down this electrical pole off the cell. "Electrons never have to travel through the photovoltaic material," says Zhifeng Ren, professor of physics at Boston College. "As soon as they're generated, they go into the metal." _TechnologyReview

This is only the beginning of the ingenious designs which are intended to shift Earthlings into a grand new solar age.

The problem, of course, is the diffuse and intermittent nature of sunlight. The invention of cheap and efficient electrical storage would partially solve that problem -- especially for desert areas near the equator, which receive plentiful sunlight on a regular schedule.

But even with cheap, efficient storage, the diffuse nature of sunlight requires large areas of land to be covered by solar collectors. At this time, even at 100% conversion efficiency, and at a cost of $0.00 per panel, large scale solar energy would not be practical or affordable for most parts of the globe.

Solar photovoltaic energy is instead a niche field, more suitable for small scale applications. Solar thermal is another matter. Solar thermal principles should be incorporated into the construction of every home and building which is built in the developed world from now on.

Big Wind and Big Solar: Like Wrecking Balls to Economies and Power Grids

The UK is the latest government to pull the plug on the destructive green jobs boondoggle.

In the US, yet another solar power company has joined Solyndra in bankruptcy. The Obama administration is becoming known as the "bad bet presidency," as a result of all the crony deals the US president has made which have cost taxpayers huge amounts of money which the treasury does not have.

More on the Beacon Power Corp bankruptcy

Power engineers and grid managers agree that big wind and big solar are far more trouble than they are worth, power-wise:

... the disadvantage with [wind and solar] is they are unreliable, infirm sources of power and can cause huge volatility in the grid, especially during the peak period when electricity demand goes up by 15% to 20%. Unless new market instruments like time-of-use pricing are introduced to elicit demand-based response from customers, supplying renewable power to the grid on a large scale might not be feasible.

... the increasing penetration of variable renewable generation required to decarbonise electricity systems is magnifying power system volatility.... _Power-Eng

Big wind and big solar are "feel good" technologies that will kill economies and power grids unless they are dealt with realistically -- and kept limited to an extremely small proportion of a utility's inputs.

Small wind and small solar are a different matter, as long as they are managed by persons who know what they are doing, for users who are able to deal with the unavoidable intermittencies, fluctuations, and unreliability of the resource.

In addition to requiring a large amount of materials, labor and money for each small increment of energy generated, the output from wind-farms is erratic and unpredictable. Unlike a 1000 megawatt nuclear plant, which reliably generates over 900 megawatt-years of energy each year, a 1000 megawatt wind-farm could be expected to generate no more than 200 to 300
megawatt-years, because of the variability of the wind.

The variability of wind speed imposes specific limitations on the electric output of any winddriven generator. Below 7-10 miles per hour (mph), the wind is too slow to generate useful power. Rated speed for most machines is in the range of 25 to 35 mph. At high wind speeds, typically between 45 and 80 mph, most wind-turbines have to shut down to prevent damage.

...So, an electric power grid is a continuous delicate balancing act, having to match up each new demand for more electricity by increasing generation accordingly, and matching each turned-off light switch by correspondingly decreasing output from one of its power stations. The grid accomplishes this balancing by maintaining a good-sized “spinning reserve” of some reliable energy source, such as coal or gas. Of course, this is all done automatically, under the coordinated watchful eye of various human operators. But in that situation, having an energy source, such as a wind-farm, that on its own initiative doubles its output or cuts it in half from time to time, is seen as pure mischief. As evidence of this, note that it usually requires 24 hours or more to restabilize the grid after a blackout. If we had never heard of unpredictable energy sources, and we observed unpredictable surges into and out of the grid, we might reasonably suspect sabotage. It is easier to harm the system by scrambling the demand than by blowing up transmission towers.

Not only is a wind-farm’s output unpredictable, but what pattern there is, is often counterproductive. In much of the U.S., the wind is apt to be higher speed and steadier at night, when the demand is lowest. And the gusts are strongest in the spring and fall, when neither heating nor air-conditioning demand is in full swing. _TedRockwell PDF

More facts about wind energy

Al Fin has always supported off-grid home-scale wind and solar power. And until he learned the facts about big wind and big solar, he assumed that they were a good approach. But no longer. If you think your world would be a better place if big wind and big solar are forced onto utility companies and power grids, perhaps you should learn the facts as well.

Obama's Great Bankrupt Solar Power Debacle

First Evergreen Solar decided to close up shop. Now Solyndra has announced that it can't compete in solar panels and is declaring bankruptcy. What gives? Wasn't this supposed to be the era of renewable energy? Weren't we headed for a green energy renaissance that would end America's dependence on foreign oil? _iStockAnalyst

Strangely enough, Solyndra's billionaire majority stockholder, George Kaiser, was a big campaign fundraiser for Obama. Interestingly, Mr. Obama has been quite vocal in his praise of Solyndra, and helped ease over $500 million in government loans to Solyndra -- which taxpayers are now liable for.

Solyndra's relationship with the White House came under special scrutiny because of Solyndra backer and Tulsa billionaire George Kaiser's history as an Obama fundraiser. In a letter to Energy Secretary Steven Chu in February, the House Energy and Commerce Committee raised concerns about the loan, noting that the company had suffered "financial setbacks," and asking for information about "whether Solyndra was the right candidate" for the loan guarantee....The Department of Energy marched on anyway _WSJ

Where did all the money go? Perhaps not surprisingly, Obama's White House is now stonewalling an investigation into the administration's financial connections with the failed solar company.

The solar industry is environmentally dirty, responsible for dumping millions of tons of lead across the Indian and Chinese countryside. In one sense, the bankruptcies of US solar companies are considered a boon for Chinese manufacturers. But in an environmental sense, Chinese production of photovoltaic panels is proving to be a great curse.

In many circles, Obama is being described as the "jobs destroyer in chief." Not only has Mr. Obama's "green jobs revolution" backfired badly, but his entire agenda of energy starvation is creating massive secondary and tertiary downstream destructive effects on job formation.

Big Solar: Not Ready for Prime Time

OECD via Rod Adams
JournoLists from the mainstream media have been credulous cheerleaders for the wind and solar industries -- and for the faux environmental movement in general. Rod Adams takes the New York Times to task for a typical example of atrocious journoLism on solar energy.

...a normally credible news source, the New York Times, apparently did not bother to more fully investigate the credibility of the "study" to find out that it is just a paper that was commissioned by an organization that is dedicated to a well publicized agenda. On July 26, 2010, on the front page of the New York Times business section, there was a Special Report: Energy titled Nuclear Energy Loses Cost Advantage written by Diana S. Powers whose conclusions about electricity cost comparisons between nuclear and solar were entirely based on the Blackburn and Cunningham paper and its sources. The writer did not check on the academic credentials of the paper's authors, check to see if it had been peer reviewed, or question whether or not it was backed up by independent work by anyone else. She quite possibly did not even read the entire paper to understand the calculations used to draw the pretty graph. The editor allotted a good deal of valuable space for this poorly researched work.
...
The paper is seductively titled Solar and Nuclear Costs — The Historic Crossover: Solar Energy is Now the Better Buy. The paper's cover has a dramatic and colorful graph that shows ever increasing costs for nuclear and ever decreasing costs for solar. The lines cross in 2010. (I will explain my use of the word "seductive".)

For their nuclear power cost projections, the professor emeritus and his grad student relied on a 2009 cost projection paper written by a lone researcher named Mark Cooper, whose current employment is described as "Senior Research Fellow for Economic Analysis" for the Vermont Law School Institute for Energy and the Environment. His brief biography states that he has a "PhD from Yale" but it does not specify his field of study. It indicates he is an "acivist/advocate" with a rather wide range of interest areas including telecommunications regulations and energy consumer issues.

The paper ignores all other cost projections for nuclear. Some of the previous work on this topic that the professor and his graduate student ignored includes the following:

• A 2003 study conducted by a multidisciplinary team at MIT titled The Future of Nuclear Power which was updated with new data in 2009.
• A 2005 report by the World Nuclear Association titled The New Economics of Nuclear Power
• A 2010 OECD study titled Projected Costs of Generating Electricity: 2010 Edition

 _RodAdams

Depleted Cranium takes a careful look at a new solar thermal plant in Sicily, and decides that the plant provides only "piddling" energy for the enormous cost of investment, land, and resources.

The actual plant is enormous. It contains over three miles of primary loop pipeline, occupies over thirty thousand square meters and costs sixty million euro just to build (never mind the operating cost of keeping those mirrors shiny and the pipes free of leaks and clogs.) For this enormous price the plant generates five megawatts.

Of course, that’s not why the plant is there. It makes a perfect window dressing for the much much smaller, yet much much more powerful gas-fired power plant that is located at the same site. Officials like to talk about how the solar collectors are “integrated” into the gas fired power system and allow for less gas usage, as some kind of transition. They don’t mention that the gas fired power plant is 752 megawatts, a lot more than the five megawatts of the solar power station. But hey, with all the glare of those solar collectors, you might not even notice the big gas burner next-door, right?

One other thing that should be noted: the plant is rated at five megawatts, but that doesn’t mean it actually generates that much power.

The “five megawatt” number is a reference to the peak capacity of the power station, which is much much different than its true output. During the mid day, on a perfectly clear sunny summer day, when all systems are functioning at their optimal performance, it may get up to five megawatts. However, it will be lower much more often.

To get a better idea of what this plant is actually supposed to produce, or at least what the estimates of the builder are, we need to figure out what the average power output is. According to one site, the plant is supposed to produce “9 million kilowatt hours a year.” That’s nine thousand megawatt hours. There are 8,760 hours in a year (non leap-year), so as it turns out, the actual output of the plant averages just a little over one megawatt. This is, of course, assuming the estimates are correct and not more rosy than the reality of things. _DepletedCranium

There are plenty of situations where off-grid solar energy makes a great deal of sense. Solar is more predictable than wind, but as an expensive and intermittent source it will not win any prizes from utility grid managers.

The gullibility and ignorance with which solar (and wind) energy projects are pursued by journoLists, public officials, political activists, and faux environmental lobbies is a sad testimony to modern education and child-raising practises. But the world is what it is and we must do with it what we can.

Wind and Solar Exorbitantly Expensive, and Can't Meet Demand

"Without...fossil fuels, we would be returned to the incredible environmental destruction and nasty living conditions and incredibly hard labor of the 19th century," he says. "We would be living in dire poverty." _World

Promoters of big wind and big solar energy have not done the math, nor have they looked at the true economic costs of attempting to convert from a fossil fuel infrastructure to a wind and solar energy infrastructure. Severe cost increases plus energy cut-backs would be devastating to any economy -- but much more so to an economy stuck in a global depression.

Math and physics offer stark realities about wind and solar energy. The most obvious problem: The sources are intermittent.

As Sen. Bob Bennett, R-Utah, ranking member of the Subcommittee on Energy and Water Development, told Environment and Energy Daily: "The wind doesn't always blow and the sun doesn't always shine."

To make the energy sources consistently reliable on a wide scale would require massive amounts of reliable storage—technology that doesn't exist on a cost-effective basis. Forcing utility companies to generate more of their power using wind and solar would likely raise energy costs for U.S. consumers.

Another problem: Wind and solar require massive amounts of land to produce and transport energy. The Nature Conservancy, a U.S. environmental group, published a report last year estimating that wind power requires about 30 times as much land as nuclear energy, and four times as much land required for natural gas.

... if wind and solar remain unrealistic for large-scale, cost-effective energy, natural gas has already proven itself on both counts: Natural gas provided nearly a quarter of the nation's energy for electricity in 2009, second only to coal.

Advances in technology over the last five years have created a mini-revolution in extracting natural gas using new methods, opening up new gas supplies all over the country. Hayward of AEI says fields are so vast, it's conceivable that the United States could become an exporter of natural gas over the next few decades. The new technology could also hold promise for developing countries still creating their power systems, if they embrace natural gas as a major source of energy that is far cleaner than coal.

Peter Huber, author of The Bottomless Well (Basic Books, 2005), sees another major use for natural gas: transportation. The United States consumes massive amounts of oil for vehicles each year, but Huber thinks natural gas could compete. He notes that some 10 million vehicles worldwide already run on natural gas. Vehicles would require more natural gas to travel the same distance, but Huber says modifications to vehicles over the coming years could accommodate the change. And since natural gas is cheaper than oil, the option could still be cost effective.

...Despite the devastating BP oil spill, oil advocates point out that major spills are rare, and that relying more heavily on imports could lead to tanker spills—already much more common than well leaks.

With any major energy transition still years away, Hayward says oil is here to stay for at least decades. "The 'problem with oil' is that it's such a terrific fuel, it's hard to match its performance and cost with anything else." Bryce agrees, and bristles when politicians complain about an abundance of fossil fuels.

"Without those fossil fuels, we would be returned to the incredible environmental destruction and nasty living conditions and incredibly hard labor of the 19th century," he says. "We would be living in dire poverty." _World

Nuclear Energy Facts PDF

Wind Energy Facts SlideShare

Renewable Energy Facts

If you digest the material in the above links, you will know 100 times more about the energy problem than the average university educated person, and over 1000 times more about energy than President Obama, Speaker Pelosi, Senator Boxer, or Secretary Salazar.

Which should tell you something about the dunces who are running the US government.

The Green Bubbles of Wind and Solar Under Stress

Small wind and small solar can fit very nicely into particular niches -- such as off-grid energy production. But large wind and large solar projects are another thing entirely.

There has never been a good economic justification for large scale wind or solar projects. Europe fell head over heels for the green energy -- carbon hysteria scams long ago, but is just now beginning to pay a tremendous price for its folly. Any other economies that are foolish enough to join Europe in its delusional pursuit of wind and solar power -- to the neglect of clean nuclear and advanced coal $ gas, will pay a huge economic penalty.

... few if any wind energy, solar energy, and other green electric power installations could make money without subsidies. As governments across Europe curb spending and cut subsidies in response to the Greek crisis, the props to green energy are being cut back. As almost each day is marked by a new, and harsher national austerity plan announcement in countries ranging far up the scale from small-size Greece, we can be sure that reining in deficits will not be kind to green energy vanity projects.

On May 6, German lawmakers reduced subsidies to new solar plants by as much as 16%, dealing another blow to the generally high cost German solar energy industry, already faced with rising, low cost competition from China and India. Italian solar industry groups expect government support for new wind and solar energy power generation plants to be scaled back by 25% or more, in June.

In Spain, where subsidies to the country's massive windfarms and their dependent industries is estimated to have attained as much as 12 billion Euros in 2009, either directly or through "feed-in tariff" subsidy for power sales, government proposals target at least a 30% cut in subsidies.

... Sales and profits for North American and Chinese renewable energy companies selling their products in Europe have declined, as the Euro has lost about 15% against the US dollar this year. Affecting profits more than sales in first impact, profits for China's leading solar-cell maker Yingli Green Energy will fall more than 40%, and Yingli's major home rival Suntech Holdings will suffer a 79% drop in profits, according to Barclays Capital analysts, if the Euro stays below $1.25 in the next 6 months.

This has quickly spilled over to stock price valuations. European, North American, Chinese, and Indian wind and solar energy companies are suffering large falls in their stock price value. The higher priced, higher tech sectors have been most affected, shown by Canadian Solar's stock falling about 50% since April 1, while stock of Suntech Holdings is off by 35% since April 1. Spain's biggest producer of wind turbines, Gamesa Corporacion, has lost 43% of its share price value since January 2010, and 19% since April 1. _EnergyTribune

Without Hot Air Energy Facts
Wind Energy Facts
Nuclear Energy Facts Report PDF

3 Approaches to Nano-Photovoltaics

Using arrays of long, thin silicon wires embedded in a polymer substrate, a team of scientists from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) has created a new type of flexible solar cell that enhances the absorption of sunlight and efficiently converts its photons into electrons. The solar cell does all this using only a fraction of the expensive semiconductor materials required by conventional solar cells. _ScienceDaily

The Caltech scientists have reportedly exceeded the conventional light-trapping limit of absorptive materials.

Professor Dawn Bonnell the director of the Nano/Bio Interface Center at the University of Pennsylvania and her colleagues have demonstrated the transduction of optical radiation to electrical current in a molecular circuit. The system uses an array of nano-sized molecules of gold that respond to electromagnetic waves by creating surface plasmons to induce and project electrical current across molecules, similar to that of photovoltaic solar cells. _NewEnergyandFuel

This approach is unique in that the hardware acts as an electromagnetic "antenna" for photons. It is worth reading Brian's article in full to understand how this approach is different from traditional photovoltaics. The authors suggest that their approach may eventually lead to a significant price breakthrough in solar electricity.

The cells designed by Solasta are built on a substrate forested with long, thin, vertically arrayed nanopillars. The pillars are coated first with metal, then with a thin layer of semiconducting material such as amorphous silicon, and then with a layer of transparent conductive oxide. Though the silicon layer is thin, a photon still has a relatively long path to travel down the length of the nanopillars, and a good chance of transferring its energy to an electron. Freed electrons then travel perpendicularly over a very short path to the metal at the core of each pillar, and shimmy down this electrical pole off the cell. "Electrons never have to travel through the photovoltaic material," says Zhifeng Ren, professor of physics at Boston College. "As soon as they're generated, they go into the metal." Ren founded Solasta with professors Michael Naughton and Krzysztof Kempa. _TechnologyReview

This approach is traditional photovoltaics, but in 3 dimensions. Increasing the surface area allows for more incident photon absorption.

Al Fin solar specialists prefer solar energy to wind energy, since solar energy is more predictable over huge geographic areas than wind. The energy storage problem is still a significant issue. Even with extremely inexpensive (free) solar cells, the short useful daily time frame for solar energy production will limit applications until large scale, inexpensive energy storage is available.

Solar Power News: Sooner or Later, Solar Breaks Out

Solar energy is too good, too vast, not to become an important energy player eventually. Orbital solar is best, but terrestrial solar will be important once the storage and cost problems are solved. A hybrid solar roofing "shingle" that collects both light and heat energy from the sun, might make a difference.

The broad concept of building a solar panel that is tough enough to act as a roof panel yet sensitive enough to capture as much of the sun's energy as possible is likely feasible, says David Ginger, an associate professor of chemistry at the University of Washington in Seattle. "Of course, putting all these ideas into the same package in a cost-effective manner is often more challenging than pitching the idea on paper, which is why you want clever engineers trying out new designs and then testing them in real-world environments," he adds.


And although this idea of "building-integrated photovoltaics" (BIPV) is not new, the Columbia-Weidlinger multilayered hybrid design is different from anything currently available to builders. SolarWorld AG in Germany, for example, sells a technology it calls Energyroof, which consists of panels covered with solar laminates that generate electricity but does not include a layer of thermoelectric material.


In October, The Dow Chemical Company announced its Powerhouse Solar Shingle, which the company says can be integrated into rooftops with standard asphalt shingle materials. These solar shingles, which feature thin-film copper indium gallium selenide (CIGS) photovoltaic cells, are expected to be available in limited quantities by mid-2010 and projected to be more widely available in 2011. In 2007, the DOE had given Dow $20 million in funding to develop building-integrated solar arrays for the residential and commercial markets. _SciAm

Solar thermal power holds more promise for large scale utility power generation, because heat can be more easily and cheaply stored than electricity. One interesting form of solar thermal uses the Stirling heat engine, which can run on relatively low levels of heat differential.

Stirling engines are significantly more efficient at converting sunlight into energy than most photovoltaic panels or concentrating solar power plants, whether parabolic trough or tower designs. The test units have reached 31 percent efficiency, compared to 16 percent for parabolic troughs and about 14-18 percent for PV panels in use today (though newer designs not yet on the market range from 24 to as high as 41 percent). _SciAm

It is easy to imagine a hybrid solar thermal plant which uses a tower to generate steam hot enough for combined cycle (gas turbine plus steam turbine) operation. The exhaust water from the steam turbine could drive a Stirling engine. So you have three cascading heat engines operating simultaneously. Then, after dark, stored heat can drive the Stirling engine well into the night to cover maximum peak times. The idea is to extract as much energy -- at the right times -- as possible.

The issue of heat storage is a different topic, but it is likely that heat storage will be more efficient than electrical storage for at least another 1 or 2 decades.

Skipping the Middle Man: Direct Solar Fuel

Some scientists and engineers want to skip all the intermediate nonsense of using biomass, gasifiers, chemical refineries, etc. to produce fuels. Why not go to the source, and produce fuels directly from sunlight, water, and CO2?

• BioCee and the University of Minnesota wants to take sunlight, carbon dioxide and two organisms (cyanobacteria for sunlight capture and shewanella for metabolic transformation) to produce a liquid hydrocarbon....
• Researchers at Penn State say they can do something similar, but instead of microbes, they mix a membrane of titanium dioxide nanotubes in with sunlight and carbon dioxide....
• MIT-spin out Sun Catalytix, meanwhile, captures solar energy and exploits it to split water to produce hydrogen. ...
• Stanford's James Swartz isolated a microbe that metabolizes sunlight to split hydrogen from water...
• A few small startups in Israel and the U.S. have experimented with microbial fuel cells....
  

_GreenTechMedia

This is the most sustainable approach in the long run. Of course, there is a very real shortage of affordable, concentrated CO2 -- which complicates the process slightly.

Algal biofuels are very close to direct solar fuels. Algae need much higher CO2 levels than the atmosphere provides, to truly thrive. If Al Gore and his merry band of larcenous con artists wanted to help the planet, they would be devising ways to concentrate CO2 for making direct solar fuels. Instead, they got sidetracked on highly corrupt scams, to make their fortune. Too bad, yet clearly par for these times.

Finding a New Niche for Solar Power?

Solar power is well-suited for small scale and off-grid applications. But without cheap utility-scale storage, the daily time limits on sunshine make large scale solar impractical and exorbitantly expensive. Abengoa Solar, based in Lakewood, CO, and Xcel Energy, Colorado's largest electrical utility, have come up with an idea that may get a foot in the door for larger solar utility projects: mixing solar energy with coal energy.

...a large part of the cost of a solar-thermal plant is the equipment for converting heat into electricity. The Abengoa Solar project will use existing boilers, turbines, generators, and so on, reducing this cost.

"The thing that's attractive about this is you only have to buy the solar field portion of the plant, which is 50 to 60 percent of the cost of the plant," says Hank Price, director of technology at Abengoa Solar. That could effectively make solar-thermal power about 30 to 50 percent cheaper, according to various estimates. That would equate to a range of about six to 12 cents per kilowatt-hour, which is competitive with many conventional sources of electricity. "It's potentially the most cost-effective way to get significant solar power on the grid," he says.

In the new project, because parabolic troughs don't generate sufficiently high temperatures, the heat they produce won't be fed directly into the turbines. Instead, it will be used to preheat water that will be fed into the coal plant's boilers, where coal is burned to turn the water into steam. _TechnologyReview

Because the water going into the boilers will be pre-heated by focused solar heat, less coal will be required to produce the steam that powers the steam turbines.

Whether this approach actually saves money, will require some testing and a great deal of analysis. It is a good idea that has to be proven by hard-headed work.

The problem hanging over the energy sector, preventing a clear analysis of new technologies, is the political crusade over carbon climate catastrophe. If the economics of energy is allowed to be distorted by political crusades, we will all end up much worse off than we are today. We hope that this project, lake all energy projects, can be evaluated in a dispassionate manner.

Back to 1968 and Orbital Solar Power

Back in 1968 Peter Glaser detailed an ambitious plan for energy independence, using solar power from orbiting photovoltaic arrays. The technology for large-scale solar panel manufacture wasn't ready for anthing that ambitious back then, although heavy space launch infrastructure was in much better shape. Regardless, the idea is being resurrected by a startup company:

Now Solaren Corporation, a startup based in Manhattan Beach, CA, is trying to get the idea off the ground. It's working with the California utility Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E), which intends to enter into a power-purchase agreement with the company. If the agreement is approved by regulators, starting in 2016, the utility will purchase 200 megawatts of power from Solaren at an undisclosed price--that is, if the startup can get a system into space and working by then. The company has already selected a site in California for the receiving station; it hasn't said exactly where, but it will be close to a PG&E substation and won't require long-distance transmission lines.

Solaren hasn't released many details about the system. CEO Gary Spirnak says that it's conceptually the same as communications satellite technology: it uses solar panels to generate electricity, which gets sent to Earth in the form of radio waves, which are received by antennas on Earth. In a Q & A published by PG&E, he said that the design is "a significant departure from past efforts," so it will be economically feasible. The first system will reportedly be able to generate 1,000 megawatts--about the size of many conventional power plants. The company will need to raise billions of dollars to construct the plant. Right now, it only has 10 employees. _TechReview

More information at Next Big Future, and at New Energy and Fuel

Nice 100 KW Solar + Modular Gas Turbine Plant

This is a very cool, very practical, very scalable, and very baseload approach to solar power. Israeli firm Aora has taken Al Fin's advice and built a gas turbine solar thermal plant with the ability to run off of either solar heat or combustible gas. This allows the plant to run night and day as necessary. At 100 KW it takes up very little space, and is modular, thus scalable.

Both PV and regular solar thermal power need vast tracts of land to accommodate all the mirrors or heliostats they require. Aora's new model requires just half an acre of land to produce 100 KW, enough to power 50 homes. By solar standards, that's not a great deal of electricity. Yet there are several advantages to Aora's system, COO Yuval Susskind told The Jerusalem Post ahead of the Eilat-Eilot International Renewable Energy Conference and Exhibition at the beginning of February.

"Aora's model has four advantages. It's modular, it's hybrid, it can run on alternative fuels and it offers all of those options in one base package," he explained. What's the secret behind the new technology? Pairing a proprietary solar concentrator with a micro-gas turbine instead of a steam turbine. Conventional solar thermal power, such as that produced by Brightsource/Luz II or Soleil, relies on heated water turning into steam which is then used to power a turbine. However, steam turbines are only efficient when producing many megawatts (MW), which also requires a great deal of land. Aora uses a micro-gas turbine which is effective at less than one MW and requires far fewer heliostats (30) to produce 100 KWs.

"A small, modular base unit which doesn't take up very much space means that you can plug it straight into the nearest electricity line. You don't need to run new lines or install new components to handle the flow. In addition, you can link several units together around a village, say, to produce enough power," the South African-raised Susskind said. Each base unit is comprised of one 30 meter high tower housing the concentrator, micro-gas turbine and 30 heliostats. _JerusalemPost

There are a lot of things to like about this design, not least of which is the ability to gang the units on widely separated lots. That aspect allows for much greater flexibility in land use planning for solar power plants.

While Al Fin prefers combined cycle power plant designs, he will settle for a gas turbine that can run on multiple fuels, including sunlight.

Converting CO2 to Methane With Nanotubes

Penn State U. researchers have devised arrays of titania nanotubes to convert atmospheric CO2 to CH4 and other hydrocarbons using sunlight.

The rate of carbon dioxide (CO2) conversion using this method is 20 times higher than that of previously published research. The work is described in the January 27, 2009, online edition of Nano Letters.

....This type of solar-based conversion process only works if a photocatalyst—a material that reacts with light—is used to convert the CO2 into hydrocarbons. A photocatalyst that utilizes the most solar energy possible is the best option.

One popular photocatalyst candidate for the job has been titanium dioxide, also called titania, because it can powerfully react with oxygen. But so far, researchers haven't been able to make titania perform adequately despite experimenting with a variety of forms, such as nanoparticles, pellets, and multi-layer films.

Grimes and his colleagues used arrays of titania nanotubes. They created the nanotubes using a technique that incorporates nitrogen into the nanotubes' structures, which the researchers initially thought would help increase the conversion rate (this turned out to be true only in a very limited capacity).

The process also yields a high total surface area compared to other forms of the material, a property that aids in the conversion. To further boost the process, the group scattered an ultra-thin layer of platinum and/or copper "cocatalyst" nanoparticles on the surface of the array. _PO

Not only will this method produce useful hydrocarbon fuels, but if the global climate cools much further, such nano-arrays could be distributed across the globe to boost atmospheric methane levels -- to trap more of the suns heat, and stave off excessive global cooling. We would need to be careful not to allow methane concentrations to reach explosive levels, however. ;-)