Empowered by Lennar » Solar

MIT Developing Paintable Solar Cells Made Of Plants

Lennar — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 19:13:17 +0000

In a report published by Scientific Reports, researchers say they’re successfully working toward making low-cost solar cells from plants. While, technically, all plants are some sort of solar cell, the key here is the word “low cost.” The project in question is focusing on a way to produce “biophotovoltaics” without all sorts of sophisticated lab equipment. The new system is incredibly user-friendly and costs a lot less – mix green plants (like grass clippings) with custom-designed chemicals, and out comes a photovoltaic material made with the power of photosynthesis. MIT researcher Andreas Mershin explained just how easy the process is: “Take that bag (of chemicals), mix it with anything green and paint it on the roof.” That’s it – mix and paint. Mershin wants to see this inexpensive method used in developing countries, for example, where electricity is scarce and the power grids are unreliable. [Read this article]

Share:

Solar-Powered Car Stops In California On Trip Around The World

Lennar — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 19:06:15 +0000

A solar-powered car on a quest to circumnavigate the globe kicked off a 49-day trek across the U.S. in Half Moon Bay, California. Propelled only by the sun’s rays, the two-seat SolarWorld Gran Turismo sports car is slated to travel 21,000 miles and set a “Guinness World Records” record for the longest distance covered by a solar car, according to its co-creator SolarWorld. “The SolarWorld GT is an ambassador for sustainable personal transportation, reminding us that the power to shift our driving habits away from dirty fossil fuels is within our grasp,” said Kevin Kilkelly, president of SolarWorld Americas. “Clean energy from the sun is there for the taking – without depleting the Earth’s riches.” The car will make five planned stops along a 3,774-mile route from California to South Carolina. [Read this article]

Share:

Leasing Solar Panels Appeals To Less-Affluent

Lennar — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 20:15:53 +0000

A new study has found that being able to purchase a rooftop solar panel system is often a privilege of the affluent, but that leasing rooftop solar panel systems is an increasingly popular option for those who simply don’t have the money to pay up front. If you have the money to lease a rooftop solar panel system, you’re not only helping the environment, but, within just a year after you start, you can start saving money. The real benefit for those leasing a system is seen over the next few decades of their contract, where third-party companies are touting household savings of up to $10,000 to $15,000 over two decades. How? Because as you pay a constant $40 or $50 per month lease on the solar panels, the cost of electricity is going up, saving you money. The study was conducted by analysts from the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory, who found that leasing solar panels is surging in southern California and is especially being adopted by those in ‘less-affluent’ neighborhoods where households are earning between $100,000 and $150,000 a year. [Read this article]

Share:

Sunflowers Inspire Improved Solar Power Plant

Lennar — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 17:33:57 +0000

The well-tuned geometry of the florets on the face of the sunflower head has inspired an improved layout for mirrors used to concentrate sunlight and generate electricity, according to new research. The sunflower-inspired layout could reduce the footprint of concentrating solar power (CSP) plants by about 20 percent, which could be a boon for a technology that’s limited, in part, by its massive land requirements. CSP plants employ arrays of giant mirrors, each the size of half a tennis court, to beam the sun’s rays up to heat a tube of fluid in the top of a tower. This hot fluid drives steam turbines that generate electricity. In the traditional layout, the mirrors are arranged in rows of circles that ripple out from the central tower. Alexander Mitsos of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology came up with a design where the mirrors are closer together, reducing the amount of land required by 10 percent. The pattern, a team member noticed, had some elements that resembled the spiraling pattern in sunflowers and suggested they mimic the florets. [Read this article]

Share:

13-Year-Old’s Solar Invention Sparks Debate

Lennar — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 20:45:32 +0000

Two years ago, when Aidan Dwyer was just 11 years old, he went hiking in the woods with his parents and he took a good long look at the trees. He wondered why the leaves grew the way they did and wondered if their patterns could somehow be used to improve solar power collection. With a little research, over the course of the next two years, he built a solar collector with panels arrayed like the leaves on a tree and compared their output to those of a traditional, flat solar panel. He compared measurements and found that his tree structure’s numbers were higher. Excitedly, the now 13-year-old submitted his results to the Young Naturalist Awards, a national contest run by the American Museum of Natural History, and was picked as one of 12 winners. And that’s when the real controversy began. Many scientists first lauded Aidan for his “out-of-the-box” thinking, but there was one little problem with his design: Aidan had measured and compared voltage when what he really needed to calculate was power. [Read this article]

Share:

Jacksonville Police Cars Charging On Solar Power

Lennar — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 20:40:09 +0000

The Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office is letting the sun shine in, and some of its officers are getting a charge out of it. Solar charging panels on some police cars allow officers to take advantage of sun power. The average police car drains two 12-volt batteries a year due to all of the electronics and lights it has to operate. The solar panels help save gas too, said Assistant Chief John Lamb, in charge of the Sheriff’s Office’s logistics and general support division. “We wanted to look for alternatives to combat the problems and solar is free,” Lamb said. The basic Chevrolet Impala police cruiser packs a 230-horsepower V-6 gasoline engine with a heavy-duty 12-volt battery. Add spotlights, flashlight charger, radio and emergency lights as well as laptop computer, and that can tax the battery. [Read this article]

Share:

How New Financing Models Could Make Solar The Facebook Of The Energy Industry

Lennar — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 17:17:41 +0000

Rapidly dropping polysilicon prices over the past year have inspired several utility-scale solar developments to move forward after many months’ pause. At the same time, those in favor of distributed generation (placing solar on every available rooftop to supply energy locally) have also made strides in improving the business case for small-scale solar, particularly with respect to what is being called “community solar” – centrally located solar projects that enable those who can’t necessarily put solar on their own roofs to support and benefit from solar energy. Now, two emergent financing mechanisms are shaking up the energy business case, creating models that could work for a variety of renewable energy sources. Berkeley-based Solar Mosaic has taken a crowd-funding approach to solar, enabling citizens to earn back their investment once the solar has been installed. The solar garden approach also enables those without the option of putting solar on their roofs – renters, people who live in historical buildings, people whose homes are in a Homeowners Association, or people whose roofs aren’t positioned to make efficient use of the sun – to reap the rewards of solar energy. [Read this article]

Share:

Storehouses For Solar Energy Can Step In When The Sun Goes Down

Lennar — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 17:09:58 +0000

If solar energy is eventually going to matter – that is, generate a significant portion of the nation’s electricity – the industry must overcome a major stumbling block, experts say: finding a way to store it for use when the sun isn’t shining. That challenge seems to be creating an opening for a different form of power, solar thermal, which makes electricity by using the sun’s heat to boil water. The water can be used to heat salt that stores the energy until later, when the sun dips and households power up their appliances and air-conditioning at peak demand hours in the summer. Two California companies are planning to deploy the storage technology: SolarReserve, which is building a plant in the Nevada desert scheduled to start up next year, and BrightSource, which plans three plants in California that would begin operating in 2016 and 2017. Together, the four projects will be capable of powering tens of thousand of households throughout a summer evening. That job will become more important if photovoltaic panels, which have plunged in price lately, become even cheaper and sprout on millions of rooftops. [Read this article]

Share:

Wind And Solar Projects Advance On A Fast Track

Lennar — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 17:08:13 +0000

The pace of approvals for solar and wind projects in the U.S. is picking up under the Obama administration, with two new plants in California and Oregon winning approval. The Interior Department says it has now pushed through 27 renewable-energy projects totaling 6,500 megawatts since 2009, compared with about 1,800 megawatts in all prior years, the result of more staff working on a fast-tracked permitting process. “When we came to the Department of Interior almost three years ago, there was very little going on with respect to renewable energy,” Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said recently. Energy projects must get federal permits if they are built on public land or if their transmission lines pass through a federal right of way. Most wind projects aren’t located on public land, but some big U.S. solar and geothermal power plants are being built on public lands in the West. Interior’s Bureau of Land Management, which oversees public lands, has fewer employees overall than it had in 2009, but more of its staff now work on renewable energy. The result has been an increase in approvals. [Read this article]

Share:

5 States With Most Solar & Wind Energy Had Smallest Increase In Electricity Prices

Lennar — Thu, 22 Dec 2011 21:20:58 +0000

Despite the fact that electricity costs are rising across the U.S., there is a widely held perception that adding wind and solar PV generating capacity results in undue costs to ratepayers. To frame the ratepayer impact of utilizing renewable energy technologies, we compared retail electricity price increases in the five states with the highest capacity of solar PV and wind with both the U.S. average and the five states with the lowest capacity of solar PV and wind. The results challenge the prevailing perception that renewable generation is expensive to ratepayers. The five states with the highest installed capacity are Texas, California, Iowa, Minnesota, and Oregon. Over the past five years, ratepayers in jurisdictions with high uptakes of wind and solar PV have experienced below-average price increases for retail electricity. In fact, the five states with the largest capacities of wind and solar PV saw an average increase in cost/kWh that was not only significantly less than the U.S. average, but also less than the five states with the lowest adoption of solar PV and wind. [Read this article]

Share: