of solar energy pass through our atmosphere and reach the Earth's surface at any moment (one terawatt equals 1,000,000,000,000 watts) .
370 - number of terawatts available from wind power.
15 - That's our current energy consumption in terawatts. Almost 6,000 times less than what is available from the sun and wind. That's not even counting ocean power, geothermal and hydro power. And don't forget the massive amount of efficiency gains we've seen in just the last year.
If those numbers aren't that clear maybe the image is, the sun reigns down more energy every second than we could even imagine using. This is why I'm such a big proponent of solar energy, it is a neverending source of power. Look, for millenia now humans have done all they could to escape the fucking sun: buildings, air conditioners, umbrellas, trees, hell anything with a roof. That should let you know how powerful of an entity we're dealing with.
I'm not knocking wind power as it truly has advantages but I worry about the functionality 20 years from now if a windy area experiences climate changes and wind becomes useless. But that is a problem for the future (and we seem to be very good at putting those off).
89,000 fucking terrawatts, are you kidding me? And here's the kicker, its all free. Nobody charges you to sit in the backyard and lap up sun and nobody charges companies to harness the sun's free energy to convert to power and sell. Its like running a business selling shirts but instead of buying or making your product you walk into work and everyday all the racks are full with new items.
Somebody is gonna make a whole hell of a lot of money on solar power cause their input costs are solely the infrastructure it takes to harness and sell the product. No mining, no drilling, no burning, no reprocessing, no shipping, take out all of those charges and imagine what happens to the price of electricity. I'll let you economics experts figure that out.
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I hear a lot of moaning from the anti-solar crowd about how much space it takes to build a truly powerful plant (I'll refrain from saying the obvious about how Death Valley really isn't that useful anyway, oops I guess I did say it). Anyway, what about this idea? On all of those commercial big box buildings lets put solar cells on the roofs to turn that into a productive space.
Well less than a year after announcing it would build the biggest solar project in the world, California is poised to take an even larger chunk of the renewable pie and produce 250-megawatts of power from rooftop installations.
The project will be distributed among many commercial rooftops, starting with southern California's Inland Empire, San Bernardino and Riverside counties. The 250-megawatt goal is 170 more megawatts than was planned in the Cleantech installation.
Beginning in August the plan is to install 1 megawatt a week until 65,000,000 square feet of commercial rooftop space is supplying power to the equivalent of 162,000 homes. The total cost will be $825M and is expected to take 5 years to complete.
"These are the kinds of big ideas we need to meet California's long-term energy and climate change goals," said Governor Schwarzenegger. "I urge others to follow in their footsteps. If commercial buildings statewide partnered with utilities to put this solar technology on their rooftops, it would set off a huge wave of renewable energy growth."
This will go a long way towards California's mandate that 20% of the electricity used by generated through renewable means by 2010.
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Spain, my home away from home, has already begun the lead into a solar powered world with two construction companies working in multiple locations around the world to set up solar power stations. Now the Spanish construction giant Sener and Abu Dhabi's Masdar are teaming up in a joint venture called Torresol Energy. The initial investment of €800 million ($1.24B) will be used to construct three solar plants in Spain.
One of the plants will use an array of heliostats surrounding a central receiver (pictured above), which the company says will be its first commercial deployment. Other companies such as BrightSource, SolarReserve, and eSolar are planning to use this same design in future deployments.
This type of technology has been developed at the Sandia National Laboratory since the 1970's and was successfully demonstrated by Solar Two, an installation using molten salt in the central receiver. The surrounding array of heliostats, or sun-tracking mirrors, reflect and concentrate sunlight onto a central receiver, generating a great amount of heat. The design is more efficient because all of the heat exchanging and steam generation take place inside the central tower, but the heliostats are also delicate and expensive.
The other two Spanish plants in the works will use parabolic trough technology, Torresol tells us. Startups like Solel are also using the trough approach, which heats liquid-filled tubes. The hot liquid must be pumped to a steam generator at an energy cost, but the troughs are supposed to be more robust than heliostats. They're hoping to generate at least 380 megawatts of power in the next five years, with a one-gigawatt goal for 10 years out.
Torresol also has some even loftier hopes for its solar thermal technology. The company plans to “facilitate” 500 megawatts of concentrating solar power plants around the world by 2012, in places like the American Southwest, the Middle East, North Africa and Northern Australia.
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Solar Energy is a super efficient way to heat water. Combine it with underground storage and you have a system that can cover heating in the winter and cooling in the summer. Ooms Avenhorn Holding BV, a Dutch company, is doing just that and moving it way forward with its Road Energy System (RES). Pipes in the roadway expose water to the sun's energy (think of that hot asphault on a July day) and the hot water is transferred to a storage area. During cold weather an on-demand reservoir of hot water is ready to heat buildings and keep roads above freezing.
After cooling, the water is stored in cold water storage and used to cool buildings during hot weather. A year round solar/geothermal heating/cooling system for both the road and buildings. The renewable combo greatly reduces electricity demands and the cooling/heating of the road reduces maintenance requirements (and lowers/eliminates de-icing and plowing).
And its already in use in the Netherlands. The small population of 3,000 in Avenhorn are the first to use this technology with a 200 yard stretch of road and small parking lot providing heat to a 70-unit, four story apartment building. An industrial park of some 160,000 square feet in the nearby city of Hoorn is kept warm in winter with the help of heat stored during the summer from 36,000 square feet of pavement. The runways of a Dutch air force base in the south supply heat for its hangar.
This is a great invention and a large swath of the US is in the operating lattitudes for the technology. It would be great to see Texas move on a technology like this with the amount of road construction constantly going on around the state. I am emailing this to both our federal and state senators to see if I can't at least plant the idea. I encourage you to do the same!
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Last week Arizona announced it would have the largest solar farm in the world (hinging on the fact Congress passes the clean energy tax credit set to expire at the end of 2008). This solar installation could power 80,000 homes if the Spanish construction company gets the go ahead to build.
This week California announced that they would build the world's largest wind farm in the SoCal Desert. The farm will power 3 million homes by 2013, holy crap that's a lot of homes running on clean energy!
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Everyday it blazes across the sky and shares more energy with the Earth than humans could ever hope to use. The greatest energy factories on Earth use its never ending supply of high power radiation to assimilate carbon, produce oxygen, and feed the world. If we add up all the power that could ever be harvested by our oil and coal deposits, it would laugh and produce the same in a 24 hour span. Yet everyday we see the sun rise and set and rarely contemplate just how important that glowing ball of plasma is.
The energy from sunlight falling on only 9% of the California's Mojave Desert could power all of the United States' electricity needs if the energy could be efficiently harvested. Really? So if we could dedicate 9% of unusable desert land to solar energy production we could turn all of our coal and gas power plants off? That sounds like a great future technology, but the truth is with the right incubation and nurturing of technology this type of energy production is just around the corner.
A team at Northwestern recently discovered a new way to make solar cells that boosted their efficiency "by approximately 40 percent and the power conversion efficiency from approximately 3 to 4 percent to 5.2 to 5.6 percent." I know those numbers don't mean a lot to you non-science folks, but they are quite amazing for such a simple solution. The group is continuing to do work on recovering efficiency within the system and the results look promising to further increasing the ability to store solar electricity. There are numerous advances within the efficiency of solar capture and conversion.
A great advantage to solar cells is their ease of production. Many cells are now produced just like a newspaper, with huge sheets of malleable plastic being printed with the solar capture machinery by the roll. A small startup company can make small solar cells using an inkjet printer. This means that in the future large quantities of commercial products can be produced to meet consumer demand with little capital investment. A major concern for massive production though is the pollution that solar cells may make. Production of solar cells includes the use of toxic heavy metals such as lead, mercury and cadmium. But with proper monitoring and capture strategies it has been shown that "producing electricity from solar cells reduces air pollutants by about 90 percent in comparison to using conventional fossil fuel technologies.
The big barrier to commercial potential for solar lies in the startup and installation costs. But with continued research the cost of components and manufacturing will continue to decrease. A recent publication showed that efficiency was not hampered when some of the most expensive materials are replaced by good ole steel. Conductively coated glass sheets have been the standard for making solar cells but now new production methods allow manufacturers to substitute low cost, thin steel sheets. The glass sheets account for more than 30% of usual production costs but steel is extremely inexpensive per pound when compared to the glass sheets.
And while production costs will start to go down with increased efficiency and larger production infrastructure, right now the demand is outpacing the supply. This is a double-edged sword as an increase in consumer demand indicates growing public support for residential and commercial solar technology, but also brings with it an increase in price. The cost of photovoltaic (PV) cells has declined steadily over time, but in the last three years the price per watt has risen from $6.93 in 2005 to $7.25 in 2006 and $7.62 in 2007. BuildingGreen.com has the full economic results for PV costs.
The supply though will continue to rise to meet the demand. Already we have seen a huge boom in renewable energy plants, not just solar. This investment in energy supply will eventually lead to cheaper electricity costs as mining for solar and wind power takes very little sustained investment. Think about the front-end cost for coal consumption, huge machines and a dangerous work environment that requires many laborers, those things all cost vast quantities of money. Now consider that mining for solar energy consists of waiting for the sun to rise and for wind technology sitting waiting for the breeze. The reduced cost of obtaining an energy supply should be passed onto consumers (unless we let the electric companies run like oil companies) by way of decreased cost per kilowatt hour. Now this decrease in cost will take a while as the supply and demand must settle in and reach an equilibrium but it should be encouraging to know that it costs nothing to make the sun rise or listen to the wind blow.
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The above image was taken at night and there is no power being supplied to the window panes and yet they light up? This is a revolutionary new window and glass technology that looks like it will have promise for commercial applications and hopefully with a decrease in pricing residential installations as well.
The technology is based on cutting edge Organic Light Emitting Diodes (OLEDs) and transparent photovoltaic nanoscale technology which allows the window to capture light during the day and at night illuminate using the stored energy. For commercial applications this could cut 22% of night lighting costs making it eco-friendly.
Lightway is the first technology which assimilates the necessary solar energy during the daytime and then using its inner devices enlightens the area (for instance, house or streets) during the night. I don't think this has much use right now for residential applications but the big story should be about a window that can store energy. Right now the discharge is light, but in the future could be energy to run heating and cooling. Instead of individual windows, they could be connected together to provide a percentage of the a buildings energy usage during both the day and night. This is the picture in mind when I think of how this technology will help.
I can't even count the number of windows in this picture and everyone of them is bombarded daily with huge amounts of solar energy. Somebody is about to make a ton of money on these ideas and hopefully the construction sector will start to promote the use of this technology.
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