Technology Review on Solar Energy

[HenryTo]

Assembly line should be ready by sometime next year:

[HenryTo]

Toyota primed to add solar panels to the next Prius. More of a symbolic gesture right now - but making this a more common feature of our everyday lives would surely bring more innovations in this area over the long-run:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/feedarticle/7634533

[rffrydr]

This needs to be generalized: much needs to be done across the "grid"--including the housing at the end.


http://www.economist.com/world/na/displaystory.cfm?story_id=10924156
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Today is the Tomorrow you worried about Yesterday!

[HenryTo]

Two-year moratorium on new solar projects on public lands lifted by the Bureau of Land Management - due to public and political pressure. This was desperately needed and it sends the right message to the venture capital/solar industry:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/03/us/03solar.html?_r=1&ref=us&oref=slogin

[HenryTo]

Another example of a slow-moving government institution (I know, this description is redundant!):

http://www.edn.com/blog/1470000147/post/1290029129.html?nid=3351&rid=428554835

[rffrydr]

Photovoltaics meet Thermal....neat. Duh. Thermal still cheaper without silicon and can produce all night long.
_________________
Today is the Tomorrow you worried about Yesterday!

[HenryTo]

SolFocus expects its panels to provide "grid parity" by 2010:

http://www.technologyreview.com/Energy/20948/

[Rubedo]

Tech Pundit Sees Bright Future for Solar Energy

Tuesday , March 04, 2008
By Robin Lloyd

BOSTON —
He predicted the fall of the Soviet Union. He predicted the explosive spread of the Internet and wireless access.

Now futurist and inventor Ray Kurzweil is part of distinguished panel of engineers that says solar power will scale up to produce all the energy needs of Earth's people in 20 years.

There is 10,000 times more sunlight than we need to meet 100 percent of our energy needs, Kurzweil says, and the technology needed for collecting and storing it is about to emerge as the field of solar energy is going to advance exponentially in accordance with Kurzweil's Law of Accelerating Returns.

That law yields a doubling of price performance in information technologies every year.

Kurzweil, author of "The Singularity Is Near" and "The Age of Intelligent Machines," worked on the solar energy solution with Google Co-Founder Larry Page as part of a panel of experts convened by the National Association of Engineers to address the 14 "grand challenges of the 21st century," including making solar energy more economical.

The panel's findings were announced last month at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Solar to compete in five years

Solar and wind power currently supply about 1 percent of the world's energy needs, Kurzweil said, but advances in technology are about to expand with the introduction of nano-engineered materials for solar panels, making them far more efficient, lighter and easier to install.

Google has invested substantially in companies pioneering these approaches.

Regardless of any one technology, members of the panel are "confident that we are not that far away from a tipping point where energy from solar will be [economically] competitive with fossil fuels," Kurzweil said, adding that it could happen within five years.

The reason why solar energy technologies will advance exponentially, Kurzweil said, is because it is an "information technology" (one for which we can measure the information content), and thereby subject to the Law of Accelerating Returns.

"We also see an exponential progression in the use of solar energy," he said. "It is doubling now every two years. Doubling every two years means multiplying by 1,000 in 20 years. At that rate we'll meet 100 percent of our energy needs in 20 years."

Other technologies that will help are solar concentrators made of parabolic mirrors that focus very large areas of sunlight onto a small collector or a small efficient steam turbine.

The energy can be stored using nano-engineered fuel cells, Kurzweil said.

"You could, for example, create hydrogen or hydrogen-based fuels from the energy produced by solar panels and then use that to create fuel for fuel cells," he said. "There are already nano-engineered fuel cells, microscopic in size, that can be scaled up to store huge quantities of energy."

[Rubedo]

http://www.paradisepost.com/ci_9699485

Ray Kurzweil is a futurist and prodigious inventor of such things as the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind and the first musical synthesizer able to recreate the sound of a grand piano as well as other orchestral instruments. He eschews what he calls linear thinking for a more all encompassing view of the future. Sometimes his ideas have been viewed as more sci-fi than science but time and again he's been proven right on many issues.

As to energy needs, Kurzweil just attended a blue ribbon panel organized by the National Academy of Engineering. While he extols all the alternative energy sources, he claims pursuing solar is paramount. He explains we actually have 10,000 times the energy we need from the sun alone, we've just not harnessed it correctly. We know it's relatively expensive at this point in time.

But in less than five years, a new generation of nano-engineered solar panels will be on the market and will be more efficient and less expensive than gasoline or coal. Even though solar energy now only provides about 1 percent of our energy, Ray says don't let the same skepticism that many had about both the Genome Project and the Internet slow our solar vision. They liked the ideas about those inventions but thought they couldn't be replicated on a large scale or with efficiency. He says people forget to include the exponential factor and that with solar, were talking about being seven doublings away from meeting all of our energy needs. Solar will be 1,000 times more powerful in a decade. If true, that's incredibly exciting.

[HenryTo]

FPL to build the world's largest photovoltaic solar plant:
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FPL plans 110 MW of solar power in Florida
Wed Jun 25, 2008 2:46pm EDT

LOS ANGELES, June 25 (Reuters) - FPL Group Inc (FPL.N: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz) on Wednesday announced plans to build 110 megawatts (MW) of solar power in Florida, including what it says will be the world's largest photovoltaic solar plant.

The plans include a 25 MW photovoltaic solar plant that will begin construction by the end of 2008, as well as a 75 MW solar thermal plant that will connect to an existing combined-cycle power plant.

[HenryTo]

Scientific American on the potential of solar - but concludes that subsidies are needed from now till 2020 in order to develop the infrastructure:

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=a-solar-grand-plan

[rffrydr]

It's so concentrated on state subsidy with grid parity some 300% efficiencies away--and the the biggest "market," stepping back (and simultaneously embracing coal as a political counter to Russia).

Thermal shows the way forward.
_________________
Today is the Tomorrow you worried about Yesterday!

[HenryTo]

The solar energy industry in Texas isn't going anywhere nowadays:

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/business/5824209.html

[HenryTo]

Google, Chevron, and Goldman continue their efforts on solar energy:

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601109&refer=home&sid=a_TUtlIwV7Fw

[HenryTo]

A different take on what solar could be going forward:

http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=9275

[HenryTo]

Google flips on solar installation:

http://www.tgdaily.com/content/view/32526/113/