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Old Posted Mar 28, 2013, 4:05 PM
amor de cosmos amor de cosmos is offline
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Quote:
Toshiba Enters Solar Power Generation Business With 6.5MW Plans
27 March 2013

March 28 (Bloomberg) — Toshiba Corp., the Japanese maker of flash-memory chips, elevators and nuclear reactors, will enter the solar power generation business through projects with combined capacity of 6.5 megawatts.

A 1.5 megawatt plant in Kanagawa prefecture, south of Tokyo, will start running on April 1 and three more stations are planned to be set up by the end of March 2014, the company said in a statement today.

Toshiba has been supplying equipment to thermal, nuclear, geothermal, and solar power plants, according to the statement.

“We will contribute to the expansion of clean energy through power generation projects using our technology,” it said.
http://about.bnef.com/bnef-news/tosh...h-6-5mw-plans/

Quote:
From: Andy Soos, ENN
Published March 27, 2013 04:55 PM
Egyptian Solar Power

Egypt is a land of ancient mysteries. It is a desert country with one long river flowing through it. Desert means lots of sun. Egypt is preparing to build a billion dollar solar power plant with help from a suite of international donors. Construction of Kuryamatt, a 150-megawatt hybrid power plant that will use both solar energy and natural gas to generate electricity, is underway 90 kilometers south of Cairo. Plans for a second large solar plant, in Upper Egypt's Kom Ombo, are also underway. These moves come after severe power cuts crippled the country last year during the hot summer months when Egyptians blast their air-conditioning units, and power up their stoves to prepare Ramadan feasts.



The Egyptian government is preparing for the establishment of a solar power plant at Kom Ombo region in Aswan within the framework of a strategy designed to diversify energy sources as an implementation of the ministry’s plan, which provides for expanding the use of solar energy.

The Ministry of Electricity and Energy report stated that the plant will produce 100MW, yet financial sources are currently considered as the project is expected to be financed by African Development Fund and UN's Clean Development Mechanism.
http://www.enn.com/environmental_policy/article/45778

Quote:
Lancaster, CA Becomes First US City to Require Solar
Every new housing development must average 1 kilowatt per house.

Herman K. Trabish: March 27, 2013

The Lancaster, California City Council unanimously approved changes to the city’s zoning code that require housing developers to install solar with every new home they build.

This is the latest piece in what Republican Mayor R. Rex Parris described at the City Council meeting as a plan to make Lancaster “the solar capital of the universe.”

Lancaster’s now official Residential Zones Update specifies, along with a range of green building provisions, that new single family homes meet minimum solar system requirements in the same way that they must meet minimum parking space requirements.



Residential homes on lots of 7,000 square feet or more must have a solar system of 1.0 kilowatts to 1.5 kilowatts. Rural residential homes of up to 100,000 square feet must have a system of at least 1.5 kilowatts.

The standards spell out simple, commonsense rules for both roof-mounted and ground-mounted systems. They also deal with some interesting issues:
  • A builder’s model home must show the kind of solar system the builder will offer.
  • Builders of subdivisions will be able to aggregate the houses’ requirements. If ten houses in a subdivision each have a one-kilowatt requirement, the builder can install a single ten-kilowatt system, two five-kilowatt systems or four 2.5-kilowatt systems.
  • If a housing tract is built in phases, each phase must meet the requirement.
  • Multifamily developments can meet the requirement with a rooftop system or a system on a support or shade structure.
  • Finally, and importantly, builders “may choose to meet the solar energy generation requirement off-site by providing evidence of purchasing solar energy credits from another solar-generating development located within the City.”



To turn his city into “a place the solar industry comes to innovate,” Mayor Parris has led the City Council to:
  • Create the California Clean Energy Authority, which has brought in utility-scale solar developers like Silverado Power and a pipeline of 700 megawatts of large-scale solar within the city’s boundaries;
  • Create the High Desert Power Authority, which has proposed a new transmission project to the state’s grid operator that would increase the delivery of renewables-generated electricity to other municipal utilities and relieve grid congestion between Northern and Southern California; and
  • Create Solar Lancaster in partnership with SolarCity (NASDAQ:SCTY), SunPower (NASDAQ:SPWR), and other installers, which identified Creative Renewable Energy Zones (CREZs) that have spawned over 27 megawatts of distributed solar across the city, including 7.5 megawatts of solar on Lancaster’s schools at a profit to the city.

“In Lancaster, a solar installer is issued a permit within fifteen minutes,” Parris said, “but eight miles south in Palmdale, it takes two months.”

His next targets, Parris said, are:
  • Requiring all new homes to be meet LEED certification standards
  • Requiring grey water systems on all new homes
  • Requiring, when partner BYD's batteries are certified, battery systems for new homes’ solar systems so they would be energy-independent for up to four days, and
  • Using LED bulbs and batteries so the city’s street lights will be entirely off-grid.
http://www.greentechmedia.com/articl...-Require-Solar

Quote:
Bentley Motors factory hosts UK’s ‘largest’ rooftop PV array
By Nilima Choudhury - 28 March 2013, 12:13
In News, Power Generation, Project Focus

UK developer Lightsource Renewable Energy has announced the development of a 5MW rooftop solar array at Bentley Motors' factory, said to be the largest installation of its kind in the UK.

The 20,000 solar panel installation is on the roof of Bentley's factory in Crewe, making use of 3.45 hectares of roof space. Lightsource said the array would generate enough energy to power over 1,200 households and is three times more powerful than the current largest roof mounted system in the UK.

Lightsource anticipates that at peak generation times, the system will produce up to 40% of Bentley’s energy requirements and reduce CO2 usage by over 2,500 tonnes per year. With a two way connection, during the summer, weekends and shutdown periods excess energy generated can be fed back into the National Grid.
http://www.pv-tech.org/news/uks_larg...by_lightsource

Quote:
Georgia legislators introduce bill for up to 2GW of rural solar
By Felicity Carus - 27 March 2013, 23:40
In News, Power Generation

Georgia could be poised to build up 2GW of large-scale solar if a bill introduced last week passes the state legislature.

Representative Rusty Kidd introduced the Rural Georgia Economic Recovery and Solar Resource Act of 2014 and was co-sponsored by Independents, Republicans and Democrats.

“Solar energy is an abundant resource that is not going to go away,” said Kidd. “We don’t have to pay for the sun.”

Georgia currently only has 749 PV installations with a capacity of 22,101kW, according to the Georgia Solar Energy Association.

HB657 will create large-scale solar farms that produce electricity for customers who choose to opt in through their utility bill, similar to other community solar models. The programme would operate through the state's main utility, Georgia Power.

The bill does not stipulate a mandated capacity - a figure to be determined by the Public Utilities Commission – but advocates believe that 2GW would be possible, equivalent to 5% of Georgia Power's energy portfolio. The utility would work with a single developer who would be granted a statewide monopoly by the PUC.
http://www.pv-tech.org/news/georgia_...of_rural_solar

Quote:
Manufacturing: Plasma treatments on a roll
Published online 27 March 2013

A revolutionary atmospheric-pressure plasma boosts adhesion of polymer films for roll-to-roll solar-cell production

Mass manufacture of photovoltaic materials is often achieved inexpensively by screen printing organic solar cells onto plastic sheets. The polymer known as poly(ethylene terephthalate), or PET, is a key part of the technology. Well known as the inexpensive plastic used to make soda bottles, PET has garnered increasing use as an optoelectronic substrate because of its strength and flexibility. But printing conductive solar-cell coatings onto PET is a challenge: it has a non-reactive surface and is frequently contaminated with static electric charges, which makes adhesion to other materials difficult.

Linda Wu from the A*STAR Singapore Institute of Manufacturing Technology and co-workers have now devised an innovative plasma treatment to ‘activate’ PET surfaces for improved bonding during roll-to-roll processing1. The team’s experiments with ‘diffuse coplanar surface barrier discharge’ (DCSBD) technology show that large-area PET sheets can be microscopically abraded and chemically modified to increase surface adhesion nearly instantaneously, thanks to plasma ions generated under open-air conditions.
http://www.research.a-star.edu.sg/research/6648

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Quote:
New type of solar structure cools buildings in full sunlight
Home » About » News & Updates » New type of solar structure cools buildings in full sunlight

A Stanford team has designed an entirely new form of cooling panel that works even when the sun is shining. Such a panel could vastly improve the daylight cooling of buildings, cars and other structures by radiating sunlight back into the chilly vacuum of space.

Andrew Myers | Stanford Engineering

Homes and buildings chilled without air conditioners. Car interiors that don't heat up in the summer sun. Tapping the frigid expanses of outer space to cool the planet. Science fiction, you say? Well, maybe not any more.

A team of researchers at Stanford has designed an entirely new form of cooling structure that cools even when the sun is shining. Such a structure could vastly improve the daylight cooling of buildings, cars and other structures by reflecting sunlight back into the chilly vacuum of space. Their paper describing the device was published March 5 in Nano Letters.

“People usually see space as a source of heat from the sun, but away from the sun outer space is really a cold, cold place,” explained Shanhui Fan, professor of electrical engineering and the paper’s senior author. “We’ve developed a new type of structure that reflects the vast majority of sunlight, while at the same time it sends heat into that coldness, which cools manmade structures even in the day time.”

The trick, from an engineering standpoint, is two-fold. First, the reflector has to reflect as much of the sunlight as possible. Poor reflectors absorb too much sunlight, heating up in the process and defeating the purpose of cooling.

The second challenge is that the structure must efficiently radiate heat back into space. Thus, the structure must emit thermal radiation very efficiently within a specific wavelength range in which the atmosphere is nearly transparent. Outside this range, Earth’s atmosphere simply reflects the light back down. Most people are familiar with this phenomenon. It’s better known as the greenhouse effect—the cause of global climate change.
http://engineering.stanford.edu/news...-full-sunlight

Quote:
Spatially explicit life cycle assessment of 5 sun-to-wheels pathways finds photovoltaic electricity and BEVs offer land-efficient and low-carbon transportation
4 January 2013

A new spatially-explicit life cycle assessment of five different “sun-to-wheels” conversion pathways—ethanol from corn or switchgrass for internal combustion vehicles (ICVs); electricity from corn or switchgrass for battery-electric vehicles (BEVs); and photovoltaic electricity for BEVs—found a strong case for PV BEVs.

According to the findings by the team from the University of California, Santa Barbara and the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, published in the ACS journal Environmental Science & Technology, even the most land-use efficient biomass-based pathway (i.e., switchgrass bioelectricity in US counties with hypothetical crop yields of more than 24 tonnes/ha) requires 29 times more land than the PV-based alternative in the same locations.

Furthermore, PV BEV systems also have the lowest life cycle GHG emissions throughout the US and the lowest fossil fuel inputs, except for locations with hypothetical switchgrass yields of 16 or more tonnes/ha. Including indirect land use effects further strengthens the case for PV BEVs, the researchers suggested.

The functional unit of the assessment was 100 km driven in a compact passenger vehicle during one year. The team calculated three environmental indicators for each county of the contiguous US:
  1. Land area required for the corn and switchgrass fields or the PV installation—i.e., direct land use measured in m2/100 km driven.
  2. Total global warming potential from the vehicle and fuel life cycles, measured in kg CO2 equiv/100 km driven.
  3. Total fossil fuel consumption from the vehicle and fuel life cycles, measured in MJ of net calorific value (NCV) per 100 km driven.

The system boundary includes vehicle production, use, and end-of-life management, as well as fuel production and use. In the case of PV electricity, the fuel cycle consists of production, use, and end-of-life management of the PV system.

GHG and fossil fuel data for the production of corn and switchgrass and their conversion to ethanol are based on the EBAMM Model, which was combined with crop yield maps and updated with data from version 1.8c.0 of the GREET model and other recent literature. Among the assumptions were:
  • NCV of corn and switchgrass is 18 MJ per kg, and that 2.53 kg of corn and 2.62 kg of switchgrass are required to produce 1 L of ethanol with 21.2 MJ NCV.
  • Energy consumption and GHG emission values of the biorefineries include coproduction credits and in- and out-bound logistics. The crop-to-electricity conversion model assumes that half of the biomass is converted in biomass boilers and the other half is co-combusted with coal to generate electricity.
  • Inventory models for both product systems are based on Ecoinvent data and reports. A biomass-to- electricity conversion efficiency of 32% was used, and an electricity transmission and distribution efficiency of 92%.
  • The PV system life cycle is based on 2005 technology and production data.
http://www.greencarcongress.com/2013...-20130104.html
http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/es302959h
http://reneweconomy.com.au/2013/sola...iofueled-31555
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