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Old Posted Dec 5, 2013, 6:56 PM
amor de cosmos amor de cosmos is offline
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Right-wing lawmakers gunning for US solar users
05. December 2013 | Markets & Trends, Global PV markets, Industry & Suppliers | By: Edgar Meza

A group of right-wing lawmakers is looking to curb states' efforts to expand solar PV and thwart the Obama administration's clean energy.

Conservative forces in the United States are putting PV consumers in the crosshairs, according to an article in the U.K newspaper The Guardian on Wednesday.

The paper reports that an alliance of corporations and conservative activists is mobilizing to penalize homeowners who install their own solar panels in what the article says is "a sweeping new offensive against renewable energy."

Some 800 U.S. state legislators that make up the politically conservative American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) are gathering this week for the organization's State & Nation Policy Summit. The council's agenda has taken aim at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), which has played a key role in implementing the Obama administration's Climate Action Plan, which includes significant investments in clean energy technology and energy efficiency, carbon pollution standards for power plants and global partnerships to reduce deforestation and advance low emission development.

ALEC, however, sees the EPA as a menace, saying on its website that the agency "has started waging war on the American standard of living. During the past few years, the agency has undertaken the most expansive regulatory assault in history on the production and distribution of affordable and reliable energy."

The conservative group blasts the EPA for regulations that "are causing the shutdown of power plants across the nation, forcing electricity generation off of coal, destroying jobs, raising energy costs, and decreasing reliability."

Citing policy documents published by the group, The Guardian reports that the council will promote legislation over the coming year that would penalize homeowners, weaken state clean energy regulations and block the EPA.

Specifically, the group is looking to hinder state government efforts to promote the expansion of solar and wind power through regulations, known as Renewable Portfolio Standards. Among the proposed bills is the "Electricity Freedom Act," which would repeal states' requirement that utilities provide a certain amount of their electricity supplies from renewable energy sources.
http://www.pv-magazine.com/news/deta...rs-_100013657/

Quote:
New Solar Cell Material Acts as a Laser As Well
4 December 2013 3:45 pm

BOSTON—The hottest new material in solar cell research has another trick up its sleeve. At the Materials Research Society meeting here, two groups reported yesterday that these new electricity-generating materials can produce laser light. Because the materials—called perovskites—are cheap and easy to produce, they could help engineers create a wide variety of cheap lasers that shine a variety of colors for use in speeding data flows in the telecommunications industry.

Lasers have long been at the heart of modern telecommunications because their intense light beams can be chopped up to represent digital currency’s 1s and 0s and can travel through optical cables at light speed. But making new lasers can be a bear. Researchers must find materials that, when fed electrons, will generate light at a single wavelength. That usually requires growing materials with near-perfect crystalline quality, as defects usually gobble up the electrical charges, the photons of light, or both. Growing such high-quality materials normally requires using high temperatures, expensive equipment, and other costly steps. Making the best solar cell materials requires similarly expensive setups. Perovskites have burst onto the solar scene over the last couple of years because it turns out they form near-perfect complex crystalline structures by simply depositing them from ready-made solutions at low temperatures. But were they good enough to make lasers, an even more demanding application?

At the meeting, two groups reported that, in fact, they are. The first, led by Edward Sargent, an electrical engineer at the University of Toronto in Canada, started by simply blasting a perovskite film with a beam of ultraviolet light. The scientists found that light reemerged from the film at a tight range of frequencies in the infrared portion of the spectrum. That was a hint that perovskites could make a good laser material. But it wasn’t a laser yet. To make a laser, researchers must create a structure that bounces light back and forth. In the right material, that shuttling light stimulates a cascade of additional photons to emerge all at a single frequency. So Sargent and his colleagues crafted their perovskites into spheres that prompt light to bounce around inside and found that it emerged as infrared laser light. Meanwhile, Henry Snaith, a physicist at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom, reported that when his team sandwiched a perovskite film in between laser mirrors known as Bragg reflectors, it, too, produced infrared laser light when first hit with laser light of a shorter wavelength.
http://news.sciencemag.org/physics/2...cts-laser-well

Quote:
Canada's Infrastructure Investment Opens New Opportunity
Published on 4 December 2013

As Canada enjoys a $350 billion “infrastructure supercycle” over the next five years, the Ontario Clean Technology Alliance – a collective of regional and municipal economic development organizations across Ontario – is attending Pollutec Horizons 2013 in Paris. The Alliance is inviting clean technology investments from around the world while shining a light on an $80 million win from Swiss-based ABB, a leading power and automation technology group, and its Ontario consortium partner Bondfield Construction.

The two partners have won an order from Canadian Solar Solutions to supply a 100-megawatt (MW) turnkey photovoltaic (PV) solar project for the Grand Renewable Energy Park in Ontario. The project is in turn part of a $5 billion investment by Samsung Renewable Energy and partners to create a green energy cluster of wind and solar power, sources with the capacity to generate 1369MW of renewable energy. The first of these developments includes a 100 MW photovoltaic (PV) power plant and a 150MW wind farm. Canadian Solar Solutions is the engineering, procurement and construction (EPC) contractor for the plant.

Nolan also points to the Province of Ontario’s visionary Green Energy Act of 2009 that helped ignite significant growth in the production of clean and renewable energy. Since 2009, the Act has created over 20,000 jobs, is on track to create 50,000 jobs and has sparked an estimated $27 billion in private-sector investment. Ontario’s clean technology sector also offers a world-leading, highly educated talent base, a low-risk business environment, and generous targeted tax credits to global companies seeking growth.
http://www.solarnovus.com/canada-s-i...ity_N7265.html
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