After Gutenberg

jcwinnie

Speaking of staying aloft, Network World reports that DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) “inked an agreement with Boeing to build the SolarEagle.

“One of the more unique unmanned aircraft concepts took a giant step toward reality… the project will build a UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle) “capable of remaining at heights above 60,000ft for over five years.”

“Boeing says the first SolarEagle under the $89 million contract could fly as early as 2014.”

jcwinnie

Instead of attacking the world’s biggest retailer directly, Emperor Fossil’s minions try to stop the supply of low-cost Chinese-made solar panels by hook or by Republicrat crook.

Image credit: Pink Dispatcher/Flickr

Solar photovoltaic (PV) cell manufacturers produced a record 10,700 megawatts of PV cells globally in 2009—an impressive 51-percent increase from the year before. While growth in 2009 slowed from the remarkable 89-percent expansion in 2008, it continued the rapid rise of an industry that first reached 1,000 megawatts of production in 2004. By the end of 2009, nearly 23,000 megawatts of PV had been installed worldwide, enough to power 4.6 million U.S. homes. Solar PV, the world’s fastest-growing power technology, now generates electricity in more than 100 countries.

China produced 3,800 megawatts of PV in 2009, leading all countries for the second straight year. Together China and third place Taiwan accounted for 49 percent of all PV manufacturing, a share that should keep climbing as companies there grow larger and more quickly than competitors based in countries where operating costs are higher. Rounding out the top five producers in 2009 were Japan in second place, Germany in fourth, and the United States in fifth. (See data.) These traditional industry leaders have lost significant market share with the recent ascent of China and Taiwan. Indeed, Japan, which dominated the global market in 2004, controls just 14 percent today.

While China now manufactures more than a third of the world’s PV cells, most Chinese consumers cannot yet afford the technology. Ninety-five percent of its production is exported, much of it bound for Germany, the world leader in using PV. Germany installed a record 3,800 megawatts of PV in 2009, more than half the 7,200 megawatts added worldwide. This brought Germany’s overall PV generating capacity to 9,800 megawatts, nearly three times as much as the next closest country, Spain. Already in the first half of 2010, Germany added another 3,800 megawatts.

Italy was first runner-up in newly installed PV in 2009 with 730 megawatts, more than doubling its total installed capacity. Japan and the United States, third and fourth in both new and overall PV generating capacity, each installed close to 500 megawatts in 2009. (See data.)

“World installed PV capacity has grown 16-fold over the past decade in large part due to government incentives encouraging the use of solar power. Although PV production and installation costs have fallen substantially over time, government support will be necessary until solar reaches grid parity (price competitiveness) with heavily subsidized fossil fuels. Incorporating fossil fuels’ largely externalized costs, such as climate change and pollution-related illnesses, into the price of fossil-generated electricity would further accelerate PV’s march to grid parity.”

The most important solar incentive to date is the feed-in tariff, which guarantees generators of renewable electricity–including homeowners, private firms, and utilities–a long-term purchase price for each kilowatt-hour they produce. This powerful incentive to invest in renewables has now been adopted by some 50 countries, including Ecuador, Israel, Japan, Kenya, Pakistan, Thailand, and most of the European Union. Deutsche Bank estimates that feed-in tariffs had driven 75 percent of world PV installations as of 2008.

Nowhere has the feed-in tariff been more effective than in Germany. In a country that on average receives about as much sunlight as cloudy Seattle, this premium payment for solar electricity has not only spurred Germany to preeminence in installed PV capacity, it has also helped grow a domestic solar industry with more than 10 billion euros ($13 billion) in annual sales.

With PV system prices plummeting, including a 30-percent drop in 2009 alone, the German government announced in mid-2010 that in order to control costs and bring support levels in line with market conditions, it would reduce tariff rates further than the annual cuts originally stipulated by law. While industry stakeholders warn of job losses and reduced demand, the government believes that other changes, including allowing larger systems to qualify for the premium, will ensure further growth. Electricity from PV could reach grid parity in Germany by 2013.

The United States, where total PV connected to the grid is doubling every two years, has no national feed-in policy. Instead, federal tax credits along with various state and local programs, including renewable portfolio standards (RPS) that require utilities to get a certain percentage of the electricity they sell from renewables, have been the main drivers of U.S. PV growth. With an RPS mandating 33-percent renewable electricity by 2020, California has 60 percent of the total 1,260 megawatts of grid-tied PV in the United States. Although this state still leads by a wide margin, others are growing more rapidly. Five states doubled their installed PV in 2009, including Florida, home of the new 25-megawatt DeSoto plant, currently the country’s largest PV park.

While interest in small-scale installations keeps growing in industrial and developing countries, the PV landscape is evolving to include utility-scale, multiple-megawatt solar parks of the DeSoto variety. In September 2010, a newly-expanded 80-megawatt park in Ontario, Canada, overtook a plant in central Spain to become the largest operational PV power plant in the world. Spain and Germany currently account for 8 of the top 10 plants, but that list could soon change dramatically as ambitious projects in other countries come online. China, with scarcely 300 megawatts of installed PV at the end of 2009, has a pipeline of large projects worth a total of 12,000 megawatts. The United States has 23 projects ranging from 100 to 5,000 megawatts under development in the arid Southwest. But these simply scratch the surface of that region’s potential: harnessing a mere 2.5 percent of the annual solar radiation striking the Southwestern land suitable for solar power plants could produce as much energy as the country currently uses.

India also is bidding to become a major player in the solar market, having announced its Jawaharlal Nehru National Solar Mission in November 2009. Named for India’s first prime minister, the Mission envisions 20,000 megawatts of grid-connected solar power and 2,000 megawatts of distributed, off-grid solar installations by 2022. The planned capacity build-out will be roughly half PV and half concentrating solar thermal power, another budding solar technology. If India meets its target, it would be a tremendous boost for a country with vast solar resources but an estimated 400 million people who lack electricity.

Even with the lingering effects of the global recession, more than 16,000 megawatts of PV are slated to be installed in 2010. Germany will likely again account for half of the newly added capacity, as developers rush to finish projects before cuts in the feed-in tariff fully take hold. Beyond 2010, analysts expect annual PV installations to be more evenly distributed among an expanding roster of countries. With costs dropping, economies of scale growing, and governments realizing the benefits of this limitless, climate-friendly resource, the future for solar power looks bright.

Read more Treehugger posts about solar production:

• Mid-East’s Largest Solar Panel Manufacturing Plant to be Built In Dubai
• First Solar: Our Solar Panel Manufacturing Costs Are Now Below $1 Per Watt
• New Thin-film Solar Cell Coater Reaches 1GW Annual Output

jcwinnie

Renewable Energy World reports that several firms are “racing to market with micro-inverters, devices that convert direct current (DC) from a single solar module (panel) to alternating current (AC).”

Micro inverters and AC modules are overcoming the drawbacks in central inverter architecture, which now dominates photo voltaic installations.

Shortcomings inherent to the central inverter architecture are creating opportunities for a range of new technologies, with a growing number of companies developing products and technology to generate more power from the PV panels already on the market.

Unlike a central, or string inverter, that aggregates and converts the power generated by an entire array of solar modules, a micro-inverter converts the DC power from a single solar module to AC. When connected to a central or string inverter, modules are typically connected in series; when they have micro-inverters, the modules are all connected in parallel.

jcwinnie

Another report on flexible thin-film solar cells on polymer film. “Researchers from Iowa State University and the Ames Laboratory have developed a process capable of producing a thin and uniform light-absorbing layer on textured substrates that improves the efficiency of polymer solar cells by increasing light absorption.”

“Our technology efficiently utilizes the light trapping scheme,” said Sumit Chaudhary, an Iowa State assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering and an associate of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Ames Laboratory. “And so solar cell efficiency improved by 20 percent.”
Details of the fabrication technology were recently published online by the journal Advanced Materials.

Chaudhary said the key to improving the performance of solar cells made from flexible, lightweight and easy-to-manufacture polymers was to find a textured substrate pattern that allowed deposition of a light-absorbing layer that’s uniformly thin — even as it goes up and down flat-topped ridges that are less than a millionth of a meter high.

The result is a polymer solar cell that captures more light within those ridges — including light that’s reflected from one ridge to another, he said. The cell is also able to maintain the good electrical transport properties of a thin, uniform light-absorbing layer.

Tests indicated the research team’s light-trapping cells increased power conversion efficiency by 20 percent over flat solar cells made from polymers, Chaudhary said. Tests also indicated that light captured at the red/near infrared band edge increased by 100 percent over flat cells.

Researchers working with Chaudhary on the solar cell project are Kai-Ming Ho, an Iowa State Distinguished Professor of Physics and Astronomy and an Ames Laboratory faculty scientist; Joong-Mok Park, an assistant scientist with the Ames Laboratory; and Kanwar Singh Nalwa, a graduate student in electrical and computer engineering and a student associate of the Ames Laboratory. The research was supported by the Iowa Power Fund, the Ames Laboratory and the Department of Energy’s Office of Basic Energy Sciences.