electricity

Nanosolar Takes Solar Power to the Next Level

- Adam Clare 8 Comments

A relatively new startup called Nanosolar has announced that they have $4 billion in contracts to sell their solar panels that produce $1 per watt. That is a low enough price point to take on those awful fossil fuels.

The key to their success is how they propose electric utilities make use of their technology. You can read all about it in Wired.

Two big announcements marked its coming out party: The company has $4 billion in contracts and can make money selling its products for $1 per watt of a panel’s capacity. That’s cheap enough to compete with fossil fuels in markets across the world.

Specifically, the company’s management thinks it can help utilities avoid the difficulties of getting big coal and nuclear power plants built by offering the option to build small solar farms they can set up close to cities.

“Cost-efficient solar panels such as ours can be deployed in 2- to 20-megawatt municipal solar power plants that feed peak power directly into the local distribution without requiring the expense of transmission and with a plant deployment time as short as six months,” said Nanosolar CEO Martin Roscheisen in an e-mail to Wired.com. “Coal or nuclear can’t do that, can’t do it as cost efficient and can’t do it as rapidly deployable.”

Thin-film solar has been a major focus of U.S. alternative energy research and development efforts since the early 1980s because it was seen as a true “breakthrough” solar technology. Silicon cells are easy to manufacture, dependable and efficient, but some researchers viewed them as inherently limited. As they are currently produced, they require a lot more silicon than thin-film solar cells. They might reach efficiency levels of over 40 percent, but they’d never compete with fossil fuel energy sources, even with carbon taxes.

Thin-film solar was different. On the one hand, it was definitely harder to make efficient cells. However, it allowed researchers to dream of printing semiconducting chemicals onto a metal sheet and having it convert photons into electricity. Thin-film cells seemed like they’d be perfect for the applications researchers imagined like “solar shingles” for building-integrated solar installations.

Bras Could Power Electronics

- Adam Clare 2 Comments

I find this to be rather entertaining, apparently bras could be manufactured that produce electricity from bouncing breasts. If one was to combine this electricity producing bra with the eco-friendly bra the world would witness the greatest piece of underwear ever made.

Then one day recently, I had an idea. As I rode a bus to the office, my messenger bag slung uncomfortably across my chest, I thought, “Why not put the girls to work?” Human-powered devices are showing up everywhere, from Rotterdam’s sustainable dance floor to human-powered gyms in Hong Kong. The timing seemed perfect – perhaps even overdue – for a bra that could harness the untapped power of breast motion.

The idea of an energy-generating bra isn’t as crazy as it might sound. The underwear company Triumph International Japan recently unveiled a solar-powered bra that supposedly will generate enough energy to power an iPod. But I live in foggy San Francisco and prefer not to walk around in my underwear in public. Could someone design an iPod-powering bra for me?

Nanosolar Producing Cheap Solar Energy

- Adam Clare 2 Comments

A company in California, Nanosolar, as produced solar chips that generate electricity at $0.90 per watt. If sales go well this is a massive breakthrough for solar energy as this a milestone in solar electricity.

After five years of product development – including aggressively pipelined science, research and development, manufacturing process development, product testing, manufacturing engineering and tool development, and factory construction – we now have shipped first product and received our first check of product revenue.

… Today we are announcing that we have begun shipping panels for freefield deployment in Eastern Germany and that the first Megawatt of our panels will go into a power plant installation there.

As far as the first three of our commercial panels are concerned:

Panel #1 will remain at Nanosolar for exhibit.

Panel #2 can be purchased by you in an auction on eBay starting today.

Panel #3 has been donated to the Tech Museum in San Jose.

Carbon Monitoring for Action

- Adam Clare

CARMA
CARMA is an organization that monitors carbon produced by power plants around the world. They have an interactive map to visualize what parts of the world are the worst offenders, you can also see which companies are the worst polluters. It’s great to see a site that puts all of this information into one place for activists and researchers to access easily.

The objective of CARMA.org is to equip individuals with the information they need to forge a cleaner, low-carbon future. By providing complete information for both clean and dirty power producers, CARMA hopes to influence the opinions and decisions of consumers, investors, shareholders, managers, workers, activists, and policymakers. CARMA builds on experience with public information disclosure techniques that have proven successful in reducing traditional pollutants.

For several thousand power plants within the U.S., CARMA relies upon data reported to the Environmental Protection Agency by the plant operators themselves as required by the Clean Air Act. CARMA also includes many official emissions reports for plants in Canada, the European Union, and India. For non-reporting plants, CARMA estimates emissions using a statistical model that has been fitted to data for thousands of reporting plants in the U.S., Canada, the EU, and India. The model utilizes detailed data on plant-level engineering and fuel specifications. CARMA reports emissions for the year 2000, the current year, and the future (based on published plans).

Arm Power to Light Entire Continent

- Adam Clare

from the bbc

Windup radios already exist and now the company that makes them has created windup light bulbs so people can create their own light!

As part of its LifeLight Project the Freeplay Foundation has drawn up designs for a charging base unit that would be able to power up several detachable lights that can be used around a home.

The Foundation aims to train women to sell and maintain the lights
“They could use them for study or for safety – to help them if they go somewhere at night,” said Ms Pearson.

Working prototypes are now being made that will be tested with families in Kenya to refine the design.

Scroll To Top