solar-power

Ontario Goes Solar

- Adam Clare

After recently banning old light bulbs, the province of Ontario has permitted a Californian company permission to build a rather large solar power facility.

The Ontario government has approved a California company’s plan to build North America’s largest photovoltaic solar farm, the provincial energy ministry announced Thursday.

OptiSolar Farms Canada Inc. of Arthur, Ont. — a subsidiary of California-based OptiSolar Inc. — will install more than one million solar panels at four farms outside Sarnia, Ont., providing the province with 40 megawatts of power by 2010. Ontario Energy Minister Dwight Duncan said that’s enough to power 6,000 homes.

Solar Skyscraper

- Adam Clare

Skyscrapers are bombarded with solar rays and all they did before was heat the building, now an entire skyscraper is being covered in solar panels! No more wasting of that precious light.

Buy 10 million dollars of solar panels and cover the building with them! They’re just as pretty as any facade, and produce hundreds of kilowatts of power for use in the building. In concert with 24 roof-mounted wind turbines, 10% of the CIS tower in Manchester will be powered by building-bound renewable energy. While that might not seem like much, it is a very big building. Only the building’s service tower (shown) will be covered with panels. The attached office building (which gets to have windows instead of solar panels) is much larger.

Solar Goodness

- Adam Clare

picture-1.png Solar power is always seeing new advancements. It can be something fun like building your own solar powered iPod charger or finding that solar dyes can be used for creating electricity. This month Georgia Tech has developed a solar panel that uses nano-towers to create a more efficient solar cell.

The difference is in the design. Traditional solar panels are often flat and bulky. The new design features an array of nano-towers – like microscopic blades of grass – that add surface area and trap more sunlight.

Kiwis Know Solar Power

- Adam Clare 1 Comment

Some New Zealand researchers have created a dye for solar power generation that mimics photosynthesis in plants. The dye is cheaper to use than standard photovoltaic solar panels.

Cam says:

Dr Wayne Campbell and researchers from the Nanomaterials Research Centre at Massey University in New Zealand have developed a range of coloured dyes for use in dye-sensitized solar cells. Synthetic dyes solar cells that can be used to generate electricity at one tenth of the cost of current silicon-based solar panels.

The synthetic dyes are made from simple organic compounds closely related to those found in nature. The green dye Dr Campbell is synthetic chlorophyll derived from the light-harvesting pigment plants use for photosynthesis. Other dyes being tested in the cells are based on hemoglobin, the compound that give blood its color and blue derived from blueberries. Apparently, dark-colored berries outperform most other plant species when it comes to spectral absorption of sunlight.

From the linked article:

Solar cell technology developed by the University’s Nanomaterials Research Centre will enable New Zealanders to generate electricity from sunlight at a 10th of the cost of current silicon-based photo-electric solar cells.
…
Dr Campbell says that unlike the silicon-based solar cells currently on the market, the 10x10cm green demonstration cells generate enough electricity to run a small fan in low-light conditions – making them ideal for cloudy climates. The dyes can also be incorporated into tinted windows that trap to generate electricity.

Solar Power Tower

- Adam Clare 1 Comment

towerOver at Gear Factor there is a short and sweet post on a tower that uses solar energy to power itself, and to make it rotate.

“We didn’t want to build just another building or tower, we wanted to create something unique – a precious place to live – a genuine contender to be one of the great buildings in the world,” said Tav Singh, director of Dubai Property Ring, the Dubai arm of UK-based property investors UK Property Group.

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