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Archive for the ‘solar power’ category: Page 107

Nov 4, 2018

Mining for Rocket Fuel on the Moon

Posted by in categories: solar power, space, sustainability

Over the past few months, I was part of a study funded by the United Launch Alliance and supported by a large group of technologists to determine if we can mine water on the Moon and turn it into rocket fuel, and to do it economically. The final report can be downloaded here.

Why Mine Water on the Moon?

The lunar water would be launched off the Moon and delivered to a “gas station” in Earth orbit. This propellant depot will use solar energy to turn the water into rocket fuel. Then, space tugs can refill their tanks so they can repeatedly boost spacecraft from Geosynchronous Transfer Orbit (GTO) (where the launch rocket throws them) into Geosynchronous Orbit (GEO) where they can begin operating.

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Nov 2, 2018

Solar Power Is About to Boom in the Sunshine State

Posted by in categories: solar power, sustainability

Florida has lagged in renewable energy use, but declining solar costs are set to change that.

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Oct 30, 2018

Hybrid cell turns sunlight and water into hydrogen and electricity

Posted by in categories: solar power, sustainability

One of the main methods of producing hydrogen for fuel cells is to use artificial photosynthesis to split water into hydrogen and oxygen, but these devices still suffer from some efficiency issues. Now a new hybrid device may be able to recover some of the energy that would otherwise go to waste, by producing both hydrogen and electricity.

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Oct 26, 2018

More solar panels mean more waste and there’s no easy solution

Posted by in categories: solar power, sustainability

https://paper.li/e-1437691924#/


Solar panels might be the energy source of the future, but they also create a problem without an easy solution: what do we do with millions of panels when they stop working?

In November 2016, the Environment Ministry of Japan warned that the country will produce 800,000 tons of solar waste by 2040, and it can’t yet handle those volumes. That same year, the International Renewable Energy Agency estimated that there were already 250,000 metric tons of solar panel waste worldwide and that this number would grow to 78 million by 2050. “That’s an amazing amount of growth,” says Mary Hutzler, a senior fellow at the Institute for Energy Research. “It’s going to be a major problem.”

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Oct 19, 2018

A new cermet that could provide a better heat exchange for solar power plants

Posted by in categories: solar power, sustainability

Six-hundred million people in Sub-Saharan Africa lack access to electricity. To meet these power needs, a mix of large public-run utility grids and standalone systems will be necessary for universal access in the region. Governments, aid organizations, and scientists are working to understand which electricity grid solution would be most cost-effective and reliable across urban, peri-urban, and rural areas.

Standalone, or “decentralized” electricity systems—most often solar power with battery storage—are usually thought to be too expensive compared to large state-run grids in all but the most remote locations. However, declining costs of solar and new battery technologies are changing the best pathways to deliver reliable power to people that currently lack access to electricity. New UC Berkeley research published today in Nature Energy finds that decentralized electricity systems in sub-saharan Africa can be designed for extremely high reliability, and that this may come at remarkably low costs in the future.

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Oct 16, 2018

Printable solar materials could soon turn many parts of a house into solar panels

Posted by in categories: habitats, solar power, sustainability

New houses could soon deliver on a long-awaited promise and incorporate windows or roof tiles that harvest solar energy, research conducted at KAUST suggests.

Derya Baran, at the KAUST Solar Center, and her colleagues have developed a photovoltaic organic material that captures light efficiently and that potentially could be coated on building .

Traditional roof-mounted solar panels are made from slabs of silicon, but can also capture energy from sunlight. These molecules could be formulated as inexpensive printable inks that are applied to regular building components such as windows. Turning sunlight into electricity is a multistep process, and the key to developing high-performance has been to find organic molecules that are good at every step, Baran explains.

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Oct 16, 2018

Independent solar power could offer reliable electricity to sub-saharan Africa

Posted by in categories: solar power, sustainability

Six-hundred million people in Sub-Saharan Africa lack access to electricity. To meet these power needs, a mix of large public-run utility grids and standalone systems will be necessary for universal access in the region. Governments, aid organizations, and scientists are working to understand which electricity grid solution would be most cost-effective and reliable across urban, peri-urban, and rural areas.

Standalone, or “decentralized” electricity systems—most often solar power with battery storage—are usually thought to be too expensive compared to large state-run grids in all but the most remote locations. However, declining costs of solar and new battery technologies are changing the best pathways to deliver reliable power to people that currently lack access to electricity. New UC Berkeley research published today in Nature Energy finds that decentralized electricity systems in sub-saharan Africa can be designed for extremely high reliability, and that this may come at remarkably low costs in the future.

Jonathan Lee, a Ph.D. candidate in the Energy and Resources Group (ERG) and Associate Professor Duncan Callaway worked with more than 10 years of solar data from NASA and developed an optimization that determines the lowest cost way to build a standalone system given component costs and a target reliability. At current costs, their model indicates that most regions in Sub-Saharan Africa can get 95% reliable power—meaning customers can use electricity from some combination of solar panels and batteries 95% of the time—for roughly USD$0.40 per kWh. Though that cost is high relative to current costs, their model indicates that with aggressive but plausible future cost declines in decentralized system costs, largely in batteries, these costs would drop to levels competitive with the grid in many parts of the continent in less than a decade.

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Oct 4, 2018

Artificial enzymes convert solar energy into hydrogen gas

Posted by in categories: bioengineering, biological, chemistry, genetics, solar power, sustainability

In a new scientific article, researchers at Uppsala University describe how, using a completely new method, they have synthesised an artificial enzyme that functions in the metabolism of living cells. These enzymes can utilize the cell’s own energy, and thereby enable hydrogen gas to be produced from solar energy.

Hydrogen gas has long been noted as a promising carrier, but its production is still dependent on fossil raw materials. Renewable gas can be extracted from water, but as yet the systems for doing so have limitations.

In the new article, published in the journal Energy and Environmental Science, an interdisciplinary European research group led by Uppsala University scientists describe how convert into hydrogen gas. This entirely new method has been developed at the University in the past few years. The technique is based on photosynthetic microorganisms with genetically inserted enzymes that are combined with synthetic compounds produced in the laboratory. Synthetic biology has been combined with synthetic chemistry to design and create custom artificial enzymes inside living organisms.

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Sep 28, 2018

Perovskite solar cells leap toward commercialization

Posted by in categories: solar power, sustainability

Solar energy has long been considered the most sustainable option for replacing our dependence on fossil fuels, but technologies for converting solar energy into electricity must be both efficient and inexpensive.

Scientists from the Energy Materials and Surface Sciences Unit at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University (OIST) believe they’ve found a winning formula in a new method to fabricate low-cost high-efficiency solar . Prof. Yabing Qi and his team from OIST in collaboration with Prof. Shengzhong Liu from Shaanxi Normal University, China, developed the cells using the materials and compounds that mimic the crystalline structure of the naturally occurring mineral perovskite. They describe their technique in a study published in the journal Nature Communications.

In what Prof. Qi refers to as “the golden triangle,” solar cell technologies need to fulfill three conditions to be worth commercializing: their conversion rate of sunlight into electricity must be high, they must be inexpensive to produce, and they must have a long lifespan. Today, most commercial solar cells are made from crystalline silicon, which has a relatively high efficiency of around 22%. Though silicon, the raw material for these solar cells, is abundant, processing it tends to be complex and shoots up the manufacturing costs, making the finished product expensive.

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Sep 27, 2018

Shake, rattle, and roll to high efficiency photovoltaics

Posted by in categories: solar power, sustainability

New insight into how a certain class of photovoltaic materials allows efficient conversion of sunlight into electricity could set up these materials to replace traditional silicon solar cells. A study by researchers at Penn State reveals the unique properties of these inexpensive and quick-to-produce halide perovskites, information that will guide the development of next generation solar cells. The study appears September 27 in the journal Chem.

“Since the development of solar , which today can be found on rooftops and roadsides, researchers have sought new types of photovoltaic materials that are easier to process into solar cells,” said John Asbury, associate professor of chemistry at Penn State and senior author of the study. “This is because construction of silicon solar cells is complex and hard to scale-up to the level that would be needed for them to generate even 10 percent of our total demand for electricity.”

Because of these complications, researchers have been searching for less expensive alternatives to silicon solar cells that can be processed more quickly. They are particularly interested in materials that can be processed using a technique called roll-to-roll manufacturing, a technique similar to those used to print newspapers that enables low-cost, high-volume production. Such materials must be processed from solution, like ink printed on a page.

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