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Category: solar power – Page 61

The installations of photovoltaic (PV) solar modules are growing extremely fast. As a result of the increase, the volume of discarded solar modules that end up on the recycling market annually will grow at the same rate in the near future. Currently, the aluminum, glass, and copper of the discarded modules are reprocessed; however, the silicon solar cells are not.

Now, researchers from the Fraunhofer Center for Silicon Photovoltaics CSP and the Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems ISE, together with the largest German recycling company for PV modules, Reiling GmbH & Co. KG, have built new PERC solar cells with 100% crystalline silicon recycled from end-of-life photovoltaic panels.

The team has developed a process for recovering the silicon material with funding from the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate BMWK. The technique is claimed to recycle silicon from different types of crystalline silicon PV modules, regardless of manufacturer and origin.

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Like electric vehicles – traditionally seen as expensive and niche – solar power is now becoming a realistic option for many households, as well as businesses wishing to decarbonise their operations. While the upfront costs of installing a photovoltaic (PV) rooftop system can be expensive, home solar will usually pay for itself within 5–10 years – and then provides the owner with an essentially free, limitless supply of clean energy, decentralised and unaffected by price volatility. Unlike the world’s increasingly scarce, finite supplies of coal, oil and gas, our Sun will continue to shine for another five billion years. Home solar can also be combined with batteries (which, like solar, are rapidly declining in cost) for energy storage at night.

At the utility scale, gigantic solar projects are now emerging in many countries. Recent years have seen the first gigawatt-scale (GW) facilities. The largest has a nameplate capacity of 2.3 GW. China is the world leader, accounting for 30% of all solar electric generation, followed by Europe (21%) and then the USA (16%). The vast majority is produced from PV modules, with a small fraction obtained by concentrated solar power (using mirrors or lenses to concentrate a large area of sunlight onto a receiver).

Following decades of rapid growth, the worldwide installed capacity of solar power has passed 1 TW this month, according to PV Magazine, an international trade publication headquartered in Berlin, Germany. The magazine has based its analysis on data from Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF).

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The Charles M. Schulz Sonoma County Airport had two solar power systems installed onsite and made them live in February. Over the course of their electricity-generating life spans, they will offset thousands of tons of CO2 emissions and potentially save millions of dollars.

Sonoma County has been hit particularly hard by wildfires in the last several years. These natural disasters occur with some regularity on their own, but many believe the latest ones are connected to the effects of climate change. The county has been experiencing higher temperatures and droughts as well. As a result of these challenges, Sonoma County’s government set a goal for the county to be carbon neutral by 2030. The airport solar power installations fit within the carbon-free plan. (The California state government has a goal for California to be operating on clean, carbon-free electricity by 2045.)

Jon Stout, the Sonoma Airport Manager, and Rachel McLaughlin, ForeFront Power’s Vice President of Sales & Marketing, provided some insights to CleanTechnica about the new solar power systems. (The last three answers are from ForeFront.)

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A research team from KTH Royal Institute of Technology and Max Planck Institute of Colloids and Interfaces reports to have found the key to controlled fabrication of cerium oxide mesocrystals. The research is a step forward in tuning nanomaterials that can serve a wide range of uses—including solar cells, fuel catalysts and even medicine.

Mesocrystals are nanoparticles with identical size, shape and crystallographic orientation, and they can be used as to create artificial nanostructures with customized optical, magnetic or electronic properties. In nature, these three-dimensional structures are found in coral, sea urchins and calcite desert rose, for example. Artificially-produced cerium oxide (CeO2) mesocrystals—or nanoceria—are well-known as catalysts, with antioxidant properties that could be useful in pharmaceutical development.

“To be able to fabricate CeO2 mesocrystals in a controlled way, one needs to understand the formation mechanism of these materials,” says Inna Soroka, a researcher in applied at KTH. She says the team used radiation chemistry to reveal for the first time the ceria mesocrystal formation mechanism.

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Over the past decades, engineers have created increasingly advanced and highly performing integrated circuits (ICs). The rising performance of these circuits in turn increased the speed and efficiency of the technology we use every day, including computers, smartphones and other smart devices.

To continue to improve the performance of integrated circuits in the future, engineers will need to create thinner transistors with shorter channels. Down-scaling existing silicon-based devices or creating smaller devices using alternative semiconducting materials that are compatible with existing fabrication processes, however, has proved to be challenging.

Researchers at Purdue University have recently developed new transistors based on indium oxide, a semiconductor that is often used to create touch screens, flatscreen TVs and solar panels. These transistors, introduced in a paper published in Nature Electronics, were fabricated using atomic layer deposition, a process that is often employed by transistor and electronics manufacturers.

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