Win a $5,000 Credit in National Solar Sweepstakes
(San Francisco, CA) – What’s new for SolarDay 2010? How about a national Solar Sweepstakes.
It’s free to enter the $5,000 solar sweepstakes on the SolarDay website to win a chance at a $5,000 credit off a residential or commercial solar installation for homeowners in the U.S.
Really Reducing Your Monthly Energy Bills
Why enter? Energy prices are going up, again. People with solar installations on their homes and businesses can dramatically reduce their monthly energy bills. And, there are many incentive and rebate programs that can reduce the cost of a solar installation by nearly half. Plus, new programs allow you to pay off your solar installation through your property taxes and other methods. Some solar companies will install a solar installation at no cost – and simply charge you for the electricity you consume – at a guaranteed rate with no surprises.
Check out the SolarDay 2010, Solar Sweepstakes at: www.solarday.com.
Somebody will win a $5,000 credit for a home or business solar installation. With existing government rebates, that credit can be worth close to $10,000 off the cost of your installation.
You Can’t Win if You Don’t Enter!
Constellation Energy Completes Solar and Wind Installation for University of Toledo
BALTIMORE, Mar. 29, 2010 – Constellation Energy (NYSE: CEG) today announced that its subsidiary, Constellation Energy’s Projects & Services Group, has completed installation of a 1.2 megawatt solar and wind power system at the University of Toledo’s Scott Park Campus of Energy and Innovation in Toledo, Ohio. The campus will utilize solar and wind power to generate electricity and the university’s commitment to sustainability also provides students with firsthand educational experiences with renewable technologies.
“Renewables have a twofold importance for colleges and universities that are looking to improve their sustainability and expose students to careers in alternative energy,” said Mark Huston, managing director of retail energy, Constellation Energy. “We are proud to have developed this project with the University of Toledo and look forward to years of clean energy production as well as years of inspiration for a generation of students that will embark on green careers.”
“The creation and production of clean, renewable energy sources is vital to the way we power our world. That’s why The University of Toledo created the Scott Park Campus of Energy and Innovation,” UT President Dr. Lloyd Jacobs said. “Our relationship with Constellation Energy for the solar and wind electric generation systems on that campus will help students and researchers advance the technology that will power our future.”
The project utilizes thin-film-on-glass photovoltaic solar technology that was originally developed based on research at the University of Toledo. Constellation Energy’s Projects & Services Group also installed a 132-foot wind turbine at the site. Together, the solar and wind systems are expected annually to generate power equivalent to the amount of electricity used by 140 homes in a year. Generating that same amount of electricity using non-renewable sources would result in the release of more than 1,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas, and the equivalent of the emissions from 200 passenger vehicles annually.
Constellation Energy finances, designs, constructs and owns these solar installations and supplies power generated on-site to the customer over a period of 15 to 20 years. This creates an attractive and affordable model that requires no upfront capital from customers, such as The University of Toledo, and reduces customers’ use of power from the electrical grid and associated carbon emissions. Constellation Energy’s Projects & Services Group has developed a number of renewable energy projects for universities throughout the U.S., including a 17.1 megawatt system under development on the grounds of Mount St. Mary’s University in Emmitsburg, Md., that will be one of the largest solar installations in the U.S. when completed.
Constellation Energy currently has approximately 25 megawatts of on-site solar projects completed or under development throughout the U.S., and announced last month that it has set aside $90 million to fund the development of similar solar installations in 2010. Qualifying projects of 500 kilowatts generally require at least 100,000 square feet of roof space or two acres of open ground. Colleges and universities and other commercial customers interested in developing solar projects can contact Constellation Energy at Sustainable-Solutions@constellation.com or 1-877-427-2005.
Constellation Energy’s Projects & Services Group utilized the design and build services of Advanced Distribution Generation (ADG) LLC of Northwest Ohio for the project. Plug Smart Solutions consulted and managed the project for the University of Toledo. Solar panels were supplied by First Solar, and photovoltaic inverters were supplied by PV Powered. The wind turbine was manufactured by Wind Energy Solutions (WES) of Holland.
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About Constellation Energy
Constellation Energy (www.constellation.com) is a leading supplier of energy products and services to wholesale and retail electric and natural gas customers. It owns a diversified fleet of generating units located in the United States and Canada, totaling approximately 7,100 megawatts of generating capacity, and is among the leaders pursuing the development of new nuclear plants in the United States. The company delivers electricity and natural gas through the Baltimore Gas and Electric Company (BGE), its regulated utility in Central Maryland. A FORTUNE 500 company headquartered in Baltimore, Constellation Energy had revenues of $15.6 billion in 2009.?
The Truth About Solar Power
From Time.com
As the U.S. plots its energy strategy, what are the pros and cons? Solar energy is plentiful. But is it practical?
Caltech Researchers Create Highly Absorbing, Flexible Solar Cells with Silicon Wire Arrays
PASADENA, Calif. (2/14/10) Using arrays of long, thin silicon wires embedded in a polymer substrate, a team of scientists from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) has created a new type of flexible solar cell that enhances the absorption of sunlight and efficiently converts its photons into electrons. The solar cell does all this using only a fraction of the expensive semiconductor materials required by conventional solar cells.
“These solar cells have, for the first time, surpassed the conventional light-trapping limit for absorbing materials,” says Harry Atwater, Howard Hughes Professor, professor of applied physics and materials science, and director of Caltech’s Resnick Institute, which focuses on sustainability research.
The light-trapping limit of a material refers to how much sunlight it is able to absorb. The silicon-wire arrays absorb up to 96 percent of incident sunlight at a single wavelength and 85 percent of total collectible sunlight. “We’ve surpassed previous optical microstructures developed to trap light,” he says.
Atwater and his colleagues—including Nathan Lewis, the George L. Argyros Professor and professor of chemistry at Caltech, and graduate student Michael Kelzenberg—assessed the performance of these arrays in a paper appearing in the February 14 advance online edition of the journal Nature Materials.
Atwater notes that the solar cells’ enhanced absorption is “useful absorption.”
“Many materials can absorb light quite well but not generate electricity—like, for instance, black paint,” he explains. “What’s most important in a solar cell is whether that absorption leads to the creation of charge carriers.”
The silicon wire arrays created by Atwater and his colleagues are able to convert between 90 and 100 percent of the photons they absorb into electrons—in technical terms, the wires have a near-perfect internal quantum efficiency. “High absorption plus good conversion makes for a high-quality solar cell,” says Atwater. “It’s an important advance.”
The key to the success of these solar cells is their silicon wires, each of which, says Atwater, “is independently a high-efficiency, high-quality solar cell.” When brought together in an array, however, they’re even more effective, because they interact to increase the cell’s ability to absorb light.
“Light comes into each wire, and a portion is absorbed and another portion scatters. The collective scattering interactions between the wires makes the array very absorbing,” he says.
This effect occurs despite the sparseness of the wires in the array—they cover only between 2 and 10 percent of the cell’s surface area.
“When we first considered silicon wire-array solar cells, we assumed that sunlight would be wasted on the space between wires,” explains Kelzenberg. “So our initial plan was to grow the wires as close together as possible. But when we started quantifying their absorption, we realized that more light could be absorbed than predicted by the wire-packing fraction alone. By developing light-trapping techniques for relatively sparse wire arrays, not only did we achieve suitable absorption, we also demonstrated effective optical concentration—an exciting prospect for further enhancing the efficiency of silicon-wire-array solar cells.”
Each wire measures between 30 and 100 microns in length and only 1 micron in diameter. “The entire thickness of the array is the length of the wire,” notes Atwater. “But in terms of area or volume, just 2 percent of it is silicon, and 98 percent is polymer.”
In other words, while these arrays have the thickness of a conventional crystalline solar cell, their volume is equivalent to that of a two-micron-thick film.
Since the silicon material is an expensive component of a conventional solar cell, a cell that requires just one-fiftieth of the amount of this semiconductor will be much cheaper to produce.
The composite nature of these solar cells, Atwater adds, means that they are also flexible. “Having these be complete flexible sheets of material ends up being important,” he says, “because flexible thin films can be manufactured in a roll-to-roll process, an inherently lower-cost process than one that involves brittle wafers, like those used to make conventional solar cells.”
Atwater, Lewis, and their colleagues had earlier demonstrated that it was possible to create these innovative solar cells. “They were visually striking,” says Atwater. “But it wasn’t until now that we could show that they are both highly efficient at carrier collection and highly absorbing.”
The next steps, Atwater says, are to increase the operating voltage and the overall size of the solar cell. “The structures we’ve made are square centimeters in size,” he explains. “We’re now scaling up to make cells that will be hundreds of square centimeters—the size of a normal cell.”
Atwater says that the team is already “on its way” to showing that large-area cells work just as well as these smaller versions.
In addition to Atwater, Lewis, and Kelzenberg, the all-Caltech coauthors on the Nature Materials paper, “Enhanced absorption and carrier collection in Si wire arrays for photovoltaic applications,” are postdoctoral scholars Shannon Boettcher and Joshua Spurgeon; undergraduate student Jan Petykiewicz; and graduate students Daniel Turner-Evans, Morgan Putnam, Emily Warren, and Ryan Briggs.
Their research was supported by BP and the Energy Frontier Research Center program of the Department of Energy, and made use of facilities supported by the Center for Science and Engineering of Materials, a National Science Foundation Materials Research Science and Engineering Center at Caltech. In addition, Boettcher received fellowship support from the Kavli Neuroscience Institute at Caltech.
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Visit the Caltech Media Relations website at http://media.caltech.edu
Solar Cooking “Grilling becomes thrilling”
What’s the best spice for cooking chicken? It might be the sun. Solar energy causes no harm to environment, and it makes the chicken taste delicious.
This restaurant uses a solar heating system made of 1,000 hand-mirrors to cook chicken nicely in 14 minutes. Located in Cha Um, a three hour drive from Bangkok, Thailand.
From Eco-ideas.net
EUEC David Hill – Solar Energy Policy 2010
David Hill, managing consultant for the Vermont Energy Investment Corporation, talks about his solar energy recommendations to the 111th Congress at EUEC conference in Phoenix, February 1. 2010.
Part One
Part Two
Seven Examples of Wineries and Vineyards Embracing Solar Energy
2) Winery goes solar with ‘Floatovoltaics’ – SFGate
3) Palisade vineyard goes green
4) Grande River Vineyards 70% of Energy Supplied from Solar Power
5) NC vineyard uses solar power to make wine
6) J. Lohr Vineyards & Wines Announces California Sustainable Winegrowing Certification
7) Oregon winery goes way beyond organic
Solar Energy International
Solar Energy International has provided hands-on workshops and online courses in renewable energy and sustainable building technologies since 1991. Through viable outreach programs, SEI works with grassroots and development organizations to promote sustainability and improve quality of life around the world.
How to Install Solar Panels
The proper installation of solar panels is one of the most important elements of your solar energy system. Although the sun provides its energy at no charge, the purchase and setup of your panels is a big investment. Whether you mount the panels on your own, or hire a company to do the job
for you, here are some tips for the best installations:
Most homeowners have a limited amount of space in which to place large solar panels. Your roof is a likely location. The solar panels must be installed in an area or areas of your roof that attract the most possible sunshine. There are many web sites that provide the amount of sunlight
received in any area of the world. They allow you to effectively track the sun’s position through the year.
Your solar panels must be placed where they will receive direct sunlight. An ideal spot is one that receives the sun’s rays at noon, typically the time at which your solar panels will operate with the greatest efficiency. Check to see if there are tree branches, satellite dishes or any other objects that might obstruct the path of the sun on your solar panels.
If you are installing solar panels on your roof, you will probably use a flush mount or a roof-ground mount. Flush mounts are typically used for smaller homes. Roof-ground mounts are somewhat more expensive and occupy more space, but they can be adjusted to follow the path of the sun during
the year. Roof mounts are often supported by your roof’s rafters, so use a stud finder to ascertain the position of your rafters.
When you have determined the best location for your panels, draw an outline of their position on your roof. Drill small holes in your roof/rafters before placement of the mounts to allow for easier drilling later. When you have placed the mounts in their exact locations, drill holes in the mounts and secure them with lag bolts. Secure metal rails to the roof. Attach the solar panels. Connect the panels to the electrical inverter with a conduit.
About the Author
Shannon Bell writes for Residentialsolarpanels.org a non commercial blog focused on her Photovoltaic experiences to help people understand how and why they should save energy investing in solar power. She writes on Solar Panels for Homes to help people learn how to start save energy from the scratch and then apply those experience to the next level.
Space-Based Solar Energy – Part 1 & 2
Peter Sage of Space Energy Inc. gives a fascinating and inspiring talk on Space Based Solar Power which shows why harvesting solar energy in space and wirelessly transmitting it back to earth will soon become the energy source of the very near future. More info at www.SpaceEnergy.com
Part 1
Part 2
