The German Solar Experiment

The government sets a premium price on solar and other alternative power sources. The policy offers lessons in ways to encourage the use of renewable energy. Read the rest of this entry »

Solar’s Great Leap Forward

Suntech CEO Zhengrong Shi made China a powerhouse in photovoltaic technology–and became a billionaire in the process. His next ambition: to make solar power as cheap as conventional electricity.

To see the future of solar power, take an hour-long train ride inland from Shanghai and then a horn-blaring cab trek through the smog of Wuxi, a fast-growing Chinese city of five million. After winding through an industrial park, you will arrive at the front door of Suntech Power, a company that in the few years since its founding has become the world’s largest maker of crystalline-silicon solar panels. Read the rest of this entry »

Solar panels are cheap enough to become a major component of green energy

The United States has supported research into photovoltaics for almost 40 years, recently with a 30 percent investment tax credit. Japan instituted incentives in the 1990s, when photovoltaics cost at least five times as much as residential electricity. In the new millennium, Germany instituted incentives an order of magnitude larger. Read the rest of this entry »

Light-Trapping Nanoparticles boost solar power’s prospects

In 1995, finishing her undergraduate degree in physics, Kylie Catchpole decided to take a risk on a field that was nearly moribund: photovoltaics. “There was a sense that I might have difficulty ever being employed,” she recalls. But her gamble paid off. In 2006 Catchpole, then a postdoc, discovered something that opened the door to making thin-film solar cells significantly more efficient at converting light into electricity. It’s an advance that could help make solar power more competitive with fossil fuels. Read the rest of this entry »

Gasifying Biomass with Sunlight

A solar-driven process could yield far more fuel than conventional biomass production.

Sundrop Fuels, a startup based in Louisville, CO, says it has developed a cleaner and more efficient way to turn biomass into synthetic fuels by harnessing the intense heat of the sun to vaporize wood and crop waste. Its process can produce twice the amount of gasoline or diesel per ton of biomass compared to conventional biomass gasification systems, the company claims. Read the rest of this entry »

Rising Sun: India’s Solar Power Initiatives Are Shining Brighter

Farooq Abdullah, India’s Union minister for new and renewable energy, is a busy man these days. Over the past few months, as the Copenhagen climate summit neared, he has been speaking at seminar after seminar on renewable energy which, most of the time, have been on solar energy. He has also been inaugurating projects, from the launch of a new solar lantern to the commissioning of a solar steam system at a temple kitchen to cook food for 20,000 pilgrims each day. All over India, solar power has found its day in the sun. Read the rest of this entry »

More AC Power from Solar Panels: DC-to-AC inverters to extract more juice from solar panels

Startup Enphase Energy is shrinking DC-to-AC inverters to extract more juice from solar panels.

There’s more to solar power than blue glassy panels shimmering on rooftops. Just as important are the inverters that convert DC power created by the solar panels into grid-ready AC power. Typically, all the panels in a rooftop PV system are connected to one large inverter mounted on the side of a house.

Startup Enphase Energy of Petaluma, CA, is now making the first micro-inverters. These smaller inverters can be bolted to the racking under each solar panel, to convert DC power into AC for each panel individually. The company claims that the devices will increase a PV system’s efficiency by 5 to 25 percent and decrease the cost of solar power.
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Sun + Water = Fuel