Posts Tagged by solar power
Solar Photovoltaics in Small Model House
| May 19, 2012 | Posted by Craig Shields under Photo-voltaics |
Tomorrow my daughter and I will spend the afternoon on a project for her science class at school: building a model house whose electrical power is delivered with solar photovoltaics. I have a small solar panel that (I believe) will put out about 5 Watts in the full sun, and a couple of flashlight batteries of different types. I think I’m going to have to experiment with series vs. parallel circuits, different bulbs, etc., before I get this right. Should be fun.
The Value of the NegaWatt
| May 16, 2012 | Posted by Craig Shields under Photo-voltaics |
I had a lovely phone chat last evening with a young lady, a high school senior who was working on a paper for school and wanted to ask a few questions about solar energy. In particular, she wanted to know the cost of converting her entire town (Arcadia, CA — 56,000 people, let’s say 20,000 households) to 100% solar.
Understandably, she hadn’t thought through some of the implications. Read More
The Health of the Solar Photovoltaics Industry
| May 15, 2012 | Posted by Craig Shields under Photo-voltaics |
Here’s a good article on the solar photovoltaics industry by consulting giant McKinsey and Company. Not to give anything away, but they share my belief that the PV industry is in a momentary lull, not a swan song. Best of all, they defend this belief in an extremely cogent and well-reasoned way. I hope you’ll check it out.
From Guest Blogger Alia Haley: 7 Ways Homeowners Can Power Their Homes with Renewable Energy
| May 15, 2012 | Posted by Alia under Renewables - Science |
You can see lots of attention is focused towards alternative and renewable energy systems. This is due to the soaring energy costs and the need to decrease the climate change effects over earth. Though these solutions may seem complicated for the homeowners in their daily chores, however, the fact is that they are now becoming more accessible to common man. There are number of options available for homeowners which can prove pretty affordable financial investment. Also, by treading these paths, you can benefit from state and federal tax and avail the utility rebates and incentives. The below are the top seven ways which the home owners can heat and power their homes via renewable energy systems.
From Guest Blogger Brian McGowan: Solar Cooking — Because I Can
| May 13, 2012 | Posted by Brian McGowan under Solar Thermal |
For amusement only….
Today I cooked mashed potatoes in my solar oven. The oven is made of one of those shiny windshield shades, a rack from an old countertop oven, a very large clear plastic pretzel container and a 2lb 13oz Prego spagetti sauce jar which I painted black with high temperature paint except for a stripe I left so I could look at what was going on in there. I peeled and cut potatoes to fill the jar and added water and put the arrangement out in the sun around 12:30. About 6:30 I retrieved the arrangement and brought the jar in to see what I had.
Where We’re Going In Clean Energy
| May 2, 2012 | Posted by Craig Shields under Photo-voltaics |
Here’s an article that gets to a couple of important points that are illustrative of where we are and where we’re going in clean energy.
• Financing solar photovoltaics. There is no doubt that homeowners would be more likely to invest in solar if the PV on their roofs could be integrated in their mortgage, just like their plumbing, HVAC, or electrical system.
• Integrating electric vehicles. My friend Paul Scott has enough PV on his roof that his Nissan LEAF very rarely has to plug in to the grid; thus the carbon footprint of his transportation is limited to the manufacturing of the vehicle (and the PV) itself. Not bad! Obviously, he’s an early adopter, but this concept is likely to go mainstream over the coming years.
What’s the Plan For Phasing Out Fossil Fuels? Which Do You Want To Hear First? The Good News or the Bad News?
| April 29, 2012 | Posted by Craig Shields under Fossil Fuels |
Germany has installed enough photovoltaics that, at this point, coal-fired power plants are beginning to become unprofitable. This is driven by a combination of factors, e.g., that coal isn’t asked to provide power at the peak of the day, when both the sun and the price of electricity are at their zenith. Of course, most of us cheer when coal runs into trouble, but issues like this raise some fantastically interesting questions about the future of power generation – and transportation – as we migrate from fossil fuels into more sustainable modalities. Read More
How Much Solar Thermal Would Be Required to Provide 100% of Our Energy Needs?
| April 20, 2012 | Posted by Craig Shields under Solar Thermal |
I’ve often written about how astonishingly little of the Earth’s surface needs to be covered in a solar collecting technology, e.g., solar thermal, in order to provide 100% of the world’s energy needs. Linked above is a wonderful graphic that makes this clear.
Don’t get me wrong: the task of deploying that much solar thermal is not something that we can do overnight, but it sure provides something to think about. We receive 6000 times more energy from the sun every day than we need to supply all our energy needs. It sure seems a shame that we can’t come up with a way of making this happen, and that, as a consequence, we keep depleting our ever-shrinking supply of fossil fuels, while destroying our natural environment.
Subsidizing Solar — Both Sides of the Coin
| April 19, 2012 | Posted by Craig Shields under Photo-voltaics |
A reader from Savannah, GA and I spoke on the phone the other day and became fast friends. In response to my piece on subsidies for solar, he writes:
I keep going back and forth on this very difficult issue. On balance, I’m against photo-opp seeking politicians and their bureaucrats (pol-crats) picking winners and losers.
Still, the last decade’s big gush of subsidy bucks (grants, credits, feed-in-tariffs) may be cited as birthing a gold-rush style ramp-up of solar PV production that maybe would not have otherwise happened. Read More
Replacement of Diesel with Solar Can Be Complicated
| April 7, 2012 | Posted by Craig Shields under Photo-voltaics |
Here’s a wonderful discussion that illustrates how an apparent no-brainer in terms of the replacement of diesel with solar on an island nation (Anguilla) can become a complicated mess.
In particular, the chairman of the Anguilla Renewable Energy Office says, “As we all know, you can’t store electricity, it has to be used when it is generated.” (They need a new chairman.) Also, per a local solar consultant: “(where) Jamaica, St. Lucia, Greneda, and other islands have implemented net-metering in some form, Anguilla has not. This means that you can have solar, but you cannot interconnect it with the grid. All the developed countries of the world incentivize solar, Anguilla outlaws it.”
Yep, that’s a mess all right.
