Concentrated solar photovoltaic energy or CPV is a relative newcomer to the solar power arena and is showing signs of entering into a phase of very rapid growth. It works by concentrating the sun onto a small area of active PV, which operates at around twice the efficiency of normal PV, and promises savings because it requires only a fraction of the photovoltaic material that normal systems require. The DOE has announced a $90 million loan guarantee to support a planned 30-megawatt facility near Alamosa, Colorado.
The WINDPOWER 2011 Conference & Exhibition, organized by the American Wind Energy Association (AWEA), is coming up this month and will run from May 22nd through the 25th, and will be held this year in Anaheim, California. On Sunday May 22nd, it will kick off with a Careers in Wind Summit, a full, one-day event that precedes WINDPOWER, and consists of two concurrent parts: the WINDPOWER “Careers in Wind” Educational Seminars, and the WINDPOWER “Careers in Wind” Job Fair & Exhibition.
While other parts of the world are busy actually building national Ultra High Voltage (UHV) transmission infrastructure the US continues to do noting more substantial than litigate. A UHV super grid would be able to move renewable energy from where it is abundant to where people live and work, and do so at an economic cost. This kind of national electric energy infrastructure would enable solar, wind, hydro and geothermal generated electric power to reach market. It is a critical piece of the kind of future energy infrastructure we will need in order to continue to prosper. John goes into a lot of detail and provides numerous links to examples and more in depth reading on this very important subject.
indoor marijuana weed cannibisThe yearly greenhouse-gas pollution of the $40 billion per year marijuana industry is responsible for about 3% of all electricity use or 8% of household use. Indoor growers use high-intensity lights that are 500 times more powerful that a standard reading lamp. They also use several other high energy industrial practices. The closest comparison for these massive, industrial-style grow facilities are data centers, which consume about two percent of the nation’s electric power.
Electric cars are finally coming to market in the U.S., but what is the future potential for this much-touted technology? A good way to find out would be to launch demonstration projects in selected U.S. cities to determine if, given incentives and the proper infrastructure, the public will truly embrace plug-in vehicles.
California’s Senate has just passed some important new renewable energy legislation that will, if approved in the Assembly and signed into law by Governor Jerry Brown, require utilities operating in the state to obtain one third of their electricity from renewable sources of energy such as wind, solar or geothermal. This is a big increase from the current 20% targets set by former Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger in a 2009 executive order.
This article makes the case for creating cleantech clusters in order to do for cleantech what the silicon valley for example did for IT. Clusters such as Silicon Valley, Boston or Tel Aviv not only enable the technology professionals who live and work in them to “cross-pollinate” their ideas, but they can also pick the […]
Streamlining the building code process for solar installation could help rooftop solar reach price parity with the average price for electric power on the grid. This key price point is also known as grid parity. Permitting costs will add $1 billion to the price structure of solar over the next five years. This article poses the following question: With widely adopted standardization of best practices in solar system construction/installation in place and the 10-20 years of performance certification on actual operating systems in the field, why then is the permitting process stuck in time and why is solar treated as if it were still an experimental niche rarity that needed to prove itself before the building code bureaucrats can give it their thumbs up.
After lagging behind the utility scale segment of the solar power renewable energy sector is really starting to take off in the US; it is is now on par with the commercial and residential segments in terms of market size and growing at a higher rate. This post summarizes AltaTerra Research’s newest report, “Utility Solar: U.S. Market Takes Off”.
