Solar energy

Organic solar cell (47)
Solar array (27)
Solar cell (772)
Solar electricity (10)
Solar energy system (5)
Solar panel (251)
Solar plant (7)
Solar technology (21)
Solarcity (26)

Synopsis: Domenii: Energy: Energy generale: Energy forms: Renewable energy: Solar energy:

Solar panels on the structure top will generate power. Such concepts allow us to see bridges in new ways not just as a method of crossing natural barriers,

I was surprised to see solar panels and water heaters sprouting from government buildings hospitals police stations bus shelters as well as thousands of gaily colored private homes throughout the Caribbean island.

#U s. Guarantees $230 Million Loan For Construction of Latin america Largest Solar plant A large solar power plant is coming to Chile Atacama desert

and how we can transition to a clean energy economyobama told The Associated press. nd wel be announcing some collaborations including the facilitation of a construction of a major solar plant inside of Chile that can help meet their energy needs. bama spent time with Chilean President

He is also chairman of Solarcity, which he said can helpprovide solar energy for the national network of Tesla EV chargers his company is creating e

and an efficient solar panel which lets it users charge smartphones, and even tablets, on the go. Featuring a solar panel the size of an ipad,

the Solartab lets its users charge any mobile device using green, sun-fueled energy. And even more impressively, ipad enthusiasts can charge their beloved touch-screen gadget even

they not only increased the solar panel size way beyond what youl find on the average portable solar charger on the market today,

but also works as a stand for the solar panel, which lets users angle the solar panel in three different positions.

After adjusting the angle to the sun current position, all that left to do is plug in any smartphone

or a utility-scale solar array in Nevada, these projects require American ingenuity and labor. The sector is helping stimulate our economy,

*In New jersey, Trinity Solar LLC installed solar panels at housing units at Joint Military Base Mcguire-Dix-Lakehurst in Burlington County,

U s. solar power capacity, for instance, recently surpassed 10 gigawatts as the price of solar panels has fallen some 75 percent during the past five years

These programs include lending for residential solar electricity and hot-water systems, deep energy efficiency retrofit loans through the Property Assessed Clean energy,

and businesses to invest in solar panels and other clean energy projects. The loans, which are designed to offset the upfront cost of photovoltaic systems,

For comparison utility-scale solar arrays in the sun-drenched U s. Southwest deliver more than 25 percent capacity factors p

, and a photovoltaic cell. image via MIT/John Freidah) Here how MIT outlines the development:(T) he team inserted a two-layer absorber-emitter device made of novel materials including carbon nanotubes and photonic crystals between the sunlight and the PV cell.

#Developing high-efficiency lasers to manufacture solar panels As the world continues its efforts to combat climate change

Solar panels are able to function because they have intricate patterns of tiny channels engraved into their surface,

high-tech materials now being developed for solar panels. In place of conventional solar panels measuring up to 5 millimetres in thickness,

the modern PV industry is looking to use new types of lightweight and flexible materials to construct solar panels measured in micrometres (thousandths of a millimetre).

With such materials, the scribing process must be controlled with a high degree of accuracy since it is vital that it penetrates only one layer of the thin solar cell film at a time.

PCF lasers provide this accuracy. Moreover, since PCF lasers operate with ultra-short pulse rates,

the flexibility means that solar panels can be wrapped onto any suitable structure, flat or curved. The results of the ALPINE team work, demonstrating the capability of PCF lasers to transform existing scribing technology and opening the way to rapid growth in the high-volume production of flexible,

thin-film solar cells, are hard to overestimate. In the words of Professor Selleri: echanical scribing will disappear very quickly from the PV industry,

powered by a solar cell located on the flat top of the container. A fibre-optic grid monitors any deformations in the bag (signs of tearing

but ew partners are always welcome These partnerships could see Light-Rolls being involved in a myriad of sectors including automotive and building lighting applications, flexible solar cells and batteries and even consumer products and games.

#New polymer makes solar cells more efficient Solar cells made from polymers have the potential to be cheap and lightweight

Now a team of researchers led by Yu has identified a new polymer that allows electrical charges to move more easily through the cell boosting electricity production. olymer solar cells have great potential to provide low-cost lightweight

The active regions of such solar cells are composed of a mixture of polymers that give and receive electrons to generate electrical current

when added to a standard polymer-fullerene mixture. ullerene a small carbon molecule is one of the standard materials used in polymer solar cellslu says. asically in polymer solar cells we have a polymer as electron donor

and fullerene as electron acceptor to allow charge separation. n their work the researchers added another polymer into the device resulting in solar cells with two polymers and one fullerene.

when an optimal amount of PID2 was added the highest ever for solar cells made up of two types of polymers with fullerene

The group which includes researchers at the Argonne National Laboratory is now working to push efficiencies toward 10 percent a benchmark necessary for polymer solar cells to be viable for commercial application.

In order for a current to be generated by the solar cell electrons must be transferred from polymer to fullerene within the device.

The fibers serve as a pathway to allow electrons to travel to the electrodes on the sides of the solar cell. t s like you re generating a street

The lowinginfrared light is guided to the edge of the plastic where it is converted to electricity by thin strips of photovoltaic solar cells. ecause the materials do not absorb

The discovery could potentially help engineers make more efficient solar cells and energy storage systems. It also injects new evidence into an ongoing uantum biologydebate over exactly how photosynthesis manages to be so efficient.

Solar panels can only generate power when the sun shining, and wind turbines can only generate power when the wind blows.

#Solar cell spikes let in 99%of sunlight The more light absorbed by a solar panel active elements,

A new one-step process to etch nanoscale spikes into silicon lets the maximum amount of sunlight reach a solar cell,

#Can nano dots outshine current solar cells? University of Toronto rightoriginal Studyposted by Marit Mitchell-Toronto on June 9 2014those flat glassy solar panels on your neighborâ#roof may be getting a more efficient makeover thanks to a new class of solar-sensitive nanoparticles.

This new form of solid stable light-sensitive nanoparticles called colloidal quantum dots could lead to cheaper and more flexible solar cells as well as better gas sensors infrared lasers infrared light emitting diodes and more.

The work appearsâ in Nature Materials. Collecting sunlight using these tiny colloidal quantum dots depends on two types of semiconductors:

and with this new material we can build new device structuressays Ning odide is almost a perfect ligand for these quantum solar cells with both high efficiency

But improved performance is just a start for the new quantum dot-based solar cell architecture. The powerful little dots could be mixed into inks

and chemical energy in plants and solar cells and in the future it may enable metals to function as active elements in optical communications.

and solar cells but Pint and Westover are confident that the rules that govern the load-bearing character of their design will carry over to other materials such as carbon nanotubes and lightweight porous metals like aluminum.

For the battery project Chao added tiny nanoparticles of carbon to the polymer so it would conduct electricity. e found that silicon electrodes lasted 10 times longer

silicon electrodes swell to three times their normal size and shrink back down again each time the battery charges and discharges.

Researchers in Cui s lab and elsewhere have tested a number of ways to keep silicon electrodes intact

and solar cell industry is the first solution that seems to offer a practical road forward Cui says.

#Crystal structure could push the limits of solar cells University of Pennsylvania right Original Studyposted by Evan Lerner-Pennsylvania on November 13 2013 A new model for solar cell construction may ultimately make them less expensive easier to manufacture

and more efficient at harvesting energy from the sun. For solar panels wringing every drop of energy from as many photons as possible is imperative.

As reported in the journal Nature existing solar cells all work in the same fundamental way:

or polarity solar cells need to be made of two materials. Once an excited electron crosses over the interface from the material that absorbs the light to the material that will conduct the current it can't cross back giving it a direction. here's a small category of materials

and of materials science and engineering at the University of Pennsylvania. e call this the bulk photovoltaic effect rather than the interface effect that happens in existing solar cells.

since the 1970s but we don't make solar cells this way because they have only been demonstrated with ultraviolet light

and infrared spectrum. â#Finding a material that exhibits the bulk photovoltaic effect for visible light would greatly simplify solar cell construction.

Moreover it would be a way around an inefficiency intrinsic to interfacial solar cells known as the Shockley-Queisser limit where some of the energy from photons is lost as electrons wait to make the jump from one material to the other. hink of photons coming from the sun

Moreover the ability to tune the final product's bandgap via the percentage of barium nickel niobate adds another potential advantage over interfacial solar cells. he parent's bandgap is in the UV rangesays Jonathan E. Spanier

which is another very useful trait. nother way to get around the inefficiency imposed by the Shockley-Queisser limit in interfacial solar cells is to effectively stack several solar cells with different bandgaps on top of

These multi-junction solar cells have a top layer with a high bandgap which catches the most valuable photons

and cost of the solar cell. he family of materials we've made with the bulk photovoltaic effect goes through the entire solar spectrumrappe says. o we could grow one material

but gently change the composition as we're growing resulting in a single material that performs like a multi-junction solar cell.?

and earth-abundant elements unlike compound semiconductor materials currently used in efficient thin-film solar cell technology. he research was supported by the Energy Commercialization Institute of Ben Franklin Technology Partners the Department of energy's Office of Basic Sciences

and tuned to capture microwave signals researchers have designed a power harvesting device with efficiency similar to that of modern solar panels.

It operates on a similar principle to solar panels which convert light energy into electrical current. But this versatile energy harvester could be tuned to harvest the signal from other energy sources including satellite signals sound signals

what is achieved in solar cells.?It s possible to use this design for a lot of different frequencies

In fact it should be possible to construct these power cells out of the excess silicon that exists in the current generation of solar cells sensors mobile phones

since it is very expensive and wasteful to produce thin silicon wafers. int s group is currently using this approach to develop energy storage that can be formed in the excess materials or on the unused backsides of solar cells and sensors.

#Ceramic converter tackles solar cell problem Stanford university rightoriginal Studyposted by Mark Shwartz-Stanford on October 21 2013coating a solar cell component in ceramics makes it more heat resistant

which can be absorbed by solar cells to make electricity a technology known as thermophotovoltaics. Unlike earlier prototypes that fell apart before temperatures reached 2200 degrees Fahrenheit (1200 degrees Celsius) the new thermal emitter remains stable at temperatures as high as 2500 F

A typical solar cell has a silicon semiconductor that absorbs sunlight directly and converts it into electrical energy.

while lower energy waves simply pass through the solar panel. n theory conventional single-junction solar cells can only achieve an efficiency level of about 34 percent

Instead of sending sunlight directly to the solar cell thermophotovoltaic systems have an intermediate component that consists of two parts:

which is beamed then to the solar cell. ssentially we tailor the light to shorter wavelengths that are ideal for driving a solar cellfan explains. hat raises the theoretical efficiency of the cell to 80 percent

and his colleagues at Stanford who confirmed that devices were still capable of producing infrared light waves that are ideal for running solar cells. hese results are unprecedentedsays former Illinois graduate student Kevin Arpin the lead author of the study. e demonstrated for the first time that ceramics

and determine if the experimental thermal emitters can deliver infrared light to a working solar cell. e ve demonstrated that the tailoring of optical properties at high temperatures is possiblebraun says. afnium

which may make it useful for protecting solar cells from the elements Lou says. ssentially this can be a very useful structural material coating

That is roughly the same efficiency at which the best commercially available solar cells convert sunlight into electricity.

Photovoltaic solar panels, by comparison, typically have an overall energy efficiency of around 15 percent. When used in the autoclaves in the tests,

Commercial applications in small electronic devices solar cells batteries and even medical devices are just around the corner.

The entire process is like a solar cell in reverse Kim says.##In a solar cell you use light to form excitons

and separate them into an electron and a hole electrically#she says.##We bring together an electron

APS has contracted to buy all of the 280 MW of solar energy from the Solana solar thermal plant 70 miles southwest of Phoenix. That could provide enough solar electricity for 70

when it comes to the residential solar panel industry. As clean energy options get cheaper starting with large utility solar farms,

The commercial version of the streetlight should feature two 100-watt polycrystalline solar panels, an array of Philips LEDS that put out either 3, 500 or 4,

This means that in principle this technology could turn out as an interesting, more versatile alternative than transparent solar cells, a technology

#Roll to roll manufactured decorative solar panels to be 10 times cheaper Based on printing technologies, VTT Technical Centre of Finland has developed

and utilized a mass production method allowing the manufacturing of decorative, organic solar panels. Freedom of design increases the range of panel applications on the surfaces of interior and exterior building spaces.

VTT is also studying the feasibility of printing technology in the mass production of solar panels made from inorganic perovskite materials.

The new mass production method enables to create interior design elements from organic solar panels (OPV, organic photovoltaics) harvesting energy from interior lighting or sunlight for various small devices and sensors that gather information from the environment.

The solar panel manufactured with VTT gravure and screen printing technologies is only around 0. 2 mm thick,

VTT is also currently examining how well the roll-to-roll printing methods are suited to the manufacturing of inorganic solar panels made from perovskite materials.

The first perovskite solar cells manufactured in the laboratory using solution-based processes have been promising. The performance of this solar cell is roughly five times better than that of an organic photovoltaic cell,

and the material costs can be even ten times lower. Freely designed decorative organic solar panels are applicable also in indoor use to harvest energy from indoor Light production methods are cost-effective

and materials can be recycled after the use. New materials such as perovskite can be printed with same methods and increase efficiency in future.

The research scientists have tested the feasibility of the method by printing leaf-shaped photovoltaic cells. Active surface of a one leaf is 0 0144 m2

Two hundred OPV leaves make one square metre of active solar panel surface that generates 3. 2 amperes of electricity with 10.4 watts of power at Mediterranean latitudes.

Organic solar panels are flexible and light, but their efficiency is lower compared to conventional, rigid silicon-based solar panels.

The solar panels are manufactured with printing machines based on conventional printing methods using the roll-to-roll method,

which enables the rapid mass production of the products: the printing machine can produce up to 100 metres of layered film per minute.

The market for organic photovoltaic cells is developing, with a market breakthrough expected within three years.

VTT is also developing a method to utilize light in wireless data transfer by using solar cells as data receivers.

This will open new application possibilities to utilize printable solar cells e g. in Iot (Internet of things) type applications, in

because it can be powered by a simple solar panel that generates five volts of energy, he said. t is a simple technology

and solar panels at the other, can pivot from straight overhead down to a 45-degree angle to chase the sun. directed by a CAD design from a connected laptop,

the electronics, cameras and a laptop all run on batteries charged by the solar panels PRINTING Kayser first designs the object he wants to print in a CAD program.

It is also thanks to advancements in solar technology which brought costs down, and innovative new forms of financing that make#going solar more affordable for consumers.#

#Companies like Vivint, Solarcity and Sunrun have raised all upwards of $500 million to finance residential solar projects around the country.

#Tesla batteries are powering an energy revolution Solarcity generator Tesla motors lithium-ion battery packs aren t just powering electric luxury sports sedans for wealthy any more.

They ve started#appearing in a small number of California homes to store electricity generated by rooftop solar panels,

and Solarcity, the Silicon valley solar installer, will start providing Tesla batteries for businesses that want to cut their utility bills.#

#A big box retailer like Walmart could charge up a Tesla battery pack with cheap energy produced by its Solarcity rooftop photovoltaic array

And the cost of the Solarcity s system, called Demandlogic? Effectively zero, according to Solarcity, since the monthly payments for energy storage would be less than the money saved by not forking over cash to the utility.

And if that sounds like a threat to century-old monopoly utilities, it is.####Our business model is to become the energy company of the 21st century,

##Solarcity chief executive Lyndon Rive told#The Atlantic.####You re still connected to the grid but the grid would be your secondary provider

such as those in California and parts of Massachusetts and Connecticut where Solarcity is offering Demandlogic.

And to get the Tesla battery pack you have to sign up for a solar array, which means only businesses with low-rise buildings and flat roof##retailers,

While Stem is a startup the utilities should be particularly wary of Solarcity and its partnership with Tesla motors.

Tesla chief executive Elon musk serves as Solarcity s chairman and is Rive s cousin.)Tesla and Solarcity s combined market cap##$21. 3 billion##exceeds that of the parent companies of Pacific gas & electric and Southern California Edison, the two big California utilities

whose customers Rive covets. And Solarcity is pioneering#the securitization of solar##giving it the ability to dip into a potentially vast pool of capital by packaging leases for photovoltaic systems into asset-backed notes that are sold to pension funds,

hedge funds and other deep-pocketed investors. Rive says Demandlogic should save commercial customers 20 percent in demand charges.

but would be able to store roughly 30 percent of the electricity generated by the solar array.

and Rive and Solarcity spokesman Jonathan Bass was sketchy on the details on how the economics pencil out

But growing economies of scale are in Solarcity and Tesla s favor.####In places with high costs of electricity,

It would##enable construction of large support structures for systems such as multi-hundred-kilowatt solar arrays, large solar sails,

But a just-completed design analysis for a 300-kilowatt orbital solar array verified that Spiderfab can provide the projected tenfold decrease in stowed volume

Terrestrial solar arrays have achieved grid parity Davis said, but without storage they cannot provide the baseload power utilities need.

Meanwhile, in Arizona yesterday, the state s utility regulator turned back a request by Arizona Public service (APS) to#impose steep new fees on homeowners who install solar panels#on their roofs.

In Arizona, for instance, there were 900 solar arrays installed on Arizona residential rooftops in January 2009. By June of this year, that number had grown to 18,000 with 500 more photovoltaic systems being installed each month.

homeowners receive a credit for the solar electricity they send to the grid that is used to pay for the power they use

half the planet s population may be served best with pay-as-you-go solar technology, not grid services.

Selling cheap basic services like solar electricity into this market through#micropayment schemes#is what makes pay-as-you-go solar not only economically viable,

powered by solar technology. The defense contractor is hoping to sell its spy rocks for surveillance, border protection

and is designed to work with PV solar panels and batteries, to continually generate water even in emergency situations.

Recently, more and more studies have focused on pairing solar panels and wind turbines with greenhouses to provide self-generated renewable electricity on-site.

What most people don realize is that solar panels in space are 10 times more efficient than those on earth

most will imagine a space-based solar array powering our energy hungry businesses on earth, but that only part of the equation.

The two mirrors will be untethered from the solar panels and the separate transmission unit, requiring a far more advanced navigating system to keep them properly aligned.

Current solar technologies on the market today are too expensive and slow to produce, require Rare earth minerals and lack the efficiency to make such massive installations practical.

Solar s influence Titan Aerospace caught Google s attention thanks to its innovative dragonfly-shaped drones that are powered by its wing-mounted solar panels

whether the solar technology is advanced currently enough to deliver the kind of long-range reliability that Google will require.

Tesla and solar financier and installer Solarcity (Musk other energy company) have been quietly selling small volumes of Tesla batteries as energy storage paired with Solarcity solar projects.

Pairing battery farms with wind and solar panel farms would enable clean power to store energy

(or solar panels) are less. That said I loved it the first time I saw one at the Vancouver World's Fair around 1987.

is guided to the edge of a clear plastic panel where it is converted then to electricity using thin strips of photovoltaic solar cells.

"Those applications could include better solar cells,"smart"coatings, new kinds of computers and all kinds of other devices or components.

because solar panels can return power to the grid and make your meter spin backwards. Japanese companies are fascinated with net-zero energy buildings,

A 9. 5-kilowatt solar array, backed up by a 10-kilowatt-hour lithium battery and a 10-kilowatt DC car charger.

essentially creating"living materials"that can be integrated into everyday objects and devices, from solar panels to adjustable furniture,

Improved batteries and solar cells could be produced, and biofilms with enzymes that catalyze the breakdown of cellulose could be used for the conversion of agricultural waste into biofuels.

His team is also looking at using the graphene electrodes in photovoltaic cells. Easing the pain

#Novel solar photovoltaic cells achieve record efficiency using nanoscale structures Here's how to make a powerful solar cell from indium and phosphorus:

Exposed to the sun, a solar cell employing such nanowires can turn nearly 14 percent of the incoming light into electricity#a new record that opens up more possibilities for cheap and effective solar power.

#and validated at Germany's Fraunhofer Institute for Solar energy systems#this novel nanowire configuration delivered nearly as much electricity as more traditional indium phosphide thin-film solar cells

That suggests such nanowire solar cells could prove cheaper #and more powerful#if the process could be industrialized,

At the same time the novel cells could be built into so-called multijunction solar cells#compound devices that incorporate several different types of semiconductor material in layers like a sandwich to absorb as much of the energy in sunlight as possible.

Such multijunction solar cells are also the most expensive type of photovoltaic, but they can be made cheaper by combining them with low-cost lenses to concentrate the sunlight onto smaller versions of the cells.

Borgstr#m, for one, suspects that nanowire solar cells will stand on their own once the production process can be simplified,

such as ultra-efficient light-emitting diodes (LEDS) and solar cells, but the technology has found mainly niche applications.

Quantum dots have shown promise for electronics, too#for example in solar cells in which a mix of quantum dots tuned to absorb different wavelengths of light could capture more of the energy in the solar spectrum.

giving materials scientists a new tool for investigating the behaviour of light in the interiors of the complex nanostructures used in lasers, light-based circuits and solar cells."

The team has mapped also the distribution of light in the silicon nanodiscs that are used as a coating on solar cells to improve efficiency,

Lukas Novotny, an optical physicist at The swiss Federal Institute of technology in Zurich, says that cathodoluminescence could be a useful tool for improving the performance of light-emitting devices and solar cells,

but proponents of a hydrogen economy say that it could be produced in vast quantities from water using excess electricity from wind turbines and solar plants.

batteries will be key to energy transport and to small-scale storage of electricity from solar panels. Long-term, large-scale storage of wind energy could best be achieved by simply storing compressed hydrogen underground.

Of course much work remains to realize a practical solar cell however the work here is one of the most important steps in that process.

#Recycling old batteries into solar cells This could be a classic win-win solution: A system proposed by researchers at MIT recycles materials from discarded car batteries a potential source of lead pollution into new,

long-lasting solar panels that provide emissions-free power. The system is described in a paper in the journal Energy and Environmental science,

It is based on a recent development in solar cells that makes use of a compound called perovskite specifically,

organolead halide perovskite a technology that has progressed rapidly from initial experiments to a point where its efficiency is nearly competitive with that of other types of solar cells. t went from initial demonstrations to good efficiency in less than two years,

Already, perovskite-based photovoltaic cells have achieved power-conversion efficiency of more than 19 percent, which is close to that of many commercial silicon-based solar cells.

Initial descriptions of the perovskite technology identified its use of lead, whose production from raw ores can produce toxic residues,

the team analysis shows that the lead from a single car battery could produce enough solar panels to provide power for 30 households.

As an added advantage, the production of perovskite solar cells is a relatively simple and benign process. t has the advantage of being a low-temperature process,

and the number of steps is reducedcompared with the manufacture of conventional solar cells, Belcher says.

In a finished solar panel, the lead-containing layer would be encapsulated fully by other materials, as many solar panels are today,

limiting the risk of lead contamination of the environment. When the panels are retired eventually, the lead can simply be recycled into new solar panels. he process to encapsulate them will be the same as for polymer cells today,

Chen says. hat technology can be translated easily. t is important that we consider the life cycles of the materials in large-scale energy systems,

Old lead is as good as new Belcher believes that the recycled perovskite solar cells will be embraced by other photovoltaics researchers,

just as good for the production of perovskite solar cells as freshly produced metal. Some companies are already gearing up for commercial production of perovskite photovoltaic panels,

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