Solar Installation Countrywise

The worldwide solar installations continues to grow at a rapid rate and it seems to double itself in this year. And it has now broken 12GW mark. The figures as at April 2013 are shown below

This clearly shows worldwide awareness and going towards sustainable development.

Graphene paint could harness Solar Power

Graphene is the new wonder material of the future. It can mop up oil spills, be used as lubricant and now, it could be used to power our homes. Researchers have discovered that by combining graphene with other one-atom thick materials, they can create the next generation of solar cells and optoelectronic devices.

Graphene is the world's thinnest, strongest and most conductive material. Not surprisingly, it holds enormous potential to revolutionize a huge number of diverse applications--everything from smartphones to drug delivery and computer chips. In addition, the isolation of graphene has also led to the discovery of a whole new family of one-atom thick materials.

These materials, collectively known as 2D crystals, demonstrate a vast range of superlative properties. When combined in layers, these materials can add new functions to the material with each new addition. Called heterostructures, these layered materials are ideal for creating new devices that can perform a variety of things at once. That's why researchers decided to utilize these heterostructures in particular to design their latest creation.

The researchers combined graphene with monolayers of transition and metal dichalcogenides (TMDC), which allowed them to create very sensitive and efficient photovoltaic devices. These devices could potentially be used as ultrasensitive photodetectors or very efficient solar cells.
"Such photoactive heterostructures add yet new possibilities, and pave the road for new types of experiments," said Kostya Novoselov, one of the researchers, in a news release. "As we create more and more complex heterostructures, so the functionalities of the devices will become richer, entering the realm of multifunctional devices."

Although the applications are exciting, the more interesting point is how this new material could affect the future of sustainable energy. The multi-layered heterostructures could, in theory, be "painted" onto an outside wall and power entire buildings as they absorb the sun's rays. In addition, the material could be used at will to change the transparency and reflectivity of fixtures and windows, which could lead to a whole new era of controlling environmental factors within an office or house.

Don't get excited just yet, though. It will take quite some time before this material could be scaled up to accomplish such feats. In the meantime, we'll have to subsist on standard solar panels in order to harness the sun's energy.

The details of this new material are published in the journal Science.

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Clean and Renewable Energy investments by Google

The past few years has seen Google embark on an ambitous program of investment in the renewables space, the most recent announcement seeing Google investing $200 million in a Texas wind farm. 
So where else has Google been putting its money?

Spinning Spur Wind Farm: West Texas wind

In December 2012, Google invested approximately $200 million in a 161 MW wind farm in Oldham County, Texas. The project, which uses 70 Siemens 2.3 MW turbines, has been contracted to SPS, a utility that primarily serves Texas and New Mexico. EDF Renewable Energy built the project and will remain the manager and an owner alongside Google.

Rippey Wind Farm: wind power in Iowa

Google invested $75 million in a 50 MW wind farm in Rippey, a small town in Greene County, Iowa. The wind farm, developed by RPM Access, uses turbines produced by Nordex USA at its Jonesboro, Arkansas facility. The energy produced by the wind farm has been contracted to the Central Iowa Power Cooperative, an Iowa-based utility that will deliver the energy to local consumers.

Recurrent Energy: Large-scale solar PV projects in California

A $94 million investment was made in a portfolio of four solar photovoltaic (PV) projects being built by Recurrent Energy near Sacramento, California. These projects have a total capacity of 88 MW— and the energy produced is already contracted for 20 years with the Sacramento Municipal Utility District (SMUD), the first projects to be built under their feed-in tariff program (FIT) to help green the grid for Sacramento-area residents.

Clean Power Finance: Financing for rooftop solar

Google invested $75 million to create a fund with Clean Power Finance (CPF) that will help up to 3,000 homeowners go solar. Purchasing a solar system is a major home improvement, but the upfront cost has historically been one of the biggest barriers for homeowners. Clean Power Finance's open platform connects installers with investors to provide financing to homeowners. It's an innovative and scalable model that makes business sense, and has the potential to lower costs and accelerate adoption of solar energy.

SolarCity: Solar for US residential rooftops

In what Google says is the largest deal of its kind to date, it invested $280 million in a SolarCity fund to help provide innovative financing for residential solar projects. SolarCity is a full service solar systems provider offering the option for consumers to go solar through a solar lease or power purchase agreements. SolarCity works with a customer to design a solar system for their home. Investors like Google purchase the system up front and, in return, receive a portion of lease payments from the homeowner along with Solar City. This kind of innovative financing removes a major adoption barrier for homeowners—the upfront cash required for systems—and makes solar power accessible to homeowners who would otherwise not consider it. SolarCity has completed or is currently building out more than 15,000 residential solar systems, the most of any company in the US.

BrightSource: Concentrated solar power at scale

In 2008, Google invested $10 million in startup company BrightSource Energy via Google.org. It subsequently invested another $168 million into their first utility-scale solar project - Ivanpah - in California’s Mojave Desert. BrightSource specializes in “power towers"— solar thermal technology that uses heliostats, or sun-tracking mirrors, to focus solar energy onto a tower-mounted receiver. The receiver produces high pressure steam which, in turn, spins a traditional turbine generator to make electricity. Ivanpah will produce 377 MW (net) of solar power once it is up and running in 2013, and is expected to supply Pacific Gas and Electric and Southern California Edison with energy equivalent to that used in 140,000 homes in Central and Southern California. This will be the first large scale power tower project operating efficiently at high temperatures and pressures, demonstrating a critical step for the technology on a path to reliable, low cost, clean power.

Atlantic Wind Connection: A superhighway for clean energy transmission

Google has invested a 37.5 percent equity stake in the critical early-stage development of the Atlantic Wind Connection (AWC) backbone, a project to build a superhighway transmission infrastructure off the Mid-Atlantic coast. Once completed, the AWC backbone will stretch 250 miles along the coast from New Jersey to Virginia, enabling the connection of up to 7,000 MW of offshore wind power. The project helps states meet their renewable energy goals and standards using the most abundant local resource. The Mid-Atlantic region has a vast offshore wind resource capable of powering more than 60,000 MW of wind turbines in shallow waters that allow wind turbines to be installed 10-15 miles offshore.

Alta Wind Energy Center: Harnessing the winds of the Mojave

The wind resource is most impressive where the Mojave sands meet the Tehachapi Mountains in Southern California, making it a great spot for wind development. Google has invested a total of $157 million in two projects totalling 270 MW at the Alta Wind Energy Center (AWEC). This investment used a leveraged lease—a financial structure new to wind but one which provides advantages to both developers and investors. The project will also use some of the first transmission lines being developed specifically to transport renewable energy from remote, resource-rich areas to major population centers. The power will be delivered to Southern California Edison under long-term agreements with the first five Alta projects, totaling 720 MW, already operational. AWEC will reportedly boost California’s wind energy production by 30% and help the state meet its ambitious renewable energy mandate of 33% clean power generation by 2020.

Shepherd’s Flat: One of the world’s largest wind farms

Located in Arlington, Oregon, Shepherd’s Flat is anticipated to be one of the world’s largest wind farm at 845 MW. Google has invested $100 million in the farm, which will also reportedly be the largest to deploy, at scale, permanent magnet generators, a state-of-the-art turbine technology used to increase efficiency and reliability and ultimately lower the cost of wind energy. The project will also benefit the region by helping California meet its aggressive renewable energy goals. The electricity produced at Shepherds Flat will be sold under long-term agreements to Southern California Edison.

Peace Garden wind farms: More financing for wind

Google’s first investment in a utility-scale renewable energy project was $38.8 million in two wind farms in North Dakota that generate 169.5 MW of power. The projects were built by NextEra Energy Resources, which uses advanced wind turbine technology and monitoring and control systems to provide one of the lowest-cost sources of renewable energy in existence today.

Photovoltaics in Germany

In 2011, Google made its first international investment of €3.5 million (approximately $5 million for a 49 percent equity stake in the project) in a recently completed solar facility in Brandenburg, Germany. The plant, one of the largest in Germany, has peak capacity of 18.65 MW and will generate as much energy as that used in more than 5,000 homes. Germany has a strong framework for renewable energy and is home to many leading-edge technology companies in the sector. More than 70 percent of the solar modules used in the project were produced by German manufacturers.

Google has been playing its part in reducing global warming by these examples. we hope to see more such investments in cleaner energies by other tech giants.

visit Google Green investments

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A breakthrough dye-sensitized solar cell enhances power efficiency

Hi All,
This is very interesting article I came across some time back, wanted to share its aspects with you all

Solar power is known as an exemplary way to generate sustainable power. Solar researchers across the world are working tireless to boost the efficiency of solar cells of various genres. Of late, a team of researchers at the Northwestern University has advanced up with an innovative breakthrough in solar cell efficiency. The researchers have shaped up a reliable dye-sensitized solar panel that is cheaper and can ensure better power efficiency than the regular cells.

The inventive solar technology is really a variant of the Grätzel cell, a kind of dye-sensitized solar cell, which makes use of semiconductor titanium oxide in place of the conventional silicon material. The outcome is that the solar cell, which is named after the Swiss chemist Michel Grätzel, delivers better power efficiency and is inexpensive, less toxic and certainly environmental in several aspects, the researchers claim.

In fact, the breakthrough the researchers have achieved is their successful attempt to solve a persisting problem with the Grätzel design. Since it makes use of an organic liquid as its electrolyte, there is a chance that it may leak in various conditions. The leaked liquid is threatening because it will corrode the entire cell. Well, it is here the Northwestern University researchers have proved their credential well. They developed a fresh material called the CsSnI3 that can solidify the liquid and prevent seepage under any condition.

The CsSnI3 is a very slim film compound, which merges cesium, iodine and tin. It is basically added in liquid form to dye-coat nano particles, but it turns to a solid mass so that there won’t be any leakage issue. Well, as per the lead researcher, Robert P.H Chang, it is the first demo of a solid-state dye-sensitized solar cell that can definitely ensure better efficiency than the current solar technologies.

Andhra Pradesh proposes tariff of 6.49 INR/KWh

Andhra Pradesh government on Tuesday fixed the benchmark price for purchase of solar power at Rs 6.49 per unit. The Cabinet Sub-Committee on Power fixed the benchmark price at its meeting on Tuesday. The State through AP Transco as the nodal agency had invited bids from private developers to set up solar PV units aiming to develop about 1000 MW in view of the unprecedented electricity crisis.

In the process, about 331 bids for development of 1,780 MW were received.

Developers will be given 30 days to respond to the proposal. 

The tariff offered by Andhra Pradesh is lower than what developers will eventually get in Tamil Nadu

So it is to be seen how developers will take to such a tariff offer in Andhra Pradesh. 

If one were to compare the rates offered by Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu, the Scenario completely changes. 

Tamil Nadu had offered Rs 6.48 a unit with escalation facility of 5 per cent over 10 years. This leads to a levelised tariff of Rs 7.75 a unit.

As per the new solar power policy announced by the state government, net metering facility will be implemented for consumers who set up solar PV plants on roof-tops, waste lands, industries, offices, institutions and residential complexes. Subsidy will be provided by the Union Government up to 30 per cent of the panel cost up to a capacity of 500 KW without battery support

So now we have to wait and see how the developers respond to this...

please let know your suggeestions and feedback 

New breed of recyclable solar cells made from plants

A remarkable and eco-friendly way to harness solar energy is found by researchers from Center for Organic Photonics and Electronics at Georgia Tech and Purdue


Solar cells provide us with the most eco-friendly way to harnessing energy and creating electricity with emissions. However, the creation of solar cells themselves is pretty un-eco-friendly which sort of defeats the purpose they serve to an extent. However, researchers currently working at the Center for Organic Photonics and Electronics at Georgia Tech and Purdue claim that they have created the solar cells using nothing more than the materials we find in trees. Using a renewable resource to create green technology, the researchers have created a new kind of organic solar cells that are disposable at the end of their lifecycle and are less dependence on fossil fuels for its production and recycling.

Using the same basic organic substrates that plants use for the chemical process that facilitates photosynthesis, the new organic solar cells convert around 2.7% of the solar energy they get into electricity. The number is pretty impressive when you consider that organic materials and not chemicals were used to create this amazing conversion.


An easily biodegradable structure called cellulose nanocrystal is used to mount these organic substrates which allows the solar cells to be recycled using nothing more than warm water when their useful life is over. The joint research team has thus created a more eco-friendly way to create and recycle technology that is used to provide green energy. The team is now working at trying to get these organic substrates to convert solar energy more efficiently and possibly even make double-digit conversion efficiency soon.

Of course, the water soluble solar cells would need to be protected against rain and storms though that could easily be facilitated via glass or transparent waterproof encasing.

The team hopes to get the solar cells into production within the next five years.

I wish the team all the best from our blog

please send you feedback about this article..

India's Grid Connected Renewable energy installations

The statistics show a very fair growth in India's Renewable energy sector
According to Ministry of Power, as on January 2013 the total Renewable energy capacity of India is about 25,856.14MW (excluding hydro power projects) which accounts to a precise of 12.2% of the total energy produced in India


Solar Power:

With about 300 clear, sunny days in a year, India's theoretical solar power reception, on only its land area, is about 5000 Petawatt-hours per year (PWh/yr) (i.e. 5000 trillion kWh/yr or about 600 TW)The daily average solar energy incident over India varies from 4 to 7 kWh/m² with about 1500–2000 sunshine hours per year (depending upon location), which is far more than current total energy consumption. The total installations by end of 2012 is 1200MW. India targets to increase its solar power capacity to about 10GW by 2017.


Wind Power:
 

The development of wind power in India began in the 1990s, and has significantly increased in the last few years. As of January 2013 the installed capacity of wind power in India was 18634.9MW









Hydro power:

  
India is endowed with economically exploitable and viable hydro potential assessed to be about 84,000 MW at 60% load factor. The current installed capacity of Hydro power counts to 39,416.40MW with 18.61% of the total energy production of India

Geothermal Power:

 

Though India has been one of the earliest countries to begin geothermal projects way back in the 1970s, but at present there are no operational geothermal plants in India.Geothermal power is cost effective, reliable, sustainable, and environmentally friendly, but has historically been limited to areas near tectonic plate boundaries. the potential geothermal provinces can produce 10,600 MW of power

It has been estimated from geological, geochemical, shallow geophysical and shallow drilling data it is estimated that India has about 10,000 MW of geothermal power potential that can be harnessed for various purposes.
Different orogenic regions are – Himalayan geothermal province, Naga-Lushai geothermal province, Andaman-Nicobar Islands geothermal province and non-orogenic regions are – Cambay graben, Son-Narmada-Tapi graben, west coast, Damodar valley, Mahanadi valley, Godavari valley etc



The MNRE said that grid-balancing problems have limited India's deployment of grid-connected solar and wind power plants, and the country is in talks with Germany, which has state-of-the-art technology in this field, to obtain the know-how.

Please give your comments and share more information for the readers.
Thanks

Solar energy at night

Greetings to all my friends out there looking out for storing solar energy

This was one of the articles that I came across
Hope you all will like it..

The molten salts stored in the two tanks pictured here amidst the rows of troughs at the Andasol 1 power plant in Spain will allow solar energy to produce electricity even at night.

Near Granada, Spain, more than 28,000 metric tons of salt is now coursing through pipes at the Andasol 1 power plant. That salt will be used to solve a pressing if obvious problem for solar power: What do you do when the sun is not shining and at night?

The answer: store sunlight as heat energy for such a rainy day.

Part of a so-called parabolic trough solar-thermal power plant, the salts will soon help the facility light up the night—literally. Because most salts only melt at high temperatures (table salt, for example, melts at around 1472 degrees Fahrenheit, or 800 degrees Celsius) and do not turn to vapor until they get considerably hotter—they can be used to store a lot of the sun's energy as heat. Simply use the sunlight to heat up the salts and put those molten salts in proximity to water via a heat exchanger. Hot steam can then be made to turn turbines without losing too much of the original absorbed solar energy.

The salts—a mixture of sodium and potassium nitrate, otherwise used as fertilizers—allow enough of the sun's heat to be stored that the power plant can pump out electricity for nearly eight hours after the sun starts to set. "It's enough for 7.5 hours to produce energy with full capacity of 50 megawatts," says Sven Moormann, a spokesman for Solar Millennium, AG, the German solar company that developed the Andasol plant. "The hours of production are nearly double [those of a solar-thermal] power plant without storage and we have the possibility to plan our electricity production."

Using mirrors to concentrate the sun's energy is an old trick—the ancient Chinese and Greeks both used it to start fires—and modern power plants employing it might provide a significant source of renewable energy without any greenhouse gas emissions.

That is a step forward in its own right, but such power plants are limited to generating energy only when there is sunshine. So engineers have tried a number of different technologies to store the sun's energy so that such power plants can be more broadly employed. They have tried batteries but too much of the energy that goes in is not returned, and they tend to be too expensive, according to an analysis from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) in Golden, Colo. Compressing air or pumping water uphill are more promising, but the opportunities to do that are limited by the number of caverns and the availability of water and reservoirs.

Melting salts at temperatures above 435 degrees Fahrenheit (224 degrees Celsius), however, can deliver back as much as 93 percent of the energy, plus the salts are ubiquitous because of their application as fertilizers.

"There's a term called round-trip efficiency. Basically, it's a measure of how much electricity is produced if the thermal energy that's generated is first stored and then used compared to just directly taking the energy. That number is around 93 percent," explains NREL senior engineer. "[For] things like compressed air and mechanical type storage, there's more significant losses," an average of at least 20 percent over all the various technologies.

The Andasol 1 power plant, which cost around $380 million (300 million euros) to build, is the first to actually use the technology, so it remains to be seen how it will work in commercial practice. But U.S. government laboratories—NREL as well as Sandia National Laboratory in Albuquerque, N.M.—have already proved the technology can work in demonstration projects that employed it, like the Solar Two power tower outside Barstow, Calif.

Solar Millennium is so confident the technology will work that a twin solar-thermal power plant (Andasol 2) is already completed. It started operations at the beginning of summer— June 2009

And Arizona Public Service Co. (APS) has contracted with Abengoa Solar to build a 280-megawatt solar thermal power plant—dubbed Solana or "sunny place"—70 miles (110 kilometers) southwest of Phoenix on nearly 2,000 acres (800 hectares) of land. "One of the great things about molten salt technology is that you can get more out of the pure solar resources, more energy out of the same facility," says Barbara Lockwood, manager for renewable energy at APS. "It's an alternative that provides us with additional green energy," as much as 1,680 megawatt-hours when cloudy or after sunset.

But that extra energy comes at a cost. First, the power plant has to be enlarged so that it is both generating its full electrical capacity as well as heating up the salts. In the case of Andasol 1 that meant covering 126 acres (50 hectares) with long rows of troughs and pipe. And then there is the additional expense of the molten salt storage tanks, according to Moormann.

All told, that means thermal energy storage at Andasol 1 or power plants like it costs roughly $50 per kilowatt-hour to install, according to NREL's Glatzmaier. But it doesn't add much to the cost of the resulting electricity because it allows the turbines to be generating for longer periods and those costs can be spread out over more hours of electricity production. Electricity from a solar-thermal power plant costs roughly 13 cents a kilowatt-hour, according to Glatzmaier, both with and without molten salt storage systems.

That price is still nearly twice as much as electricity from a coal-fired power plant—the current cheapest generation option if environmental costs are not taken into account. But Arizona's APS and others can then use solar energy to meet the maximum electricity demand later in the day. "Our peak demand [for electricity] is later in the evening, once solar production is trailing off," Lockwood says. That's "the reason we went that direction and are so interested in storage technology."

As efficient as solar-thermal power plants using parabolic troughs with molten salt storage systems like Andasol 1 or Solana are, they don’t capture as much of the sun's heat as is possible. Above 750 degrees F (400 degrees C), the synthetic oils used to capture the sun’s heat in the troughs begin to break down, but the molten salts can take in much more heat than that.

To allow the salts to get hotter, some companies, such as SolarReserve in Santa Monica, Calif., are developing so-called power towers—vast fields of mirrors that concentrate sunlight onto a central tower. Because of the centralized design such a structure can operate at much higher temperatures—up to 1,000 degrees F (535 degrees C)—and use molten salts directly as the fluid transferring heat in the power plant. "We are heating the salts to more than 1,000 degrees F and that results in the same inlet conditions that utilities see today on a coal-fired or nuclear power plant," as said by SolarReserve's president.

But such a power plant—and Murphy says the company has some 50 such projects in the pipeline and expects at least one (in the U.S. or Spain) to be operating by 2013—would cost as much as $800 million for a 200-megawatt power tower. "The first molten salt power tower built is going to be a real trial," says Thomas Mancini, manager of Sandia's Concentrating Solar Power Program. "It's going to take someone progressive enough to finance it or take a little more risk."

So researchers are also looking into salts that could be used instead of the oil in parabolic trough power plants, such as those that melt at lower temperatures and therefore would not freeze as readily during cold nights.

Solar Millennium is working on such a salt, according to Moormann, and Sandia has developed small quantities of a new mixture of salts, including calcium nitrate and lithium nitrate, that melt below 212 degrees F (100 degrees C). "With the lithium nitrate, it's as expensive as all the other constituents combined. Though still a lot cheaper than organic heat-transfer oils," says chemical engineer Bob Bradshaw at Sandia in California, who is leading the research. "You don't get something for nothing."

And long-term research projects are looking at other thermal storage technologies, such as storing heat in sand or creating single-tank molten salt storage. "The main goal is to find a storage technology that may reduce the actual capital cost" of adding it to a power plant, says Phil Smithers, technical services leader for renewable energy at APS, which is researching those technologies under a U.S. Department of Energy grant.

Ultimately, it will come down to how much value policymakers and consumers put on electricity that is renewable and emissions-free. "If we start valuing carbon and force a coal plant to go carbon-free via sequestration then we're at or over 10 cents per kilowatt-hour from coal," Mancini says. "Any of these technologies can get to that same 10 cents level with [molten salt] storage. Then the market will make the call."

And should Andasol 1 spring a leak or otherwise fail to deliver as expected, the damage would not be confined to a pile of salt fertilizer on the ground—it could be a setback for the entire effort to store solar energy. "We had to build the first [commercial] plant [with molten salt storage] and that's what Andasol is," Mancini says, in order to prove the technology. "It doesn't have to be perfect, but they've got to make it work."

 It is also estimate that Andasol 1 will generate 178 000 MWh of renewable electricity per year, whereas the same field of solar collectors and turbine would turn out just 117 000 MWh sans storage.

Solar & Wind: Energy for gen-next...!!!!

 



India is world's 6th largest energy user, comprising about 3.3% of overall global energy expenditure per year. This energy consumption is bound to grow in the years to come.

Solar and Wind Energies have been remarkable sources of power generation. After my visit to one of the wind farms made me believe that the energy of - and for gen-next are SOLAR and WIND. It has given me a new perspective of energy generation in Indian climatic conditions.

The wind being one of the prominent renewables has been in India for quite some time and also has made its mark in the market. Everyone knows the big names into the sector.
Solar has seen drastic and a dramatic growth in last 2years after the JNNSM was launched and state policies introduced.

Power generation in India using renewable sources is surely going to be next big market. All the large power producing companies globally, foreign banks and venture capitalists are taking keen interest in these fields and specially in Indian and Asian market.

As proverb says "All that shines is not gold, but for us all that shines is SUN"

Please feel free to give your comments/feedback.