Lifeboat Foundation

In a quest to cut the cost of clean electricity, power utilities around the world are supersizing their solar farms.

Nowhere is that more apparent than in southern Egypt, where what will be the world’s largest solar farm — a vast collection of more than 5 million photovoltaic panels — is now taking shape. When it’s completed next year, the $4 billion Benban solar park near Aswan will cover an area 10 times bigger than New York’s Central Park and generate up to 1.8 gigawatts of electricity.

Continue reading “Supersized solar farms are sprouting around the world (and maybe in space, too)” »

The innovative 800-kilowatt wind turbine is an effort to protect the environment and attract tourism.

TILOS, Greece (AP) — When the blades of its 800-kilowatt wind turbine start turning, the small Greek island of Tilos will become the first in the Mediterranean to run exclusively on wind and solar power.

The sea horse-shaped Greek island between Rhodes and Kos has a winter population of 400. But that swells to as many as 3,000 people in the summer, putting an impossible strain on its dilapidated power supply.

This summer, technicians are conducting the final tests on a renewable replacement system that will be fully rolled out later this year. It will allow Tilos to run exclusively on high-tech batteries recharged by a wind turbine and a solar park.

Continue reading “Renewable resort: Greek island to run on wind, solar power” »

Realizing industrial-scale, large-area photovoltaic modules without any considerable performance losses compared with the performance of laboratory-scale, small-area perovskite solar cells (PSCs) has been a challenge for practical applications of PSCs. Highly sophisticated patterning processes for achieving series connections, typically fabricated using printing or laser-scribing techniques, cause unexpected efficiency drops and require complicated manufacturing processes. We successfully fabricated high-efficiency, large-area PSC modules using a new electrochemical patterning process. The intrinsic ion-conducting features of perovskites enabled us to create metal-filamentary nanoelectrodes to facilitate the monolithic serial interconnections of PSC modules. By fabricating planar-type PSC modules through low-temperature annealing and all-solution processing, we demonstrated a notably high module efficiency of 14.0% for a total area of 9.06 cm with a high geometric fill factor of 94.1%.

The unprecedented features of organic-inorganic hybrid perovskite semiconductors, which allow low-temperature crystal film growth from their precursor solutions, have greatly promoted both scientific and technological revolutions in a wide range of fields within electronics (1, 2). The advent of organolead trihalide perovskite semiconductors as light harvesters has resulted in the fastest-advancing solar technology to date, with an extremely rapid rise in power conversion efficiency (PCE) from 3.8 to 22.1% over just a few years (3–6). In addition to recent remarkable breakthroughs in addressing the instability of these devices, which has been considered the greatest challenge toward commercialization due to their intrinsic properties vulnerable to oxygen and moisture, pioneering researchers have begun fabricating large-area devices for their ultimate application (7–16).

The German engineering company Geltz Umwelt-Technologie has successfully developed an advanced recycling plant for obsolete or ageing solar panels.

As sales of solar power increase, there is a looming problem that is quite often overlooked: disposing waste from outdated or destroyed solar panels. A surge in solar panel disposal is expected to take place in the early 2030s, given the design life of solar energy systems installed around the millennium.

To address this problem before this big disposal wave, the EU has funded the ELSi project. With strong competencies in plant manufacturing and wastewater treatment including recycling, the Geltz Umwelt-Technologie firm has built a test and treatment facility at a large disposal firm to retrieve reusable materials from solar modules.

Continue reading “State-of-the-art solar panel recycling plant” »

By allowing them to launch higher-power small satellites on smaller rockets, as opposed to the larger, and more expensive rockets that current technology requires.

Made in Space is developing power systems for small satellites that can provide up to 5 kW of solar power and is enabled by the company’s Archinaut on-orbit manufacturing and assembly technology. Current small satellites are typically constrained to 1 kW of power or less.

Made in Space CEO Andrew Rush pictured next to a subscale version of a solar array that the company can produce in space. The golden Mylar pieces are physical mockups of what would be solar blankets. This solar array is over 3 m tall. (Made in Space)

Continue reading “Made in Space believes its on-orbit manufactured power supply can save militaries money” »

Wind and solar farms are glutting networks more frequently, prompting a market signal for coal plants to shut off.

The Egyptian government wants to get 42 percent of its energy sector powered by renewables by 2025, leaving a healthy 5-year window for their 2030 sustainability goals with the United Nations.

In the Western Desert, 400 miles south of Cairo, a solar energy company named KarmSolar is helping them do it. Founded by five friends in a cafe, the company is building what will become a hub of 30 individual power plants with a collective capacity of 1.8 gigawatts of electricity. Located near the Benban village near the Nile, KarmSolar’s complex already employs 4,000 people at the first of 30 facilities, which came online this past November. Once it’s completed, according to the Los Angeles Times, the Benban Solar Park will be the largest solar plant in the world.

Small satellites will soon pack an outsize power punch, if one company’s plans come to fruition.

One of the first big jobs for the Archinaut in-space assembly robot being developed by California startup Made In Space may involve outfitting small satellites with large solar-power systems in Earth orbit.

Such work could boost the power potential of spacecraft in the 330-lb. to 660-lb. (150 to 300 kilograms) range by a factor of five or more, allowing them to take on duties previously limited to larger satellites, company representatives said. [Satellite Quiz: How Well Do You Know What’s Orbiting Earth?].

Continue reading “Made In Space’s ‘Archinaut’ Could Build Big Power Systems for Small Satellites” »

The energy-generating potential of solar panels – and a key limitation on their use – is a result of what they’re made of. Panels made of silicon are declining in price such that in some locations they can provide electricity that costs about the same as power from fossil fuels like coal and natural gas. But silicon solar panels are also bulky, rigid and brittle, so they can’t be used just anywhere.

In many parts of the world that don’t have regular electricity, solar panels could provide reading light after dark and energy to pump drinking water, help power small household or village-based businesses or even serve emergency shelters and refugee encampments. But the mechanical fragility, heaviness and transportation difficulties of silicon solar panels suggest that silicon may not be ideal.

Building on others’ work, my research group is working to develop flexible solar panels, which would be as efficient as a silicon panel, but would be thin, lightweight and bendable. This sort of device, which we call a “solar tarp,” could be spread out to the size of a room and generate electricity from the sun, and it could be balled up to be the size of a grapefruit and stuffed in a backpack as many as 1,000 times without breaking. While there has been some effort to make organic solar cells more flexible simply by making them ultra-thin, real durability requires a molecular structure that makes the solar panels stretchable and tough.