Breaking News - 2006-2009
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November 7, 2009. Driving a Citroen Saxo électrique. Fun! Today a couple of folks, including myself, were entertained in the south of the province of Limburg by Edwin Steenbakkers who owns several electrically powered cars. The solar photovoltaic panels on the roof of his house help charging the batteries of these cars. A perfect combination: zero pollutrion, zero emission, zero noise and zero motor tax (which is considerable in Holland). Edwin uses his car to commute daily to his job. This car is a normal production car in which the petrol engine has been replaced in the factory by an electric motor. Equipped with Ni-CD batteries the range between charges is 50 kilometers. Driving this car was quite normal, like driving a car with an automatic gear shift. Differences: no noise, no tail pipe and no smell, no heat (!). This car has a heater that runs on . . . . petrol. Although it was a pretty cold and rainy day we decided not to switch the heater on. Edwin is a member of VERA (Verein der Elektromobilfreunde in der Region Aachen), a German club of electric car owners. |
November 6, 2009. World record electrically powered cars. While the race in Ozzieland with the solar powered cars was full of drama and sensation another caravan of environmentally friendly cars took a more quiet trip from Darwin to Adelaide. This part of the World Solar Challenge was called the Global Green Challenge. One of the participants was a 100% electric Tesla Roadster. The drivers of this car managed to drive so economically that they registered a new world record: 501 kilometers non-stop on a single charge of their car's lithium-ion batteries. - source: CarsGuide
October 28, 2009. Tokai University solar car winner of the World Solar Challenge. The Japanese team was the first to cross the finish line in Adalaide, South Australia, after a dramatic, 3,000 km event. The cars in the second and third positions (Michigan State University and Nuna 5, respectively) lagged hours behind the winner. Congratulations, Tokai heroes!
October 22, 2009. The World Solar Challenge is about to take off, the race across Australia over 3.000 km by a bunch of 100% solar powered cars. Start is in Darwin, NT and the finish is in Adelaide, SA. This year is the 10th time that the event is taking place (every two years). A score of red-hot teams is eager to begin the monster trip across the red earth. Parallel to the solar race is also an Eco Challenge, a demonstration drive with environmentally friendly cars and specials (e.g., an electric production-Tesla and an experimental electric Honda. Web site of the organization: globalgreenchallenge.com.au. Kangaroos and Wallabies, beware!
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October 16, 2009. German team ends first at Solar Decathlon. The contest to build the best, most comfortable and best looking sustainable dwelling, held in Washington DC between 20 teams, was won by the German team from teh University of Darmstadt. Their contribution was a two-story cube including a host of interesting features. To mention some:
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Winners: Team Germany website www.solardecathlon.tu-darmstadt |
October 9, 2009. Solar Decathlon in Washington DC. On the National Mall, Washington DC, a score of sustainable dwellings have been erected that were designed and built by university teams from all over the world. This (the fourth already) Solar Decathlon is a demonstration to show the US and the world public the possibilities of renewable energy integrated in and around the private home. A team of referees judges the homes on innovation, ingenuity and design of aspects like architecture, market viability, engineering, lighting design, communications, comfort, appliances, hot water supply, net metering and also home entertainment. Take a look. Renewable energy in the home environment is fun !
September 24, 2009. US National Solar Tour, Saturday October 3. Americans who are interested in solar energy can see with their own eyes how the neighbor generates his own solar electricity or hot water with a solar installation. Find out on the ASES National Solar Tour web site.
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September 22, 2009. Orange tie, flags out!. Tomorrow, the 23th of September, the Crown Prince of the Netherlands will officially open the Stad van de Zon (City of the Sun), a completed city development adjacent to Heerhugowaard in the province of North Holland. It took ten years of building to complete this huge project which from the beginning was planned to be 100% energy-neutral. Among others, 3.75 MWp of photovoltaic panels plus three 800 kW wind turbines will suppy electrical power to the homes of the city. A large portion of the homes are themselves equipped with PV and their inhabitants thus enjoy low strongly reduced energy bills. This super project was planned by the architect Ashok Bhalothra and realized though unabated effort by the municipal staff at Heerhugowaard and the construction companies. After its ups and downs. the project will see tomorrow its finest hour, and I believe a perfect award for everybody who has been involved in the project. After the show by the Prince a big symposium will be held. Among the speakers will be the Minister for the Environment, mrs Jacqueline Cramer. Links: here and here. In his role as municipal project manager, Cees Bakker saw it all happen. A photo narrative of the building process can be viewed on his website (picture left borrowed from Cees' website |
September 10, 2009. 2,000 MWp solar photovoltaic farm in Mongolia. US-based First Solar, one of the world’s biggest makers of thin-film solar modules, has said that it has signed a memorandum of understanding with the Chinese governmenet to construct build a 2 GWp solar power plant in China’s Inner Mongolia region. Construction is to start by June 2010 on the first 30 MWp phase of the project, with 100 MWp and 870 MWp segments to be completed by 2014. The remaining 1 GWp of capacity is to be built in the five years to 2019. First Solar’s thin-film panels will be used in all the arrays. Most interestingly, The PV farm will be part of a planned renewable energy park in Ordos, Mongolia, that is to generate a total of 11.95 GW of power from wind turbine, solar, biomass and hydrostorage – the use of off-peak power to pump water to an elevated reservoir, where it can be stored and released to turn turbines during peak demand. Source: BusinessGreen
August 30, 2009. Battery-powered Trabi. In the DDR of the old days the deep desire of the socialist burgher was to own a car. His choice was simple: a Wartburg or a Trabant. The Trabant was the most common in the DDR. I once visited Leipzig, DDR, and noticed traffic jams consisting exclusively of Trabants. Also on the roads of my home country some Trabants could be seen puttering around, trailing big blue clouds of smoke (people mixed their own two-stroke fuel and were sometimes splashy with adding oil). My girlfriend at that time drove around with a brand new Trabi, and I was in love and a little bit jealous. In love with her, jealous because she could afford a new car while I was barely able to keep an old rusty 15 HP, 425cc-Citroen-2CV moving. Both cars became icons of the '60's and '70's: the Trabi and the 2CV. The Trabi has recently been redesigned into a hypermodern, fully electric version. The design is great because you immediately recognize the iconic lines of the old Trabi. Clean she will be because traction will be electrical. At the upcoming Frankfurt Autosalon the final production car will be revealed. Will it be a success? Who knows. In the mean time hobbyists have succeeded into turning a classic Trabi into an EV-Trabi. Watch the movie at YouTube. What would my girlfriend say upon seeing this? If only designers could stay away from my beloved 2CV. That design is sacrosanct to me.
August 14, 2009. LEDs light the lanes of Leiden. Leiden's alderman in charge of the 'Environment' portfolio is a strong supporter of LED-lights in the streets. No wonder: The LED-industry promises less energy use, longer life and less stray light. Normal incandescent street lights try to illuminate the universe. The combination of a lower energy bill and longer lifetime (less inspection and less replacement) must be very appealing to any city manager in this economically depressed time. In December of 2008 the alderman flipped the switches of the first LED fixtures installed at various spots in and around Leiden. These were small groups of fixtures made by different manufacturers. A live test so to say. Citizens coud give their opinion and tell their experience via a municipal website. The LED-illumination of the Franchimontlaan (left picture) belongs to one of these early tests. Inspection of the Franchimontlaan-fixtures reveals that the 'lamp' is composed of 6x4 packets of 12 small LEDs each. Cool, blueish LEDS are alternated with LEDs with a lower color temperature. The result is nice, pleasant street illumination. These lamps are still working fine and everybody has gotten used to this type of light.
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Leiden:
Franchimontlaan (installed: December 2008)
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Leiden:
Uhlenbeckkade (installedt:Aaugust 2009)
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In the beginning of August, the local newspaper reported about an entire street in my hometown going to be lit with the latest development in LED-street lights. The alderman was keenly present for a promotional fotoshoot. The new LED-lights have been placed at the Uhlenbeckkade (picture on the right). Because this lane is close to my home I decided to take a look. The square fixtures contain 14 big, strong LEDs that produce a quite cool light of the correct color temperature. The amount of light is perfect: more than sufficient to find your way and even enough to let you read a book or map. The Uhlenbeck-LEDs are supposed to use less electricity than the Franchimont-LEDs. The alderman must be a very satisfied person with such a great, green and visible project in his city.
August 13, 2009. Three solar racing cars on display on Friday, August 21 in Enschede, The Netherlands. Students of the Technical University Twente have participated in two recent World Solar Challenge races in Australia and they are preparing for the next event. Two 'veteran' cars and the newly designed and built 21Revolution (these guys have a fair chance to win the upcoming race in October, 2009) will be on display next Friday, at the Oude Markt in Enschede, 11:30. The cars will also drive a few miles on Enschede's city streets..More information at www.solarteam.nl
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August 10, 2009. Time to sell the phones. In an inquisitive mood I collected all three cordless Philips SE445 Trio phones in my home and tested their power consumption. There is a cordless phone on every floor of my home, together a nice good looking set that works reasonably well: a base station with voice recorder/messager and two substations. Very handy indeed. I could not believe my eyes when I saw the power meter's display showing a consumption of 14 watts continuously. I assume that this outrageous power consumption is caused by the hopelessly 'cheapy-cheapy' plug-in Chinese power adapters (these things get warm - a dire sign!). 14 Watts continuously means per day 24x14 = 336 Watt hours. Every week then these things drain 7 x 336 = 2,352 kWh. Last year the flashy gadgets thus cost me about 119 kWh of power (2008 was a leap-year). My precious solar panels are burdened with producing all this wasted juice (it is much more economical to feed this solar power back into the public grid). Which cordless phone could be a climate champion? Can cordless phones be climate champions at all? The Philips stuff is going to be replaced, that is for sure. No waste of electricity in my home! It's war gainst power parasites. |
August 9, 2009. Blue Saint. Some Italian genious seems to have developed a project to erect a huge (200 ft) statue close to the city of San Giovanni Rotondo (province of Puglia) dedicated to the extremely popular local saint, Padre Pio, a priest canonized by the Pope in 2002. The very special thing about this architectural thing is the photovoltaic paint through which solar energy will be converted to electricity ("don't touch that statue, Jimmy - you might be electrocuted!" - "yes, mom"). Seems to me a clever trick to obtain a government subsidy. Source: Daily Telegraph
August 4, 2009. Oil crisis in the making? The chief economist at the International Energy Agency (IEA) in Paris, mr. Fatih Birol, has said in an interview with The Independent that wold oil supply might tighten after 2010 to the point that peak oil has arrived. Causes are 6-7% annual production decline of existing oil fields, under-investment and increasing demand. Birol has calculated that with unchanged policies the world will need until 2030 at least six oil fields of the order of magnitude of Saudi Arabia's to fill the production gap. When demand will outstrip supply the inevitable result will be skyrocketing prices, depressed economies and destruction of demand. Fuel poverty will be on the rise again. The big surprise here is that an expert of one of the world's most respected and conservative energy think tanks expresses such a depressing perspective.
July 26, 2009. 50 MWp solar PV project in Bavaria. The German company, Q-Cells announced on July 24th that, in a joint venture with the solar silicon manufacturer MEMC, they will build near Straskirchen, Bavaria, on 135 hectares of land a 225,000 panel solar electricity farm. Total capacity will be approximately 50 MWp. The solar park will generate electricity sufficient to cover the needs of 15,000 households. Yearly, the emission of 35,000 tonnes of CO2 will be avoided.Source: Q-cells
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July 15, 2009. Creative variation on DESERTEC-plan. An agreement of understanding has recently been published between a number of European companies and the DESERTEC Foundation to start working on a plan to build solar concentrating installations (CSP) at the edges of the Mediterranean, in North Africa, the Sahara and the Middle East. Looking at the insolation map, left, one can see that the Sahara receives per surface area more than three times as much energy than most of Britain and continental western Europe. That is why the Sahara is a good location to generate huge amounts of electricity with solar installations. Too bad that the main population centers are so far away from the place. All energy needs to be transported to western Europe via long, expensive and vulnerable power lines. The original plan describes only high-voltage power lines to connect DESERTEC solar power stations with the consumers. The Dutch business magazine, FEM-business published yesterday a comment that proposes to replace the power lines with the manufacture, transport and storage of hydrogen. The storage function seems interesting since the DESERTEC plans conceive also huge wind farms in the North Sea and Atlantic Ocean. The hydrogen, once shipped to western Europe, could power cars, trucks and fuel cells, and supply energy in periods when North Sea wind power is scarce. Nevertheless, owning my own PV panels makes me less dependent on the power utility company. In the Netherlands, one-third of the heat and sunshine of the Sahara still amounts to a considerable amount of solar energy and instead of insufferable heat we enjoy pleasant weather. No airco necessary! |
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July 11, 2009. Only 16 Watts is the power consumption of this cute little netbook that I bought a week ago. The device runs on an Intel Atom N270 processor, is equipped with one gigabyte RAM memory and a 2.5 inch 160 Gb hard disk, and its OS is Windows XP with all the applications you can think of (unfortunately the a USB-to--RS232 port replicator does not work with the RS485 converer software that monitors some of my PV panels - too bad!) Tiny Tim has a built-in webcam, wireless network connectivity as well as a wired network port. Resolution of the 10-inch bright screen is 1024x768 pixels which means that my web site fits nicely horizontally though up-down scrolling is necessary. Main reason to purchase this little gizmo (€300) is to take it along on journeys, in bus, train and plane. No more hauling a big bag with a clumsy and heavy laptop computer and auxiliary gear. It weighs only 1,000 grams and gets lost in my backpack. It is a complete computer! I can now update my website any place in the world, any time, no hassle. |
July 6, 2009. On kites and ladder mills. Who would not like to turn a children's dream beyond a nice hobby into a business case, notably a renewable one? In The Netherlands, the former astronaut Wubbo Ockels proposed and designed in the early 1990's a 100MW high-altitude ladder mill, soaring sky high. In Dan Diego, USA, Skywindpower tries to keep the idea floating. And a wonderful new design in high altitude kite wind power has recently been developed by Kitegen in Italy. And of course, there is a freighter partially powered by a giant kite manufactured by Skysail.
June 25, 2009. Solar-hybrid power station in Israel. At Kibbutz Samar in the southern Negev desert (Israel) a hybrid solar-gas power station started operating yesterday. Mirrors reflect sunlight onto te top of a 30m high tower. Here, a turbine generates electricity. At night a gas turbine takes over and generates 100 kW of power. Nice pictures of this solar power station can be seen here.
June 23, 2009. A Dutch Jurassic Park? For a board of directors of a big energy company two nightmarish scenarios argue against building a coal-burning power station. The first nightmare is a carbon tax. Electricity from a coal-powered generator may be cheap today, but a solid carbon tax will be disastrous for future profit generation. The second nightmare is CCS (carbon capture and storage). Succesful application of large-scale CCS will require so much power from the installation that the effect on its profitability may be ruinous. Thus a coal powered generator may be losing money one way or another, no matter what. Nuclear power does not suffer from both black handicaps. A board of directors therefore may decide that nuclear power is a much better option than coal. A big Dutch energy company, Delta, has published its intention to build four additional nuclear power generators next to the existing Borssele-I nuclear power station (the best defence is the attack). However, nuclear power has its own small risks. The capital investment is enormous with guaranteed cost overruns (in the last century not a single major project in the Netherlands has not been plagued by at least 100% overrun. Look at what is happening with the oh-so-cheap-and-easy-to-construct Finnish Olkiluoto-III nuclear power generator currently under construction. The radioactive waste problem has not been resolved. The burden of the ultimate risk (boom!) must be carried by current and future generations of tax payers. If things ever go really boom, a large swath of Holland will become uninhabitable. Who cares? In the mean time the army may be called upon to protect he installations. Nuclear power, after all, is a strategic asset (if not we should not worry about the peaceful application of nuclear power by, let's say Iran or North Korea). The board of directors, forced by its desire to let the profitability of the company grow, and barred from letting a coal burning power station run full throttle spewing its CO2 unobstructeed into the air, can easily be seduced to embrace the monster of nuclear power generation. A smart and cynical judgement by these Delta-guys. A country gets what it earns. I am glad that my own solar panels generate most of my own electricity. I definitely don't need Jurassic Park!
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21 juni 2009. The way to do it. On his home in Zevenaar, Netherlands, Sjoerd Lentjes has installed 36 PV panels of 110 Wp apiece (4 rows of 9 panels, one row on the back face of the roof.). Such an amount of PV panels perfectly fits the roof. As far as I am concerned a perfect way to protect the environment. Some weird object is visible on the fifth panel, second row. What could that object be? A ball of protective tape thrown away carelessly? It looks woolly because there appears to be little shade on the panel. The reason that I emphasize this contamination is that PV systems of this size usually are confured in strings (I estimate this PV system in 4 strings of 9 panels, each string 990 Wp, with two big inverters). Each string performs according to under the 3-musketeer principle "one for all, all for one". Thus, if one panel underperforms then the production of the entire chain drops. Each panel consists of a series of 72 solar cells that act like 72 mini-musketeers. As a consequence, if one tiny cell on a panel is covered by something -let's say a ball of tape, leaves, bird droppings or just shadow by a vent, pipe or antenna-, the power output of the entire panel drops dramatically and also that of the affected string. Sjoerd needs to inspect panel #5 on row #2 and if necessary, remove the contamination. Picture kindly provided by Sjoerd Lentjes, Zevenaar, The Netherlands |
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June 9, 2009. Dutch Open Solarboat Challenge next week in the province of Zeeland, between June 15 and 20. This is the first Dutch National Championship featuring exclusively solar powered boats with their crews. Forty teams are expected, divided among 4 classes. The Grand Final is scheduled on Saturday, June 20 in the city of Middeburg. Website (in Dutch) at Dutchopensolarboatchallenge.org |
June 4, 2009. PV solar power plant in Abu Dhabi on line. One usually associates the Middle East with oil, lots of oil. One could speak of 'OiIistan', a region in the world where pronouncing the words "renewable energy" was considered a kind of blasphemy. No more. In Abu Dabi a 10 MWp solar photovoltaic facility was officially connected to the grid yesterday. The plant, featuring 87,777 solar panels, is part of Abu Dhabi's Masdar initiative and the first and biggest of its kind outside Europe, South Korea and the USA. Source: New Civil Engineer
May 29, 2009. Scrapping my old Toyota at a premium and buy a new one ? Several European countries, including the Netherlands and the UK, support the ailing car industry by providing an incentive to owners of old cars provided they buy a new one and have the old car scrapped. The BBC website devotes a page to this practise. The Dutch government tries to sell the scheme by arguing that scrapping old polluting cars and replacing them by news clean cars is good for the environment. My gut feeling is that this is a bogus argument. Applying the funds towards accelerated installation of solar panels or wind farms turbines would be much more beneficial to the environment than handing out incentive sto buy new CO2 spewing cars and spending a lot of CO2 as well to scrap the old one. My current 12-year old, bonus-eligible car is equipped with a catalytic converter and gloriously passes the compulsive 'clean' exhaust fume test every year. Here is a comment published on the BBC website that perfectly states what I feel:
When a minister claims that something is an environment benefit, one can be fairly sure that an untruth is being told, and this is a case in point. Much of the energy consumed in a car's lifetime is during the extraction of the raw materials and its manufacture and the 'recycling' of a car still causes environmental damage - we should be encouraging people to keep older cars. There is nothing to stop people trading in a 10 year old car and buying a gas guzzler. Another waste of our tax money. - Ian Shaw, Cambridge.
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May 28, 2009. Solar powered stadium in Taiwan. The architect who designed this stadium for the occasion of the 2009 World Games must have had a dragon in his mind. The scales of the serpent consist of 8,884 solar panels. The stadium will seat 50,000 spectators. All electricity consumed by the lights and screens of the stadium will be generated by the PV roof. More pictures and a descripton can be found on the website, Inhabitat. The comments on the Inhabitat post are interesting. They show that the majority of the commenters need more information about PV, to say it euphemistically. Fortunately there are architects who understand the concept of sustainability and use their design genius accordingly. |
May 16, 2009. European Solar Days
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| On Saturday, May 16, members of ODE (Dutch Organization for Renewable Energy) enjoyed a tour of the photovoltaic production lines at the Scheuten Solar production facaility in Gelsenkirchen (Germany, picture - note the roof with a 350 kWp solar array). Two production lines were churning out solar panels, one line partly automated and the other fully automated. Robots were happily chirping away, flipping future panels up and down, putting on cells, soldering strips, laminating and framing the laminates, and finally checking the panels in huge flash boxes. Scheuten produces Multisol panels for down-to-earth rooftop and open field use and the fantastic high-end semitransparent Optisol BIPV panels that are implemented in architectural landmarks like train stations and congress and exhibition halls. A big project currently going on is the 2 MWp Multisolar panel solar farm at Veurne (Belgium). |
May 10, 2009. Grid parity - when? An interesting question is "when will the day arrive that power generated by solar photovoltaic panels on my home's roof be equally expensive as power purchased from the utility company?". The break even is called grid parity. Note that after the break even moment, PV-generated power will for ever be cheaper than utility-generated power. Note that I am discussing grid parity here for private consumers (you and me, i.e., ordinary citizens with an electricity bill 'decorated' with all sorts of taxes, fees and other add-ons). Hawaii is the place where grid parity has been reached already as a result of lots of sunshine combined with very high fossil fuel prices. California is very close to grid parity. Big question here in Europe is: when will grid parity happen here? According to experts, Southern Europe will experience grid parity first, Italy to start with (2010), closely followed by Spain and Greece. After this the 'photovoltaic-tree-line' will move north. It is expected that Germany, the Netherlands and Britain will see grid parity around 2015-2018, while entire Europe will be covered by grid parity in 2025. Of course the speed of movement of the 'photovoltaic-tree-line' will depend on the one hand on peak oil events and on the other on the decrease of the cost of solar power per wattpeak. Utility companies that earned in the past gigantic profitsthorugh cheap and dirty fossil power generation will of course be trying to stem the progress, but that will amount to rear-end action doomed to fail.
April 30, 2009. Dry and sunny April. It is fairly common for Holland to experience a wet and cold spell in April. Not so this year. The month saw many dry and sunny days. This can be easily concluded from the graph produced tonight by my Plugwise logger. My original six SunPower panels (together 570 Wp) yielded a nice 51,9 kWh. Note that the Plugwise software records the production of PV panels as consumption ("verbruik"). My panels experienced 7 days with little sunshine while the remaining days were sunny and often with crisp and clear skies. Especially cool and sunny weather creates very favorable conditions for high productivity.
April 22, 2009. Earth Day. Greenpeace asked me to inorm you to pay attention to the special movie made for the occasion.
April 10, 2009. No forced introduction of smart metering in The Netherlands. Sime time ago the grid operators, driven by expectations of high gains in cost-effectiveness, superior insight in power consumption/generation and much higher profits, had proposed the introduction of smart electricity meters in every single Dutch household. These meters would measure the consumption of electricity every 15 minutes and relay the data to the energy supplier. A bill had been approved last year by Parliament to start the forced roll out of these meters. However, many individuals and organizations objected because of privacy and security concerns (Big Brother watching you when you take a shower; hackers taking over your electricity meter). In Holland, all new bills are subject to review in the Senate. Last Tuesday, the proposed bill was rejected in the Senate because of the above concerns. For the time being, consumers can choose to install a smart meter on a voluntary basis. People with mechanical meters will not be forced to have an electronic smart meter installed (in the original bill, refusing to accept could led to a heavy fine or even imprisonment!). Some people regard this action by the Senate as "sending Stalin back to the Gulag".
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March 27, 2009. Lights out, tomorrow between 8:30 p.m. and 9:30 p.m. because of Earth Hour. Don't forget! |
March 24, 2009. What do Shell and General Motors have in common? The press announcement by Shell that they are no longer interested in investing money in wind energy because of the presumed low profitability of wind energy compared with pumping, refining and selling fossil fuels struck me. Shell not continuing with wind energy? Previously they had abandoned solar energy. Fossil fuel is their core business, their monopoly. I promptly felt a strong déja-vu feeling. Did we not see something similar happening just a couple of years ago? The big automobile manuifacturer, General Motors kept making big trucks, gas guzzling SUV's and uneconomical Hunmmers, because making small cars wasn't profitable enough for them! With big arrogance the Detroit people stuck to their way of not caring to listen to consumers. It took a few years while the Japanese car makers perfected the skill of making money manufacturing and selling small, fuel efficient cars. Suddenly it was over for the arrogant Americans. The market turned, fuel became suddenly expensive and the public did not buy the big cars any more. GM went finally bust because of lack of foresight, lack of innovation and for holding on too long and too arrogantly to their core business: the king size full American car. A similar fate may overcome GM's oil cousins. While the top oil brass is completely blinded by big money making, the consumer silently switches to electrical cars, energy saving and energy efficient homes and start producing their own renewable energy. Suddenly, Shell might notice that the heyday fossil days are over and that they lost out to the non-monopoly wind and solar renewable energy sources. Would any government bail them out?
March 10, 2009. Spot market oil price on the march. In spite of financial crisis and mondial economic malaise the oil price has bottomed out and has started to rise again. One month ago the spot market oil price hovered around 35 US dollar per barrel; currently one barrel of oil makes about 47 dollar (which is more than 25% higher). The amazing fact is that this upward price movement is occurring at a moment when the demand for energy-intensive raw materials is low. Either this means that the economic recession has bottomed out, or that peak-oil mechanisms are at work. Given the historical high oil price last year and given the cyclical nature of the price of oil, the big question is whether a price peak is ahead. Has Europe made progress in reducing its dependency of foreign fossil fuels? Here in The Nederland, progress has been minimal. Count your beans. If your house isn't yet equipped with solar panels or a solar water heater, I advise you to seriously consider these measures (and also to take measures to reduce the consumption of energy). The best defence may be to attack straight away.
February 10, 2009. My A+ energy label fridge/freezer combination had an incandescent light bulb. Since it burned every now at half the voltage with the fridge door closed (my cheese got moldy) I called the company serviceman to fix the lamp. This guy told me that this half-voltage burning was standard procedure in their refrigerators to keep the freezing compartment freezin. If I would remove the lamp then the fridge/freezer would not properly work any more. I promptly removed the lamp and the fridge has been working fine ever since. Without interior light, though. I am wondering why energy-conscious manufacturers of freezer/fridge combinations mount only one thermostat in their gadgets and why they do not install LED-lamps by default. Are these guys lazy? Yes, they are.
By the way, I found this very interesting comment by cpotoso on this issue on www.instructables.com. I quote: "This is REALLY A WASTE of resources. The amount of heat pumped into the fridge by a 40-60 W bulb is negligible compared to what happens while you open and close the door. Furthermore, creating the LED light consumes much more resources than creating an incandescent bulb (even worse since the bulb was already there). High efficiency bulbs are meant for places that use them a lot. The interior of the fridge is not one of them. Regarding the mercury on the CFL, do you know that the LED's may have arsenic in them? (maybe these don't but red and green LED's do). Not a very interesting instructable and a VERY ENVIRONMENTALLY UNFRIENDLY ONE (resources to get the LED lamp are not free of environmental consequences)."
In orther words: slam that door!
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February 7, 2009. Topaz, park of parks. Solar parks exist in all sorts and sizes. The Dutch national champion, Nuon's Floriade Solar Roof (2,3 MWp; 2002), has been superseded long ago by bigger and bigger solar farms: 10 MWp, then 20, 40 and last year 60 MWp (Parque Fotovoltaico Olmedilla de Alarcon, Spanje). But Americans do everyting much, much bigger. The US company, OptiSolar has submitted plans to build a staggering 550 MWp solar power farm in San Luis Obispo county in California: the Topaz project. The first green electricity from the park will be produced in 2011 while completion of the park is expected in 2013. The panels will be fixed angle thin film panels produced by OptiSolar. After completion, 190,000 Californian homes will be powered year round by the generated electricity. Transport and distribution will be supplied by PG&E (Pacific Gas and Electric Company). Photomade by David Lena on behalf of OptiSolar. |
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January 19, 2009. Around the world in a solar ship. On the 6th of January of this year construction started in a shipyard in Kiel, Germany of a 30-meter three-hull catamaran that will be equipped with 470 square meter of solar photovoltaic panels. Skippers Raphaël Domjan and Gérard d'Aboville plan to circumnavigate the globe in 2010 with this ship, of course exclusively solar powered. Their route will follow the equator as much as follows, east to west.The project is called 'PlanetSolar'. You can sponsor the trip by contibuting a special Jules Verne postcard which will be on board the ship all the time Big sponsors are Q-cells and Solon AG. We will keep track of these adventurers! |
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January 16, 2009. Measuring power consumption and solar power production is essential for owners of PV panels. Recently the Plugwise was launched on the market, and lucky me could get hands on one. The Plugwise system consists of a wireless in-between plug between an electric device's plug and the wall outlet. A usb-type stick sticks in one of the usb ports of my computer. The plug measures power flowing through and reports via the usb stick to the software running on the pc. In other words: this is a system that logs power consumption and power production. One of the nice afeatures of the Plugwise system is that the logging runs 24/7/365 no matter whether the pc is powered up or down. Power consumption of the plugs is negligible. I am currently testing a set of Plugwise-plugs (these devices are being sold in pairs and up to eight plugs). My fridge has one, the TV, the PV panels, my solar thermal unit, the central heating unit, my computer and so on. |
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January 10, 2009. Bound to drop? A quite boring routine job the last few years was keeping an eye on price development of PV panels. Prices of PV material hovered around 5 euros per peak Watt. SolarBuzz maintains a permanent price development graph with current prices of PV in the US and Europe (left). In the last quarter of 2008 several reports appread on the internet suggesting that prices might go down in 2009. In the graph it seems that especially in Europe the price of PV material suddenly has started to dive. A change of this magnitude in this calm market can be considered breathtaking. On the other hand, utility electricity bils are up and up. Result of upward fossil electricity prives and downward PV prices: Yes! Grid parity! |
January 7, 2009. Gas crisis in Europe, with the exception of the Netherlands and Norway. Why? because the fortunate Dutch and Vikings both produce and export large volumes of natural gas. However, the Dutch gas reserves will be depleted 20 years from now. If the Dutch government does not act fast and decisive, also Holland will run out of supplies and therefore will be at the mercy of Putin or some other ruler, and pay dearly or suffer, just like Ukraine and the adjacent Eastern European countries currently do. I propose for The Netherlands an independent Ministery of Renewable Energy. Not later, may be, but NOW.
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December 31 2008. Out goes old. From now on all old-fashioned incandescent bulbs are banned from my home. On the left in the picture the last one has been immortalized. I had a problem, notably that in the living room the main fixture consists of five nice small glasses each equipped with a mini 25W E14 light bulb. After looking around in many shops I finally found yesterday mini-CFL lamps that fit the fixture and that produce sufficient light at low power consumption (7W each). As a consequence, 125W typically switched on for two hours has been replaced by 35W. As the difference is 90W, on a yearly basis this saves me about 66 kilowatt hours of electricity which, generated though a coal-fired plant, would have amounted to 60 kilograms of carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere. I will pay less to the utility, and my PV-panels will feed 66 extra green kWh's back into the grid without release of any CO2. Bingo! I wish all of you out there a colorful 2009. In a few hours the moment will arrive that I will read the meters of the PV system and complete the spreadsheet solar production numbers of 2008 completed. Record? |
December 26, 2008. All time midwinter high of 2,2 kWh PV system wide yield for one 24hr cycle. Normal yields this time of the year amount between 0 and 1.3 - 1.4 kWh. Last year the sytem yielded the previous all time high of 1.9 kWh on December 29 (no extra panels added in 2008!). The solar thermal heater produced today 90 liters of water heated from 9 degrees centigrade (inlet temperature) to 40 degrees centigrade. Whether my six SunPower panels will set a month record remains to be seen. The monthly record for December is 12 kWh (2007) while current production stands at 8.7 kWh. May I pray for some extra sunshine?
December 21, 2008. You don't have to live in the USA to enjoy superextravagantly decorated homes. This one is owned by a proud Dutchman who has put in a lot of work to secure all these lights on his dwelling. Quite some lights! If you spot one that is even better than this one, please submit for publication here! (please mention city and country).
December 20, 2008. Outdoor Christmas light, Dutch style. Last night I took my camera to the streets on a hunt for extravagant outdoor Christmas illumination. Here are a few examples of decorated Duch homes. Illumination schemes like these often occur in clusters, as if neighbors and neighborhoods compete to produce the most fantastic results. Which one consumes most electrical power?
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November 21, 2008. All-electric Mini Cooper. The Californian campany, Hybrid Technologies showed at the LA Motor Show a full-electric BMW-Mini Cooper. The car is equipped with a load of lithium-ion batteries and electric motors that make the little gadget run like crazy: acceleration 6 seconds to 100 km/h,range of 150 km, emission zero (if the batteris are charged with electricity from wind or hydro). The first 100 cars are being leased. Hybrid technologies builds more emission-free cars. These are being shown on the 'products' page on their web site.
October 31, 2008. Record-breaking month for my original 6 solar panels (installed year 2000, each 95 Wp), that is 30.3 kWh produced last month together. From the onset of my tallies (1-1-2001), these panels have yielded 3.361 kWh of electricity, or over 560 kWh per panel. This yield saves 500 kilograms of CO2 emitted from the stack of a coal-fired power station per panel. Don't blame me when I vote against coal fired stuff. Solar makes me feel happy and breath clean air.
October 28, 2008. Californian Academy of Science in a new building. Spectacularly set in the Golden Gate Park, San Francisco a great new headquarters for the Academy has been built, combined with exhibition space and museum. The entire design breathes renewability, and surely one may spend many hours wondering about how amazing nature is. The roof of the building is a green garden with a large, yet modestly looking rooftop solar PV installation. Take a closer look via the website. And when you have seen it all, take a look at the city from space to check solar installations on the roofs of the dwellings in the city. The website San Francisco Solar Map was specially designed to promote solar power in this great American city.
October 23, 2008. Solar feed-in tariffs for UK homeowners. Feed-in tariffs, known in Britain as the Renewable Energy Tariff, constitute a support mechanism for renewable energy. Such a tariff guarantees a long-term, premium price for energy generated from renewable sources. So households generating energy from solar, wind or other renewable sources would be able to sell any excess energy to the UK grid at an established price. Finally, sound and healthy thinking has arrived in Albion. Source: Renewable Energy Association.
October 10, 2008. How much will oil cost @ December 31, 2008? I have been following the fall of the NYMEX crude oil spot price with amazement. Today oil closed at US$ 77,70 per barrel. Will people start buying big SUV's again to save General Motors from bancrupcy? Will they flock to airports to spend money on more flights to exotic destinations? Or did they learn something during the oil price boom and spend the money saved on gas on measures to avoid problems the next time? The basic structural developments remain unchanged: peak oil, decreasing natural gas reserves, precarious equilibrium between production and consumption of oil, unreliable suppliers, Iran's nuclear ambitions, dependency on imports and the huge transfer of capital from the industrial economies to Russia, OPEC and the like. My assumption is that the oil price will rocket again as soon as the credit crunch is over.
September 30, 2008. EPIA expects grid parity in Europe for solar-generated electricity between 2012 (southern Europe) and 2020 (northern Europe). Grid parity means that solar generated electricity costs as much as classically generated electrical power. The EPIA (European Photovoltaic Industry Association) has published in her newsletter the expectation that in 2020 a stunning 12% of all electricity in Europe can be generated through solar photovoltaic farms and ecentralized installations (your PV panels nand mine). The grid parity 'line' will slowly move north fromSpain and Italy towards northwestern Europe to at northern latitudes like Germany and Holland in 2015. The dynamism is caused by the relentless increases in the price of oil, natural gas, coal and nuclear generated electricity (cuased by peak-oil, peak-gas, CO2 emission levies and so on). Because EPIA is a partisan organization, I suspect them to be a little bit overenthusiastic. So let's set grid parity for the Netherlands at 2018. That year is exactly the year that the electricity produced by my own PV panels is expected to arrive at grid parity level (estimated conservatively) (see this blog, entry July 13). The future shines bright for solar energy!
September 30, 2008. Energy bill stalledin the House (too busy with the $ 700 bn bailout) which postpones the greening of America. Money, mortgages and bonuses come frist!
September 24, 2008. Energy bill passes the US Senate, which is significant because the bill sets a new mileage standard for cars of 35 mpg (currently 27,5 mpg - compare Europe with 44.2 mpg), and extends tax credits for wind farms and solar energy installations for another eight years. Next stop is the House, and the signature of the President. The source does not say much about offshore drilling and nuclear energy, both favored by the White House.Source: Washington Post
September 14, 2008. To the Princess Amalia (offshore) wind farm
Somehow I came across last summer a call on the site of the Eneco power company inviting folks interested in visiting Eneco's new offshore Princess Amalia wind farm (formerly Q-7; situated in the North Sea, 23 kilometers west of the port of IJmuiden, Holland). My reaction was honored and that's why I had to get up early this morning to catch the 8:30 AM run to the wind park. The weather was perfect for an unlimited photoshoot (a lucky circumstance since previous runs had been cancelled because of poor weather). And I can tell you: this is a fantastic and a very impressive piece of offshore engineering. The park consists of 60 Vestas V80 wind turbines in a perfect array, with interturbine distances of 550 meters. Each yellow-painted monopile carries a 2 MW wind turbine of 59 meters height and with a rotor 80 meters in diameter. All turbines are connected to a central transformer platform from which a thick 150 kV cable runs all the way (23 kilometers) to the mainland. The investment has been euro 385 million, but this is all in, including the connection with the mainland.
Super. Chapeau, Eneco. And upon returning home I notced that my solar photovoltaic panels had today produced 6,4 kWh, which is a record for the month of September.
September 10, 2008. Undaunted by the looming Finnish Oikiluoto-3 debacle, the Dutch energy company, Delta proposed today to apply for a permit to construct a 1,600 MW nuclear power station at a initial cost of euro 5 billion. Given the Finnish Oikiluoto-3 cost overrun, the initial cost estimations for future nuclear power stations always appear too optimistic, to say it euphemistic. I am not aware of any nuclear power station ever built on schedule and within initial cost calculation. Let's estimate with all the delays, overruns, mistakes and redesigns a more realistic euro 7.5 billion at commissioning time for that proposed Dutch reactor. This makes 1 nuclear megawatt to cost euro 4.6 million. It is amazing to learn that offshore wind power today costs euro 2.5 per megawatt, with prices falling. Wind power is by virtue of its turbine-wise building process ans step-wise commissioning much more convenient and economically feasible than the huge one-time expenditure ond one-time commission that is inevitable with a nuclear power generator. Who wants these centralized dinosaurs in an age of decentralized power generation? Who wants the decommissioned power station (a mountain of radioactive concrete) after 50 years or so of operation (provided that there will be sufficient uranium left after 25 years to run that thing anyway). Who wants to be responsible for 100,000 years of nuclear waste ? And finally, who is going to pay the insurance premium? My guess is that this nuclear proposal is purely political because economically it bears down to financial suicide. It will need a lot of spin-doctoring to persuade the Dutch tax payers to take a risky nuclear burden on their shoulders and that of the next 4,000 generations.
August 30, 2008. Cost overrun Finnish nuclear power generator Olkiluoto-3 bothers builders. The French company Areva (formerly Framatome) has published a new estimation of cost overrun of its prestige object, the new Finnish nuclear power plant Olkiluoto-3. Areva originally agreed to build the power station for a fixed price of euro 3 billion. Today, two years behind schedule, Areva has come to the conclusion that building costs may exceed euro 4,5 billion. By the way, this is not the firstcost overrun estimate. Who is going to pay the pricipal and the interest (5% interest on 1.5 billion is 75 million)? Because this is a project strongly backed by the French government, the French taxpayer may fear to get saddled with a nasty surprise. (source: Financial Times)
August 24, 2008. UK-designed solar plane sets record. A lightweight unmanned solar-powered aeroplane designed and built by the UK company QinetiQ, the Zephyr-6 has flown uninterrupted for a record 82 hours and 37 minutes, a new record. Source: BBC
August 13, 2008. Biggest PV farm in South Korea to grow bigger. The German company, Conergy, said in a statement it has reached a framework agreement to expand the existing 20 MWp PV generator at Sinan with an additional 4.35 MWp before the end of 2008. The size of the generator is equivalent to 96 football fields. It will provide enough energy to supply 7,200 households. Source: Google
August 6, 2008. Cheap storage of solar electricity ahead? (2) The folks at the Oil Drum energy forum were less enthusiast about the hallelujah-story trumpeted yesterday by MIT. Their judgement is, let's say, "sceptical".
August 5, 2008. Cheap storage of solar electricity ahead?(1) A report on the website MIT News claims a breaktrough in conversion technology from electricity to hydrogen. This finding amy form teh basis for economical and efficient storage energy of excess solar energy: generate electricity during daytime, consume at night.
July 31, 2008. Forward defense. One strategy to beat the rising price of natural gas worth looking at is to buy a big two-way energy-efficient airconditioner in combination with solar electricity panels on the roof of your home. The two-way airconditioner provides cool air in summer and hot air in winter. It moves heat, it does not create positive or negative heat. Aircos are heat pumps. The big advantage of a heat pump is that the heat itself is free of charge, while you pay only for pumping it out of your home (summer) or into your home (winter). One condition is that the house is very well heat-insulated, like a fridge (which is in fact a one-way mini-heat pump). Moreover, heat pumps and solar electricity panels are cheerful mates. In summer with plenty of sunshine and soaring temperatures the solar panels provide the power to move the heat out. A killer application!
July 31, 2008. Devastating price hike by British Gas. A rate hike of 35% for gas and 9% for electricity like just announced in the UK by Centrica is a blow for the family budget even for the happy few with solar thermal and PV panels. Looking at my own energy situation: my home is centrally heated with natural gas (1200 cubic meters per annum purchased from the gas company) while I rely for 100% of my electricity needs on the grid (I export 60% solar power and import 40% wind power). Because I fear that a sudden devastating price hike can happen in my country as well, I am going to look seriously for equipment that will make my home less dependable on natural gas, without negotiating on comfort. I may report on progress this fall. The best defence may be to generate your own power. After the up front investment no hikes ever for that part of your energy supply! See Heat my Home.
July 27, 2008. Thousand plus. Every week I read the production meters of my PV panels and update the spreadsheet. This time I noted that the cumulative production of all my PV panels for this year had gone up through the 1,000 kWh level (to be exact: 1,061 kWh at the end of week nr. 30). That's a lot of green and free electricity! What can you do with so much juice? Let's calculate: one 1 Watt LED lamp can burn a million hours (114 years continuous), or you can toast 30,000 slices of bread (each slice 2 minutes at 1,000 W), run the laundry washer 1,000 times, and so forth. And there is still a lot of electricity to harvest from sunshine until the end of the year. Who was that moron that dared to say that solar energy is good only for folks living in the Sahara?
July 16, 2008. Mr. Gordon Brown, European champion of renewables - or is it nukes? Tony Blair's Labour government published in 2003 a white paper in which nuclear energy was abolished and renewable energy embraced. In his final year in 10 Downing Street, mr. Blair however made a 180 degrees turn towards "seemingly inevitable" nuclear power generation. The current Chancellor, Mr. Gordon Brown seems to hold a similar position. On the one hand he wants the seas surrounding Britain seeded with offshore wind turbines while at the same time at least eight new nuclear power stations should be built. Mr. Brown is speaking out an all too familiar European theme. Instead of an all-out effort towards renewables, the various governments as well the EU in Brussels choose the middle ground 20% renewables, 20% nuclear, and the remaining fossil energy. Read Mr. Brown's speech to the Government's Low Carbon Economy Summit on London's South Bank (June 28, 2008).
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July 13, 2008. How much does my solar electricity cost? Sounds simple: divide cost by yield. The real word is less easy. PV is one of my hobbies, so every now and then I buy extra panels, add an inverter, reconfigure and so forth. Expenses are met by harvest of clean energy: day after day, year after year. Nice and rewarding hobby! The balance depends on the accumulated costs and the accumulated yield. At the end of 2002, when the first set of PV panels had been up for more than one year, the balance stopped at a whopping euro 3.79 per kWh (US$ 5 at the 2002 exchange rate, today US$ 6). Everybody called me a fool. At the end of 2007 the balance had improved to euro 0.92 per kilowatt hour. That's becoming bearable. Some people changed their mind. In April, 2008, a new subsidy system (SDE) became efective. Owners of SDE-supported PV systems are the lucky ones. Anyway, when I extrapolate to 2025, the cost of one unit of electricity from my system will have decreased to 26 eurocents. Interesting is the crossover point, or the moment that electricity generated by my system is equally expensive as electricity bought from the utility company. Using a modest 5% tariff increase the crossover point is reached in 2018. If prices may rise at 8% per annum, the crossover point will be reached in 2016. Infation is up, so I expect to pop the cork of a bottle of Champagne in 2016.Maybe earlier! |
July 9, 2008. Nuclear waste spill at the site of the Tricastin nuclear power plant near Avignon, France. About 30,000 liters of radioactive waste containing 12 grams of uranium per litre was spilled during a cleaning operation at the nuclear power plant sit, owned by Areva. Some of this waste spilled into the Lauzon and Gaffière rivers. Local and regional environmental authorities banned the consumption of well water in three nearby towns and the watering of crops from the two rivers. Swimming, fishing and other water sports were also banned. 30,000 litres with 12 grams of uranium in each litre makes 360 kilograms highly toxicand moderately radioactive stuff. If not intercepted some of this juice will reach the Mediterranean and may end up in the food chain. Source: Reuters.
July 7, 2008. North Pole webcam. The BBC features a story that the Arctic sea ice is melting this year faster than ever before. There seems to be a 50-50 chance that at the end of the Arctic summer the North Pole can be ice-free for a while for the first time in human history. The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has positioned a permanent webcam at the North Pole, so see for yourself the effect of our CO2 emissions.
July 6, 2008. Yankees flip the switch. The US federal government reversed the decision to put a moratorium on all new applications for large solar concentrating (CSP) and PV plants on public land areas. This reversal occurred after enormous protest by the renewable electric utility industry on the moratorium. Maybe the turnaround was pushed by the spiking oil price as well which, because of the extremely low fuel tax, is very visible for US car drivers. (conclusion: do the feds drive huge SUV's? YES!)
June 28, 2008. Yankees hit the brakes. The US federal government has placed a two-year moratorium on all new construction proposals for large-scale solar power plants (CSP-like and PV mega solar power stations) in six states: Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, and Utah. The US Bureau of Land Managemen, which oversees large tracts of public land in the western deserts has received 130 applications since 2005 from companies who want to build large-scale installations to generate renewable solar energy. The moratorium was declared because the feds say they want to assess the environmental impact of building power stations, roads and buildings, not to mention power lines, in the fragile desert environment, and they want to know as well how much water would be needed for CSP power stations and where to draw that water from. They could have done this assessment long before, of course. These feds either can't cope, or they favor the slogan "to govern is to put my heads in the [desert] sand".
June 24, 2008. Bad weather on the horizon? In its annual report 2007, the Dutch National Energy Council warns for a future oil crisis. Causes are insufficient production, insufficient investment, aging facilities, high demand (call it peak oil). When these folks start panicking, the wolf may be at the door indeed . The council is manned by eminentia gris of the [fossil] energy community and Big Oil. They discuss an oil crisis, yet they provoke the audience by wrapping their report in a cover that shows a nuclear power plant. So that's what the gents and ladies really want: nukes! It is time to replace these oldies with a lean and mean renewable team.
June 21, 2008. Big boys on the horizon. Clipper Windpower Plc has announced that the UK Crown Estate has signed an agreement to buy a prototype of Clipper's 7.5 MW offshore wind turbine, the 'Britannia'. The mega-turbine will be installed near Blyth in the northeast of England. The Britannia is an upscaled version of the existing Clipper 2.5 MW turbine. Upscaling is very important because a 100 MW wind farm needs only 14 of the giants instead of 40 units 2.5 MW Clippers. This saves tremendously on the installation costs and thus reduces the cost per unit of produced electricity. Web site at www.clipperwind.com/index.html
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June 11, 2008. Sunshine + a cool breeze = power! A day like today (northwestely winds, dry air, clouds passing in endless amounts) makes the inverters dance, a slow up and a fast down. As soon as the sun pops up from behind a cloud, power shoots up to fall as rapidly when the next cloud arrives. Inverters have to work hard and they suffer a lot on days like today. Please have a look at the web site showing the production of the big solar installation, Ecopark Waalwijk (Java has to be enabled). The Waalwijk facility (4,212 solar panels, 674 kWp) consists of an array of panels and inverters whose production is displayed in color coded blocks. Reading the inverters is slow, and so goes the display: power goes up and down, up and down, as if a slow Viennese Java walz is being performed.!
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June 5, 2008. Utility bill rises for people without solar panels. Effectieve Julyy 1, 2008, electricity rates will be increased 0-6% depending on the utility company. Consequently, folks with PV panels on the roofs of their dwellings will see their return on solar electricity rise 0-6%. It's as straightforward as that with solar panels.
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June 1, 2008. Nederlamp, an energy saving light bulb given away by NUON, a local public utility company to promote the national Dutch soccer team at the European Soccer Championship, next week. Since I am interested in energy efficient lamps I went to the Nuon Energy Shop in Leiderdorp to pick up one of these little wonders. The Nederlamp, as it is called, can be seen in the left picture while the right picture shows my 4W Pharox LED-lamp for comparison. The Nederlamp is a Philips 8 W Softone fluorescence bulb shining a pleasant white-yellowish light comparable with a classical 40W incandescent lamp. The light coming from the Pharox lamp, (pictured under similar conditions; no flash) is slightly more reddish (the color is exaggerated by the CCD chip in my camera). The Philips lamp yields more light and becomes warmer than the Pharox. It is incredible how much light both lamps provide given their low power usage. This is extremely efficient stuff. |
May
24, 2008. Kind message from Gistrup, Denmark. Hello
from Denmark! Congratulations on reaching 8.000 KWh of PV generated power.
I am currently standing at 1.290 KWh produced in 4 years using 4 Siemens SM-110
24 Volt panels and a Sunny Boy 700 inverter. In Denmark there are no subsidies
at all. All I am granted is that I can ‘buy’ my produced power back
without paying VAT and energy tax.
Here at 57 Degrees North, the yield is a less than in Nederland, but this month's production is rapidly approaching an all time record thanks to a lot of sunny days and almost no rain at all. The farmers are not happy, but I am (lots of SUN is good for my solar production).
I have just bought 4 more SM-110 panels. Second hand, but in working order. 8 panels is too much for my SB700 so I got my hands on a Mastervolt Sunmaster QS 1200, which should be able to accommodate all 8 panels in series. Before the 4 ‘new’ panels can be utilized, I will have to modify the panel mounts, so I can make rooms for thee extra panels.
My solar WEB-page is down, but you can ‘peek’ my status screen on http://www.lundbykrat.com/webcam/pv.html. I am awaiting the QS Bus to USB converter from Mastervolt. When it arrives I will change the inverter and should be able to put up a new solar page.
I will continue to follow your progress on your home page - All the best to you and your family!
May 21, 2008. The 8,000 kWh barrier broken. Thanks to the very favorable sunshine in Februari, April and May the PV panels on my roof are humming along happily. Two weeks earlier than expected the total yield of my solar panels has reached and breached 8,000 kWh ((I started in 2000 with 6 panels, today the total is 17 panels). Compare with this: the energy of ten kilowatt hours is equal to the energy contents of 1 litre of petrol. Eight megawatt hours is equal to 800 litres of petrol. My car runs 14 kilometers on each litre, so the solar production stands for 11.000 kilometers of sunny rides. 8.000 kilowatt hours is equal to the electricity consumption of Johnny Average and his family during 2 years and 3 months (avarage electricity consumption per household in Holland is 3,500 kWh/year).
The nice thing about PV panels is that they don't retire at 8 megawatt hours. They go on, day after day, year after year. Based on past production patterns I can predict that in a year and a half the production of my system will pass the next milestone: 10 megawatt hours of green, super clean electricity.
May 20, 2008. Dutch Secretary for the Environment inspects HRe furnace, the highly advertised successor of the high-efficiency central gas heating furnace (HR-CV). I call this gem the magical furnace. Indeed, how magical it is for profit generation in the industry while the question remains open whether the private owner of the device will profit at all. Most suspiciously this magical gadget will consume more natural gas than the HR-CV unit that it replaces. It is a small co-generator, primarily producing electricity (excess electricity is supposed to flow back into the public grid) while the surplus heat is used to heat the home. Compared with the classical situation of heating (HR-units) and electricity generation (big coal power stations), the overall CO2 emissions will be lower. However, one needs a severe twist of the law to create a feed-in tariff for the co-generated electricity because that power is generated with fossil means. People are not allowed to feed electricity back into the grid generated with, let's say, a diesel generator. How different is a magical furnace from a diesel generator? How can you distinguish a magical furnace from a Honda generator? A homeowner will think twice before buying such a magical device: a) he is going to burn more natural gas which burdens the wallet, b) excess electricity co-generated with his precious device given back to the grid will not pay off (although the power utility will be extremely glad to receive this "free" electricity), c) his maintenance costs may be higher than with a classical HR-CV unit because of the complexity (burner plus generator).
In other words: magical humbug. An overclocked furnace, no more, no less. By contrast, a solar PV-powered heat pump will only pump heat, not generate heat and therefore not burn whatever fossil fuel. No fuel costs. The electricity necessary for the pumping is supplied super green via the PV panels. And in summer a heat pump may work as an airconditioner. Try to beat that.
May 15, 2008. Flying a solar-powered airplane live in a simulator. The Virtual Flight 2008 will be conducted by the Solar Impulse team from May 12 to 16 in the construction hangar of the HB-SIA prototype, at the aerodrome of Dübendorf near Zurich in Switzerland. Follow the test flights live via the internet.
May 14, 2008. One percent extra. The Californian company SunPower announced yesterday in a press release that they have successfully produced a prototype 5-inch solar cell with a solar conversion efficiency of 23.4%, setting a new world record for cells this size. The company's aim is to start marketing solar panels with these cells in approximately two years. The cell is part of a larger effort to reduce the price of solar panels by 50% in 2012. SunPower is the manufacturer of solar panels for very large solar PV farms. Aerial pictures of several of these farms are on display on the website of SunPower.
May 12, 2008. Tesla starts selling elektric sports car. Associated Press announced that Tesla's full-electrical car 'Tesla Roadster' is now in production. 'Governator' Arnold Schwarzenegger, among others, seems to have ordered one.
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May 5, 2008. Up and up and up. Scaring. the graph on the left shows the trend in the carbon dioxide concentration in the Earth's atmosphere, published by US National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). The curve is even slightly progressive.In 2007 it went past the 380 ppm level. 400 ppm is in sight. In my country funny TV ads are being shown paid by energy companies claiming how eco-friendly they think they are (burning cow dung, among others).This is their spin towards the general public. On the other hand the big energy generators Nuon, E.ON, RWE and Electrabel have started the construction of coal-burning power stations (licensed by the Secretary for the Environment (!)). If we want to adhere to the Kyoto treaty, and if we want to reverse this dramatic trend leading to climate disaster, we have to stop wasting energy in the first place, abandon coal-beased power generation, and start generating much more and much faster environmentally benign energy (wind, solar) than we are currently doing. By the way, I am not a nukes-supporter. |
May 1, 2008. Europe Solar Days, May 16-17. More than 4,000 events will be held in 10 European countries. One of tehse eventis is the Sunny Saturday in The Netherlands, organized by ODE, when a number of PV-owners will open the doors of tyheir home sto show and explain their solar-PV and solar-thermal installations. An announcement of the European Solar Days can be found at www.solardays.eu, and the details of the event in Holland at ODE (in Dutch).
April 24, 2008. Ever amazing Yankees. Americans always surprise me. As a nation, the USA is the most exuberant energy guzzling country on earth. Some Americans are proud patriotic Hummer drivers. Movie stars drive Toyota's Prius. Texans build the biggest wind farms, and among the biggest PV generators on earth is the 14 MW installation at Nellis Air Force Base, Las Vegas, NV. I recently ran across the US Army Hawaiii Family Housing website, featuring a web camera on one of the newly built army family Housing residential areas. Take a look! Amazing! All homes equipped with solar water heaters, and in the backyard sheds with PV roofs that caught the eye of a New York Times Dot Earth reporter.
April 10, 2008. About jobs .The number of people employed by companies working in the renewable energy sector in Germany increased last year to 249,300. In 2004 this number was 160,500 so this sector is enjoying unparalleled job growth. In 2020 there could be as many as 400,000 German workers earning their living in the renewable energy sector. Solar currently employs 38,600. In my country a paltry 300 people are employed in the solar energy sector. The gap between neighbouring Germany and my country is alarmingly wide. This gap is the result of the progressive German Renewable Energy Law which is far more advanced compared with the conservative poor-man's handouts by the Dutch goverment and very tight local regulation. Source: RenewableWorld
April 7, 2008. Greg's Sun Cubes to collect energy from sunlight. The Australian Greg Watson, the inventor and manufacturer of the SunCube™ has installed a Sun Cube™ farm on the roof of his manufacturing facility in Adelaide, South Australia. The South Australian government has commissioned Green and Gold Energy, Greg's company, to build and operate three big Sun Cube energy farms. A Sun Cube™ is a solar concentrating, sun tracking system very well suited for sunny, hot climates like that of Australia, the southwestern USA, parts of Africa, the Middle-East and maybe southern Europe.
April 4, 2008. Burns all for you to generate electricity. In my country, energy suppliers are compelled by law to publish every year their fuel mix, that is the stuff they have burned to generate the electricity purchased by their customers. Here is the 2007 fuel mix of several of the public energy companies in The Netherlands.
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| coal l |
22%
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24%
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20%
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26%
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0%
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| natural gas |
40%
|
46%
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61%
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48%
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0%
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| renewable |
29%
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17%
|
9%
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4%
|
100%
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| nuclear |
7%
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9%
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7%
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19%
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0%
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| rest |
3%
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5%
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3%
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3%
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0%
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No surprise that my electricity supplier is the rightmost one ! Source: Energeia
March 30, 2008. Mallorca, Spain, turns solar. The German company, Phoenix Solar has announced plans to install a 1.2 MWp solar PV generator on the island of Mallorca, Spain. This PV station will become on line July, 2008. The company is installing much more in sunny Spain: 5.3 MWp in the province of Castilla La Mancha and another 4.7 Megawatts of PV in the province of Granada. Installed solar power in Spain currently stands at 625 Mwp. Source: Phoenix Solar
March 29, 2008. Power off tonight at 20:00. A number of world cities is switching off city lights tonight between 20:00 and 21:00 as a warning against climate change. Sydney (Australia) was the first, turning off the lights of the famous Opera House and Sydney Harbor Bridge. Bangkok, Toronto, Chicago and many more cities world wide will follow. As a sympathizer I will turn off the lights of my home at 20:00 p.m. local time and keep only one little light on until 21:00. Also my computer and internet access gear will be shut off. See ya tomorrow, mates. Source: BBC
March 2, 2008. Mind boggling numbers. If you add all the things done during a lifetime, oh boy, that accumulates impressively. The same holds for the production of anything, even solar photovoltaic panels. The Japanese company, Sharp, which has been one of the pioneers in mass manufacture of solar cells and solar panels, published recently in a modest message that the company had reached at the end of 2007 the accumulated production of 2 GWp. This is an impressive achievement, and worth congratulations. Assuming that a 100 Wp panel approximates 1 square meter the Japanese company has manufactured in 15 years the amount of 20 milion square meters of solar apnel. According to Wikipedia the length and width of a soccer field is 100 and 75 meters respectively, so we are discussing here the equivalent of paving 2,667 soccer fields with blue tiles. Sharp encounters strong competition of German and Chinese comnpanies which threaten the market leading position of Sharp. Things move fast in the PV world.
February 24, 2008. Economy of photovoltaics. Solar photovoltaic energy for the home may enjoy increasing popularity in the USA, yet their costs far outweigh the benefits, according to a recently published economic analysis by dr. Severin Borenstein who is professor at the University of California and head of the University's Energy Institute. Borenstein: "We are throwing money away by installing the current solar PV technology, which is a loser" (quote taken from the press release of the University of California).
Thank you, dr Borenstein! I am a staunch supporter of PV. You suggest that I am supporting a losing scheme. Supporting a losing scheme can be done only by losers. Consequently I am a loser! Wow! Should I immediately stop this website and sell my PV panels? Of course not, and I am sure that dr. Borenstein did not intend to offend me nor my co-supporters of solar energy, he only intended to warn us not to be too optimistic. So I downloaded the paper from www.ucei.berkeley.edu to read the analysis myself. It is an impressive article, well researched. Borenstein did a good job. He investigated 26,522 solar PV systems in his home state (which by the way is an amount roughly equal to the number of privately owned systems in my home country).
Borenstein's paper concludes that, even after considering that the panels reduce greenhouse gases, their costs still far outweigh their social benefits. Part of this is caused by slow integration of solar systems by utility companies. However, the premium value of solar PV could be from 30 percent to 50 percent higher if U.S. systems were run with less capacity and prices were allowed to rise as demand increases at different time.
Econonomic studies like dr. Borenstein's always project the curent economic situation on the future and they work with hard facts. 1) there is no carbon tax, 2) efforts by private citizens to reduce CO2 emissions are not awarded 3) utility electricity rates remain stable over the years and are not tied to the oil price 4) the environmental and health costs of fossil electricity generation are never taken into consideration, an important factor is missed also, notably that owners of PV systems get used towards looking at power consumption from a different point of view than plain consumers do.
In an interview, Borenstein said that if one had money to spend, the most economic way to invest in the environment would be to take measures to insulate the home. I completely agree with him on this issue.
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February 16, 2008. Logging the energy yield is a dream of many owners of PV systems, and quite some inverters are equipped with logging functions. Most of the inverters owned by me however do not have built-in logging, so when I saw an advertisement for a cheap energy logger I was immediately caught. I received a packet with the device last Tuesday, and only today I had time to connecte the instrument to the mains of my PV system array and let it run. This logger is an interesting device since it contains memory on which logging data is stored (every minute: time stamp, voltage, current, cosinus phi). After a while you can dump the contents of the memory onto a SD-memory card and transfer the data to your computer. That's the theory. The the vendor has printed a text on the cardboard package that the logging files can be imported in an Excel spreadsheet which, unfortunately, does not work.Excel does not recognize the .bin file format in which the data is saved. A helpful programmer (thanks, TD!) wrote for a solar friend a conversion utility that converts the binary data into the .csv format which is importable into spreadsheets. The entire procedure is somewhat clumsy but it works. |
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The result can be appreaciated on the left. The conversion utility is a DOS-tool and has to be run at command line level. I remembered the syntax from the good old DOS days and from Linux excercises. Excel is a recognized powerful tool to prepare nice graphs. The graph shows the power output of the system. We had a great day: cold weather, crisp atmosphere, sunshine all day. A record sunshine day for February. Because the logger is logging the power output of the entire system the curve is not symmetrical but has a shoulder on the descending part. The highest power output was recorded between 11:30 and noon: 705 Watts. Not so bad for Northwest Europe in winter! The original SunPower panels face the south-east, and later during the day sunshine starts hitting the other panels. We had a lot of sunshine today which resulted in a record 4 kWh production. This month is on its way to become a rememberable solar month. |
February 9, 2008. No coal, no nukes? is it possible to support the electricity needs of a society completely from renewable sources? Some Germans think so and they set out to prove it scientifically. A group working at Kassel University has investigated the output of a so-called combined renewable power plant which is in reality a series of inteconnected renewable energy generating systems hooked up to a computer monitoring, prediction and regulating system: wind turbines in the north of Germany, solar parks in the south, and biomass generating stations in between. An existing pumping storage system was hooked to the array to store excess wind energy or to assist the biomass generators in case of darkness, no wind and high demand. The outcome was surprisingly positive. See a movie explaining the concept and the workout (in English) on the site, op www.unendlich-viel-energie.de (endless energy).
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Januari 23, 2008. A big advantage of solar electricity is a stable utility bill. Take a look at the electricity whereabouts of my PV-supported household and the impact of net metering. The graph shows electricity consumption of my household with 6-month intervals between 1999 (no PV yet) through 2000 (fist 6 solar panels) and 2005 (most recent expansion: 1 kWp PV extra). The main electricity meter has two displays: day (expensive) and night (cheap). Needless to say that excess electricity is sent back into the public grid during daytime. This 'export' causes my meter to run backward, short and slow in winter, long and fast in summer. Plotted is the difference in consumed electricity registered by the daytime tariff meter. The first six solar panels (0.6 kWp) arrived mid-2000. Result in 2001: a slight dip (15% self-generated). In the years following I installed more panels. The sum of electricity consumption (the bill!) decreased. After the last great expansion (2005, 1 kWp), registered yearly consumption hovers around zero. The excess (negative consumption) in the summer is offset by 'import in the winter season. The impact on my electricity bill is that I do not have to pay an advance and in addition that I only pay for the electricity used in the (cheap) nightly tarifff hours. We burned less natural gas as well for heating because of improved insulation, a solar water heater in 2003 and in the same year a new ultra-efficient CV heating unit. And remember: solar electricity is green and ultra-ultraclean. |
January 12, 2008. I wonder how thoughtful it is to reconsider nuclear power. The British light bulb (and the European as well) must keep burning. But isn't it a better idea to replace the 95% inefficient incandescent bulb with the 90% efficient CFL lamp? If every home in the UK and continental Europe would be really energy efficient, would there be need for nuclear power stations, these monolithic molochs that generate so massively electric power that must be consumed and therefore conflict brutally with energy conservation ? In The Netherlands the only thing the single national nuclear power station does is to power an aluminium smelter. Is that wat we want? More aluminium? Do we need more aluminium smelters or should we recycle beer and soda cans instead of throwing them away. The point here is that nuclear power is centralized massive monolithic electrical power generation of the past, big ugly and dangerous things with huge high voltage stations and power lines, while renewable power is decentralized, no big power line necessary because the power is consumed where it is being generated. You don't feel radiation from radioactive emissions, your DNA just gets damaged without the owner knowing it.
Then there is the nucear fuel, the radioactive waste issue and the assumed reduction of emission of carbon dioxide. Nuclear fuel is imported, just like oil is. There ain't any uranium mine in the entire UK. Somebody has to protect the transports. The military? World supplies of usable uranium are limited and the shortages are for the time being replenished with dismantled nuclear warheads. Uranium has to be mined in the first place and from poorer and poorer ores which means more rock to grind and more mine tailings. What is the CO2 emission for hauling billions of tons of rock and grinding all this stuff ? Isn't it natural to consider breeding technology once the step has been made to invest in nuclear fission reactors? How safe are breeder reactors? Is there any commercially operating breeder reactor in the entire universe? Who is going to pay for 100,000 years of waste storage? Will future generations thank us for waste cleanup, just like the British taxpayer currenly thanks the previous generation for leaving for us roughly 7 billion pounds worth of waste cleanup?
Then there is the money. You can flip a coin only once. Money invested in a nuclear powered society is not invested in a renewable energy powered society. It takes a lot of money and a lot of time to build a nuclear power station. Both have in ALL cases of nuclear power plants exceeded. Construction of the new Finnish Olkiluoto-3 reactor is two years behind schedule, and the cost overrun is company secret. In my country the municipality of Steenwijkerland threatens to demolish a newly built home because completion took two years longer than announced in the contract. I suggest the Steenwijkerland mayor sends his bulldozers all the way to Finland. There's work to do!
Finally, do you have to bury a wind turbine 10,000 feet deep after it has fulfilled its task? Come on! Nuclear energy is not green, the reduction in CO2 emisions is doubtful if one considers the entire supply chain, nuclear power is at odds with saving energy, uranium supply is in doubt and in foreign hands, the investments are gigantic, cost overrun more than likely, and there is highly radioactive waste to consider. And, who will pay the insurance policy?
January 5, 2008. Ambitious solar plans in Japan. Call it the 14 million solar homes plan. In de Japan Times one could read on Januari 1 that the Japanese Government has published plans to support policies to have in 2030 solar panels installed on 30% of all homes in Japan. The solar systems will be full-blown 3,7 kWp systems. One such a system produced sufficient electricity to supply an average Japanese family with electrical power. Installed PV power will grow fronm the curent 1300 MWp to 40 GWp, a 30-fold increase. Sourcen: Japan Times.
January 3, 2008. What does 100$ per barrel mean 4U? - You don't have to be a professional economist to expect this:
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December 30, 2007. 99 cents per peak Watt on the horizon? In Europe, consumer prices of standard silicon solar panels currently hover in the € 5.50 (US$ 7.75) range. That's a lot of money to invest for Johnny the Consumer. With a lot of press hoopla, the innovative company, Nanosolar, has started large-scale printing of CIGS-PV nano-ink on a flexible aluminum carrier foil. The result is a thin-film PV panel with relatively low conversion efficiency, yet with a very spectacular price-to-performance ratio. Nanosolar says that they may be able to produce their PV panels for as little as 99 dollar cent per peak Watt. The US price for conventional silicon solar panels according to SolarBuzz is at the moment 4 dollar 83 per peak Watt. Quite a lot compared with 99 cents!. Nanosolar says that their production portfolio is fully booked until mid-2009 with orders from investment companies starting up their own solar powers tations. The consumer has to wait a few years, which given the flaws that came with the early silicon panels, is not such a bad idea. Sceptics remain critical about durabillity. we will see. Keep an eye on Nanosolar. Source: The Guardian.
December 24, 2007. 35 GWh solar electricity produced in the Netherlands in 2006. Imagine a moist climate that directs rain-laden clouds day after day over a flat, windswept country in Northwestern Europe. Could this be the scene for the production of electricity via solar panels? Yet it is happening. An amazing 35 GWh of solar electricity was produced in the Netherlands in 2006, according to a report published by the Central Netherlands Bureau for Statistics (CBS). Quite a lot of electrical power, sufficient to provide 10,000 Dutch homes all year round with this free, zero-carbon dioxide emission, green stuff.
December 19, 2007. President Bush signs energy bill. Today, mr Bush signed H.R.6, the Energy Independence and Security Act 2007. One of the most attractive aspects of the bill is the fuel efficiency of cars which will be set at 35 mpg in 2020 for all new cars. The bill does not particularly support renewable energy. Quite the contrary. Mr. Bush made a few remarks that may sound like music in the ears of the nuclear industry lobby. Source: The White House.
December 17, 2007. Leiden icicles. On the 12th of February, 1929 the 16th century city hall of Leiden burnt completely to the ground. The only thing leftw as a ruined facade. It was so cold that day that water from the fire fighting formed grotesque icicles all the way from the gutters to the ground. This historical event inspired an artist and a group of Leiden citizens to design a daring Christmas time illumination of the city hall.
The project 'Lichtjes Leids' includes reindeer, angels, strings of lights on the town square facade of the city hall, an illuminated bell tower and these LED-icicles on the front facade at the Breestraat ('Broad Street'). The entire icicle assembly probably uses less electricity than the three ornaments spanning the Breestraat. Tourists, please travel to Leiden to see this fantastic Leiden-by-night spectacle which will be around until the 6th of January, 2008. Take youc camera with you because several more photogenic opportunities are on offer in the close vicinity of the city hall.
December 14, 2007. Mass solar! According to Boston.com the Massachusetts administration has launched a new rebate program to boost solar energy in this northeastern US state. 68 million dollar will be spent to support homeowners who want to join the already 3,000 Massachusetts home owners that profit from the free energy coming from the sun. Currently 4 MW of solar energy is installed; the program aims to increase this to 27 MW in 2012 and as much as 250 MW in 2017.
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December 10, 2007. Ireland bans bulb. Legislation is being introduced in the Irish parliament to forcibly ban the incandescent lightbulb effective January 1, 2009. The Secretary for the Environment, John Gormley, announced the ban and said "By getting rid of these bulbs we will save 700,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions every year." Irish consumers are estimated to save €185 million in electricity costs every year as a result of the measure.Source: Eetimes The Dutch Minister for the Environment coined a similar measure this spring, but following intense pressure she had to cancel her proposal. Too bad, and all the poohah around the measure painfully showed how conservative and environment-unfriendly many of my compatriots think. |
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December 1, 2007. How much solar power in winter? I constructed with my spreadsheet program this picture showing the November (red bars) and December (yellow bars) production patterns across the last seven years. November 2007 wasn't that bad after all. On average the 6 SunPower panels produce in November 11,5 kWh, with 2006 holding the record. In December on average 7,5 kWh is collected. These are modest production numbers (June yields on average 56 kWh) but an amazing fact remains that even in winter there is plenty energy out there, sufficient to ppwer for instance my Christmas light strings. Last year I bought LED-illumination for the Christmas tree, and now the power balance for the Christmas lights is positive. There is surplus! The difference between June (56 kWh) and December (7,5 kWh) is a factor 8. In winter the earth receives much less solar energy than in summer. That's why it is cold in December and warm in June, after all.. |
November 29, 2007. Money back from the utility company. I received a check worth 120 euros from the utility company to balance the bill for electricity consumption, past year. Checks like these (in addition to the already modest monthly charge for electricity compared with my neighbours) are the result of having PV panels on the roof of my home. The ownership of photovoltaic panels pay off!
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November 23, 2007. Which one is the energy saving lamp? (see message of (November 13). Both fixtures contain energy saving lamps! The left one features a classical 1.5W mini compact fluorescent lamp (bought at IKEA) while the right one houses a Pharox LED lamp (3.4W). Most respondents (n=16) gave the correct answer. Typical for the Pharox LED lamp is the reddish light. Most of this reddishness is not seen by the human eye, it is produced by the CCD chip in my digital camera. My own eyes perceive the light coming off the Pharox LED lamp as yellowish white while the IKEA lamp provides a more distinct yellowish light. This picture has not been tinkered with Photoshop or the like. To all respondents: thanks a lot folks for your comments. |
November 22, 2007. Chrysler in the electric car business. Chrysler will be presenting the all-electric, pluggable Dodge Zeo at the Detroit Auto Show (to be held January 2008). The Zeo will carry a load of Li-ion batteries which will provide a driving range of 250 miles. An increasing score of car manufacturers is designing or even planning to sell electric cars. An electric power train is much more energy efficient, simpler to manufacture and and lighter than the good old, CO2 spewing explosion motor. Many people including myself judge it immoral to steal food out of the mouths of hungry poor people in the Third world to convert that into ethanol to power SUV's. I bet on electric cars provided that those Li-ion batteries remain stable and don't explode like the infamous Dell laptop batteries, last year. Also Fisker is going to show a plug-in electric sports car at the Detroit show.
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November 16, 2007. Action against coal burning power stations. The Green Party of The Netherlands is opposed to plans submitted by the energy companies, Nuon, Electrabel, E.ON, Delta and Essent to construct five big new coal burning electricity power stations. These plans are indeed ridiculous. CO2 emissions from the new power stations will equal those of 7.5 million cars. Our country will be among the first to drown when sea levels rise because of climate change. By raising atmospheric CO2 even more these power stations will in effect help to get our feet wet faster. This is completely unacceptable because in the mean time our society is wasting billions of kilowatt hours of electricity on ridiculous things as stand-by power (one complete generating station), light bulbs (95% energy wasted as heat!), inefficient applicances (another generating station), illuminating the entire country by night (including wind mills - one additional power station) and so forth. These proposed new power stations are therefore redundant and unwanted, and the promise by the energy companies to develop CO2 sequestering techniques is just propaganda, first because these techniques do not exist and second since CO2 storage methods store the carbon dioxide in the soil (which is integral part of the environment). The web site is www.kappenmetkolen.nl (in Dutch) |
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November 13, 2007. Which one is the energy saving lamp? Left or right. Some people argue that the light fro energy saving lamps is ugly, cool, too little, and that one is inclined to let these lamps burn longer, offsetting the savings. I have placed these two lamps next to ach other, and you may tell me which one burns an energy saviung lamp. E-mail your solution.:
As soon as I have received sufficient answers, I will publish the results and reveal the solution. |
November 8, 2007. Fifty things that will save the planet is a list published recently by the Guardian with measures, tips and tricks by 25 experts to save energy, waste, reduce your carbon dioxide footprint and the like.
November 7, 2007. International Energy Agency confirms oil shortage next seven years - and beyond. Peak oil has begun.
November 5, 2007. Oil shortage in foreseeable future? In the 100-page report "Crude oil: the supply outlook", published October 2007 by the Energy Watchgroup a chilling prognosis for future fossil fuel production is predicted. According to the report, world production of oil has reached a plateau and probably will not further expand. So many oil fields are 'mature' (this means: over the top; yields declining), and so little is being found, that there is fair chance that the stagnating production in spite of huge price hikes messages that we are witnessing peak oil right now. The main message of the report: do not expect the production of oil to grow substantially anymore, it may even start to decline in spite of all efforts to pump up more oil. Don't expect the price of petrol to go down; fuel shortages will begin to occur in poor countries as richer nations claim remaining fuel. The poor will be hurt first. Natural gas will follow in a couple of years, and coal will peak later. I checked the oil production numbers on BP's website, and these look very similar. According to BP, oil production in 2006 was 81.7 Mb/d. Oil reserves estimated by BP in 2006 1208.2 gigabarrels (Gb). According to EW the reserve stands at 1,050 Gb. The optimistic US Geological Survey estimated in 2000 oil reserves at 2,300 Gb. Maybe the latter number includes tar sands and oil shale, but oil from these sources is hard to extract. Since 81.7Mbd * 365 days equals 29 Gb, it follows that the last drop of oil can be expected to flow out of the empty pipe in 36-40 years, if demand remains constant. Since demand still grows and keeps growing, those 36 years may shrink fast. The last oil will be hard to extract. Peak oil therefore is imminent if not already occurring, according to The Energy Watchgroup.
October 30, 2007. IBM announces a way to produce solar silicon out of rejected wafers. At IBM's Burlington (VT) microchip facility a procedure has been developed to grind solar silicon out of wafers that do not satisfy production standards. See the report movie on the IBM website.
October 28, 2007. France will turn green, Président Sarkozy promises. No new motorways, no new airports, unless green?
October 27, 2007. Gigawatts in Singapore. Last week the Norwegian company, REC (Renewable Energy Corporation) announced that they had agreed with the Government of Singapore to construct an integrated solar silicon -PV manufacturing center in Singapore. Accoring to REC Singapore offered the best combination of geographical location, fiscal and investment opportunities, personnel and profitability forecasts. Plans are to build the plant piecemeal. Groundbreaking will be in the first half of 2008. In its final stage production will be a stagering 1.5 GWp worth of solar panels per year.
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October
26, 2007.
Final classification
World Solar Challenge
* Nuon Solar Team
at 2007-10-25 16:54:00 Website of the organization at www.wsc.org.au |
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October 22, 2007. 2nd day of the World Solar Challenge: passage in Tennant Creek: Belgian team ahead of the pack. * Umicore at 2007-10-22
11:08:00 |
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Devil's
Marbles, Tennant Creek, NT
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October 21, 2007. Start of the World Solar Challenge. The two Dutch teams (Nuna-4 and Twente-1) performed well, but the Belgian team (Umicore) beat them all ! Positions in Dunmarra after the first leg: * Aurora Challenge at 2007-10-21 16:13:00, * Nuon Solar Team at 2007-10-21 16:39:00,* Southern Taiwan University at 2007-10-21 17:30:00. Superb!
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October
12, 2007.
Today is the start of the Solar Decathlon.
This decathlon is a design contest organized by the US Department of
Energy in which 20 university teams across the nation compete for the
most beautiful, original and efficient solar home. Model homes have
been built on the Mall in Washinton. The display will be open to the
public until October 20. The web site is www.solardecathlon.org.
The aerial picture on the left has been kindly provided by the organizing
committee. . |
September 23, 2007. Solon AG to build a 44MWp solar electricity generating station near Ayora, province of Sevilla, Spain. Source: Solarserver.
September
17, 2007. Chernobyl cleanup. The
French firm, Novarka, will construct a giant steel structure (190 metres wide
and 200m long) cto replace the concrete casing built over the exploded reactor
after the 1986 accident. The project will cost an estimated 1 billion euros.
It will take five years to complete and the authorities say they will then
be able to start dismantling the reactor. The ruin still contains 95% of the
original nuclear material. Money for construction of the steel cathedral has
been collected by international donors. Source: BBC
If you want to have a look at Pripyat, the abandoned town in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone: click here or on the Pripyat sign below.
September 12, 2007. Two solar parks to be built near Sault St. Marie, Ontario, Canada. Each solar park will consist of 10 MWp solar panels. The Ontario Power Authority (OPA) signed contracts under the Standard Offer Program supporting renewable energy. Source: RenewableEnergyAcess
September 12, 2007. Oil closes at record US$ 79,85 (NYMEX) after hitting the all time high 80 bucks.
September 11, 2007. Record oil price: US$ 78, 26 at the NYMEX. This may cause a local natural gas price hike. usually, prices are fixed for 6 months; the price for the first 6 months of 2008 will be published early Novermber. Should I consider buying more solar panels or extra heat insulation for my home?
September 7, 2007. Oil up and up. One barrel of Texas Sweet Crude Oil is featuring US$ 76,70 at the NYMEX. Oil is going up relentlessly. Only one year ago, the Dutch Ministry of Economic Affair was still calculating economical forecasts based on 40 dollars per barrel. And winter on the northern hemisphere is still some months away.
August 28, 2007. High EG import tariff on energy saving light bulbs prolonged. The European Commission has decided to retain import tariffs on Chinese-made energy-efficient light bulbs for up to another 12 months. Source: BBC
August 27, 2007. Around the world in a solar taxi. A Swiss team of adventurers is touring around the world in an exclusively solar-driven car, the Solar Taxi. The start has been on July 3 in Luzern (Switzerland). Current position is Jordan, at the border with Israel. The trek will take 14 months during which the car will travel 50,000 kilometers. A website devoted to this epochial event can be found at www.solartaxi.com.
August 22, 2007. Ozzie schools and families go solar. The federal government of Australia will provide funding to help every school in the country to install a solar hot water system and rainwater tanks. To this purpose, Aus$ 336 million has been earmarked. Another Aus$ 252 million over five years will be made available to provide for 225,000 solar thermal rebates of $1,000 for homes which install solar and heat pump water heaters. The rebate is available if electric water heating and storage water systems are replaced. Some income restrictions have been imposed. Source: Renewableenergyfocus
August 13, 2007. Is Peak Oil at hand? The International Energy Agency (IEA) issued a warning today that oil production has to rise [i.e. that of OPEC members] because otherwise a shortage of oil might be on the horizon. I's an easy guess what the consequences of such a shortage would be for the petrol prices at the pump. My conclusion is that consumption is simply too high. Oil prices took a ride on the rollercoaster the last few days but the cause of that was the popping up and down of stock exchanges. Source: Financial Times.
August 9, 2007. The Chevrolet Volt is coming. General Motors Corporation will begin road testing its Chevrolet Volt plug-in hybrid in the spring of next year and remains on track to produce the rechargeable car by late 2010, a senior executive said Thursday. More news about the Volt and its competitors on the website CNN.com
August 5, 2007. US House of Representatives approves Renewable Electricity Portfolio bill. If approved in the Senate as well and signed by the President, this bill will force American utility companies in 2020 to generate 15% of their energy from renewable sources. However, the bill will have to pass the Senate, and Big Oil is really powerful here. Source: BBC.
August 1, 2007. Toyota testing a plug-in hybrid car. The Toyota Prius is a fuel efficient car (1 litre of petrol provides 23 kilometres). When you tweak the software and put in a few more batteries the car can do a lot better, especially when it is possible to charge the batteries at home or at work from an external electrical power source. The Japanese car maker apparently knows this and has announced that it is working on a plug-in variant of its hugely succesful Prius: the Plug-In HV. Source: Yahoo News.
Much more about plug-in hybrid cars on www.gm-volt.com/
July 30, 2007. New record set for conversion efficiency of solar cells. Researchers at Delaware University, USA reported today that they had developed a solar cell with 42.8 % conversion efficiency, that is more than two per cent better than the previous record set by folks at Boeing, Seattle (40.7%). According to the Delaware investigators, the 42.8% conversion efficiency is a step on a road towards the dream target of 50%. The conversion efficiency is the amount of energy in sunlight finally converted by a solar cell into electricity. The remaining energy is lost as heat. Current commercial polycrystalline silicon cells like the ones on my own home have conversion efficiencies of 14-15%. The best, monocrystalline, commercial solar cells for the home achieve 20%. Source: RenewableEnergyAccess
July 29, 2007. Manhattan in a nutshell. Researchers at Georgia Tech have succeeded in building carbon nano-skyskrapers on a silicium suface and then coating the assembly with PV-material. Result is a highly efficient solar cell that traps nearly all photons that hit it. The efficiency is enormous. Breakthrough? See: www.gatech.edu/news-room/release.php?id=1337
July 26, 2007. Biggest CSP generator in the world to be constructed in California. In California, legislation compels power utilities to generate in 2010 20% of their electricity in a renewable way (RPS, Renewable Portfolio Standard). The Californian utility, Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E) announced yesterday that they have ordered a 553 MW CSP power station to be constructed in the Mojave desert. The solar generating station will be finished in 2011: nine square miles, 1.2 million mirrors. The technology is the same as in the 25-year old, recently expanded (150 MW) installation at Kramer Junction. See for CSP the page dealing with other solar energy. (Source: SolarBuzz)
July 21, 2007. Additional PV panel. One measure to fight the mighty Ampere (see July 19, below) is to install more solar panels on the roof of your home. Also in Holland, hidden or parasite consumption by stand-by numerous electrical gadgets is rampant. One way to do something about this is to generate your own clean power (of course the best thing to do is not to buy energy-savvy gadgets) I found via the Web a nice used 110 Wp monocrystalline Siemens PV panel for a reasonable price. I bought it, picked it up and mounted it this afternoon on the roof of the shed. The blue panel in the background is a 145Wp that I bought in 2003.
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July 19, 2007. The Ampere Strikes Back is the title of a fascinating report published by the Energy Savings Trust. This organization extrapolates current trends in ownership of electrical appliances and gadgets. If things develop according to an 'business as usual' scenario, in 2020 a whopping 45% of the electricity consumption in the average UK home will be caused by computer games, entertainment and ICT applications. To generate the extra power consumption alone, 14 new average electricity power generation units would be necessary in the UK.
One of the nice things about the report (apart from the dazzling lay-out) is the distribution page. This page is an account of the average ownership of electrical gadgets in the UK. Compare with your own possessions:
| gadget/appliance |
average
|
in
your household
|
| TV |
2-3
|
|
| video cassette recorder |
1
|
|
| DVD speler-recorder |
1-2
|
|
| set top TV box / digi box/ decoder |
1
|
|
| stereoinstallatie muziek |
2
|
|
| mobiele telefoon |
3
|
|
| MP3 speler / ipod-achtige |
1-2
|
|
| computer |
1
|
|
| notebook computer |
1
|
|
| printer |
1
|
|
| scanner/fax |
1
|
|
| huistelefoon (DEC) |
3
|
|
| telefoonbeantwoorder |
1
|
|
| computerspelletjes console |
1
|
|
| breedbandmodem//router |
1
|
|
| digitale fotocamera |
1
|
|
| videocamera |
1
|
|
| radio |
2
|
|
| afwasautomaat |
1
on 4 households
|
|
| stofzuiger |
1
|
|
| wasdroger |
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July 12, 2007. California declares war on parasite energy consumption. On July 1, 2007 a new rule has become effective in California demanding that standby use of electronic appliances not exceed 0.5 Watt. The regulations, already approved by the California Energy Commission in December 2004, will limit the amount of electricity used while electronic devices are on standby power. They are a significant step toward meeting the state's 20 percent renewable energy goal by 2010.
The conservation standards, known as Title 20, target "standby power" and reduce the ever-increasing consumption of residential electricity. Standby power is defined as the power consumed by an appliance during the lowest possible electricity consuming mode. The new regulations mandate that external power supplies sold in California must draw only 1/2-watt of energy. Previously, such power supplies could produce as much as five watts of energy. Californians may save as much as $75 dollar a year on power bills. Source: California Energy Commission.
Comment: If California can take the initiative and outmanoever Bush and a big-oil dominated Congress, so why can't any European country do the same? (i.e., being more progressive and faster than the European Commission?).
July 10, 2007. Off grid in the Dutch canals. Buy a houseboat and you can live anywhere in Holland. However, the conventional houseboat needs a connection for electrical power, water, gas and sewage. Not this one. The gewoonboot has a fully autonomous power generation and sewage treatment system. It is an energy-zero houseboat. Designed and made in Holland. The only thing you need is a jerrycan with drinking water and a few gallons of Diesel fuel per year. If I had the money I would be tempted to buy one. You can download a virtual tour. The site is in Dutch only.
July 3, 2007. Solar thermal installations extremely unpopular in the Netherlands in 2006. Sales in solar thermal installations grew in Europe in 2006 with an astonishing 47% (Belgium: 76%, France: 81%, Germany: 58%). One peculliar exception to this surge are The Netherlands where sales collapsed (--27%). 2007 is going to be a poor year as well for solar thermal installations in Holland. This is remarkable given the fact that next to insulating the home a solar thermal installation is the next major step to save energy and reduce carbon dioxide emissions. Apparently nobody cared in 2006, or anyway there was absolutely no government support at all for energy saving measures. Maybe the new center-left government with its huge ambitions (20 % energy savings in 2020) will induce by its inspiring words an all-out run by consumers on solar thermal installations in 2008 and beyond.Source: Holland Solar
June 23, 2007. San Francisco to develop solar energy web mapping. Enterprise Management Solutions, together with the City and County of San Francisco's Department of the Environment, has announced the development of the first solar mapping Web portal.
The portal estimates the solar energy potential for every commercial and residential rooftop in San Francisco and allows building owners to visualize the potential environmental benefits and monetary savings that would result from installing solar energy panels on their property. The Web portal can provide the following information for a specific rooftop: the estimated amount of solar photovoltaic (PV) energy that could be installed on the roof; the estimated amount of solar PV energy that could be generated at that site; potential electricity cost reduction resulting from the solar PV installation; estimated cost of installing a solar PV system, before and after state and federal incentives; potential carbon dioxide/greenhouse gas (CO2) reduction as a result of installing a solar PV system; case studies of other San Francisco businesses and homeowners who have already installed solar PV systems; and information about how to install a solar PV system, including contact information for local solar installers. Source: Alternative Energy
June 20, 2007. Google has also installed a 1.6 MWp solar PV system on the roofs of their headquarters. Watch the system of 9212 panels and the daily yield at Google's website.
June 19, 2007. Google.org, the philantropic arm of Google, has launched an initiative, RechargeIT, promoting plug-in electric hybrid vehicles. See www.google.org. The goal is a 100 mpg electric/hybrid plugin car
June 15, 2007. Minister sets goal of 3,000 MW land-based wind power in 2011. In a speech this morning, the Dutch Secretary for the Environment announced a new target for wind power in The Netherlands in 2011. Celebrating the landmark 1500 MW currently employed, she aannounced thatshe and her colleagues, the Secretaries of Economic Affairs and Agriculture, will do everything they can to support doubling existing wind power on land in 2011. This means adding 1500 more megawatts worth of wind turbine capacity in three years.
June 14, 2007. Dutch Government to incease spending on measures to reduce CO2 emissions, support for renewable energy and on measures to save energy. Today, the Prime Minister announced plans to increase Government spending the next 4 years with substantial money (although not spectacular). Big-business renewable energy will receive 51 million Euros on top of the existing program, and all sorts of projects improving energy efficiency and clean air will get 74 million Euros in 2008, with a gradual increase to 449 million Euros in 2011.
June
12, 2007.
City to offer solar shares to citizens. Ashland,
OR, will soon become one of the first cities in the world to offer solar energy
shares to its citizens. Everyone will be able to buy them and not only profit
financially, but also live in a more sustainable and energy-independent town.The
first package will be worth $ 0.5m, allocated in renewable energy bonds. An
additional $0.3 m will be made available through tax credits to businesses.
Each share will cost around $1,000, and there will be some 375 available in
this first phase. Each citizen will be able to buy up to ten, and the revenues
produced by the facility can be deducted from their energy bills.
The project will kick start with one big solar array built on top of a storage
facility. would be built on the roof of a large storage building in the city.
It will be able to produce around 0.75% of the Ashland's yearly energy needs.
The facility is expected to be ready by the end of the summer. Source:
EPIA
June 7, 2007. Solar thermal bill approved by California Assembly. The bill deals with USA's largest solar water heating program. The Solar Water Heating and Efficiency Act of 2007 (AB 1470), authored by Assembly member Jared Huffman, sponsored by Environment California, and supported by hundreds of organizations and businesses, would create a $250 million ten-year program to provide consumer rebates for solar water heating systems. Source: Common Drearms
June 7, 2007. Macy's goes solar. The big retailer Macy's will install rooftop solar arrays at 26 of its California stores that will produce 8-megawatts of green electricity. Coupled with an energy-efficiency overhaul, the retailer expects to cut its utility bill at the stores by an estimated 40 percent. Solar cell maker SunPower's (SPWR) PowerLight subsidiary will install the solar energy systems. Macy's will buy the arrays for 11 of the stores. For the other 15 stores, Macy's will purchase the electricity produced by the solar panels from a third-party financier who will retain ownership of the systems. Macy's is just the latest big retailer to go solar. Last month, Wal-Mart (WMT) said it will install solar arrays at 22 stores using third-party financing in deals with SunEdison, BP (BP) and SunPower. Source: Green Wombat
May 31, 2007. Vatican adopts solar energy A rooftop garden of solar panels is set to be installed on the Vatican's Paul VI Audience Hall. The solar energy project will begin next year and, when completed, will create enough electricity to heat, cool and light the entire building year-round, the Catholic News Service reported. When the project is finished, more than 1,000 solar panels will cover the football field-sized roof. Whatever solar power the hall is not using will be funneled into the Vatican's energy grid and benefit other energy needs. Source: UPI.
May 30, 2007. The Spanish sun shines mainly on the plain. The Iberinco company (subsidiary of Iberdrola) yesterday released news that they had signed a contract to develop the 60-hectare, 10 MWp Talayuela PV park, in the Careres province, Spain. The PV station will take ten months to build and is scheduled to go online in the first quarter of 2008. The Talayuela solar park is Iberinco's second solar PV project; it recently won a contract to build a 11.65 MW PV facility in Soria. The plant is cover at two sites with each 5 MW of nominal power: 50 plants of 100 kilowatt (kW) with silicon-crystal PV panels installed on double-axis solar trackers. Power delivery will start early 2008.
The Talayuela solar park is Iberinco’s second solar PV project; it recently won a contract to build a 11.65 MW PV facility in Soria. Iberinco has brought 8.2 MW of solar power online in the last few years, with another 21 MW in the pipeline. Source: RenewableEnergyAcess
May 21, 2007. ZAP the petrol car? Dr. Wubbo Ockels, the first Dutchman in space and currently Professor in Renewable Engineering at the Technical University of Delft, The Netherlands, is an outspoken advocate of the fully plug-in elecrically powered car. No stinking gasoline, no environmentally incorrect biodiesel, no hydrogen, just electricity. The power grid is here, all homes are fitted with electrical outlets, and charging can be done overnight. Most people drive small distances anyway. Electrical power is very efficient comapred with an extremely expensive hydrogen infrastructure. And it seems much, much more efficient to charge batteries and drive than to manufacture hydrogen first in with the aid of electricity, transporting and pumping the volatile and combustible stuff, pumping it into the tank of your car and then burning it. Hydrogen makes little sense. It is only a matter of battery capacity and renewable electrical power generation.
And forget to consider electric cars as ugly, lazy and heavy. There are beautiful designs out there. Look at the Tesla, the Chevrolet Volt, and now the ZAP-X (zero air pollution car). And if you think that an electrical car does not accellerate like a Ferrari or a Porsche: watch this movie at You Tube.
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May 7, 2007. Finish in sight. Tomorrow the solar boat Sun21 will arrive in New York harbor. Sun21 is the first man made solar ship that crossed the Atlantic Ocean. See the website of the Sun21. |
May 3, 2007. Watch BBC World Channel on May 5 and 6. View Feed-In Tariffs Documentary on BBC World. London, UK [RenewableEnergyAccess.com] "Pay-Back Time," a documentary on feed-in tariffs, will be broadcast as part of TVE's 'Earth Report' series on the BBC World channel May 5 and 6 (see first link below for schedule). Householders installing wind turbines and solar panels in the UK must wait many years for a pay-back on their investment, so it is an ethical not an economic choice. Now Germany is buying back spare clean energy from customers at four to five times the price it charges them for conventionally generated electricity. More than 40 countries, states and provinces now follow the German lead. But some countries like the UK use a quota system, which critics argue is inequitable and fundamentally flawed. Earth Report investigates.
May 3, 2007. 2750 kWp solar PV panels installed in the UK in 2006. Congratulations, fellows, this amount of solar panels was six times more than in my own country, the Netherlands. On August 18, 2006 the Dutch Government made an historical blunder by declaring that it had done enough for the environment. It halted all government support for renewable energy.
April 28, 2007. All time high record yield for April. At noon today, the registration of the original six Sunpower PV-panels displayed 2664,3 kWh. This implies that in the current month these panels have yielded an astounding 57,6 kWh. In the previous record year (2003) the meter recorded over the entire month of April a yield of 56,7 kWh. The old record has been smashed and a new record is being born. And yet a couple of sunny days ahead!
April 27, 2007. Canadians do it bigger. The largest PV system of the Americas will be built near Sarnia, Ontario, Canada. Today, the Minister for Energy of Ontario, mr. Dwight Duncan, made public that more than 1,000, 000 PV panels will together form a 40 Megawatt-peak installation. The system will be built by Oti-Solar, and become fully operational in 2010. source: CBCNews
April 25, 2007. US Air Force goes solar. One of larger US Air Force bases is Nellis Air Force Base, located at the northeastern edge of Las Vegas, NV. Spying via Google Earth you can observe some F16's and F18's on the vast tarmac (N 36 13' 56.42", W 115 02' 09.13"). The military have recently broken ground for the construction of a 15 MWp solar photovoltaic power generating system: 70,000 PV panels mounted on trackers that will supply the base with electricity. The system will generate 25% of electrical power consumption on a yearly basis. Remarkably, the US Air Force relied in 2006 for 11% of electrical power consumption on renewable energy. Follow the aircraft and vehicles?. Source: www.nellis.af.mil
April 16, 2007. Alice Springs goes Solar. AliceSprings is the fourth Australian city to receive funding under a federal program promoting solar power.The Northern Territory town joins Adelaide, Townsville and Sydney's Blacktown under the Solar Cities program set up three years ago. The Feds will provide Alice Springs with $12.3 million to install solar photovoltaic panels on 230 homes and business, 1000 solar hot water systems and roll out 400 smart meters. Source: The Australian
April12, 2007. Solar energy on YouTube. You may find several movies about solar photovoltaic energy at You Tube. A very interesting movie with people explaining why they inested in solar electricity is the one you will see when you click here.
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April 8, 2007. A moment to remember. Each of the 6 Sunpower PV panels (see home page) has its own mini-inverter. Today, one of these inverters, serial number #13303 achieved the 500 kWh production performance. Number 13303 is a real die-hard veteran. This inverter was installed together with 5 other inverters on the 21st of June, 2000, being part of the original Sunpower system. Three of its colleagues passed away and have been replaced. #13303 was taken off its panel in 2004 and re-mounted inside my home on the [extremely well insulated] attic. It has been humming cheerfully all the time ever since. A small calculation learns that 500 kWh in 7 years equals 71 kWh/year. Not bad for an inverter serving a 95 Wp Shell PV panel on a roof in Holland. 500 kWh equals 284 kilograms CO2 emission avoided. Both the 500 kWh and the 284 kilograms make me feel very happy. |
April 7, 2007: Modest man, modest car. Here is a website that deals with a fully electric, fully equipped Daihatsu Cuore.
March 30, 2007: 11 MWp Solar photovoltaic generating system in Portugal. The major solar electrcity plant at Serpa, Portugal was officially opened last week. The array of electricity-generating solar panels covers about 60 hectares (150 acres) in one of Europe's sunniest areas in southern Portugal. The installation is made up of 52,000 solar photovoltaic panels. Production will be 20 GWh yearly, sufficient to power 8,00 homes. The plant is also meant to bring development and jobs to the Alentejo region 200km (125 miles) southeast of Lisbon, a poor area traditionally dominated by cork and olive production. Emission of 30,00 tons of greenhouse gases is revented by the solar power plant. Source: BBC
March 25, 2007: 64 MW Solar One Concentrating Solar Power (CSP) generator due to be completed at Eldorado Valley, Nevada, USA. This installation is the first large-scale CSP plant to be built in the US, and more are expected to follow. The construction counts 760 parabolic cylinder concentrators and 18,240 high-spec receivers newly developed by the Schott Company, Germany. Source: Renewable Energy World
The
picture shows how CSP power stations work. In the focal area of mirrors (the
parabolic cilinder concentrator, also called 'solar throughs'), runs a metal
tube that contains water, salt or another heat transporting medium. The transport
medium in the tube is heated by the solar irradiation concentrated on the
tube. The hot medium is led to a steam turbine which powers an electricity
generator.
The parabolic cilinder concentrators can be tilted to make full use of the daily course of the sun through the sky.
There is a natural preference to built CS power stations at extremely sunny locations. Several solar power stations exist already for quite some years. The most well known are the CS power stations near Kramer Junction, Mojave Desert, California.
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March 20, 2007: Pharox! One of the light bulbs in my home has been replaced with this bulb-lookalike LED-lamp. Installation is very easy: bulb out, Pharox in. If you want to combat CO2 emissions in earnest, you may choose to boost supply or reduce demand. Boosting supply means installation of solar panels. Reducing demand is looking at your appliances and replacing those that are most inefficient. Light bulbs are extremely inefficient and you can supplant them by energy saving fluorescent lamps or by this hi-tech LED lamp. According to the manufacturer (Oxxio), energy consumption of this lamp is 3.5 Watt. The amount of light produced would equal that of a conventional 40 Watt bulb. This means 90% less energy consumption This lamp indeed uses too little energy to measure with my equipment. The amount of light is certainly below the 40 Watts promised. I would say 25 watts. This makes this lamp an ideal replacement as a background illumination source (85% less energy). Oxxio of Hilversum, The Netherlands is acknowledged for their kind cooperation. |
March 15, 2007: Uranium oxide ('yellow cake', U3O8) made today 91 dollars per kilogram on the spot market. There has been an incredible price hike. Six months ago, one kilogram cost 50 dollars, and two years ago the price was 20 dollars. Source: UXC.com. If oil had seen a similar price hike, oil would now cost about 227 dollar, 50 cents per barrel. Speculation? Who counts on future nuclear energy must be prepared to pay dearly. There's a sign on the door of the uranium shop saying 'sold out' .
March 6, 2007: All you want to know about global warming, climate, carbon dioxide and what to do about it on this website.
February 28, 2007: German solar boom. Germany installed an astounding 100,000 solar systems in 2006, representing 750 MW of solar-electric generation. This follows on the back-to-back record-setting years of 2005 (750 MW), and 2004 (600 MW).
February 20, 2007: Light bulbs to be phased out in Australia from 2009 onwards. The standard incandescent light bulb, which has been around for 125 years, will be phased out by 2009. It will be replaced by the compact fluorescent bulb which costs AUS$ 5 more, but saves an average of AUS$ 30 a year, and is around 80 per cent more energy efficient. Mr Turnbull said new government standards will be in place by 2009. "We are introducing new energy efficiency standards and these old lights simply won't comply, they will be phased out and basically over a period of time they will no longer be for sale," Mr Turnbull told Channel 9 TV. He also said that the plan was expected to save up to two million tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions in Australia over time and, if introduced globally, could have an enormous impact. "If the rest of the world supports us ... follows our lead, this will reduce an amount of energy ... to the tune of five times as much energy as Australia consumes," he said. "It's a little thing but it's a massive change." Low efficiency halogen lights will also be phased out but the more efficient ones will remain.
February 7, 2007: Political deal in Holland opens the way to a new center-left coalition. In a 53-page document the Dutch Christian Democratic Party (CDA), Labour (PVDA) and Conservative Christians (ChristenUnie) agreed to form a new coalition government. There is ambition all over the place. Among others, energy eficiency has to increase at a rate of 2% per year.According to the document, Holland will become one of the most energy-efficient and environment-friendly economies in Europe by 2020. CO2 emissions have to go down 30% compared with 1990, and in 2020, 20% of all energy used has to be of renewable origin. According to good old Dutch practise, the financial section shows an inverse relationship with the ambition. An appallingly low amount of 800 million euro's will be available for all investements necessary to reach the impressive goals.
A true and bold innovation is the creation of a Secretary for the Environment, with Energy in his portfolio. Until now, the people (mainly economists) at the Ministry of Economic Affairs dealt with energy, and these market-oriented guys almost deliberately screwed up renewable energy all the way They seemed to be even more conservative than George W. Bush, Imagine! The times they are a'changin', that's for sure.
February 5, 2007: Solar Impulse. As if sailing the oceans with solar-powered boats is not challenging enough, Bertrand Piccard, son of Jacques Piccard and grandson of the deep-sea pioneer Auguste Piccard, has proposed to circumnavigate the globe non-stop in an all-solar plane. Piccard started out in 2003 with a team calculating and planning, conducting a feasibility asessment. Now he is actually building the plane. Test flights will commence in 2008. See the fascinating website about Solar Impulse and its predecessors.
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February 3, 2007: Solar-powered boat completes crossing. For the first time in history a 100% solar-powered boat has crossed the Atlantic Ocean (any ocean). Today, at 3 pm local time the Sun21 and its crew arrived in the port of Le Marin, island of Martinique. Congratulations, brave crew!. Take a look at the website of SUN21
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February 1, 2007: Exxon biggest profit ever. The Exxon Mobil Corporation today published earnings over 2006. Total revenue: $ 377.6 billion, net profit 39.5 billion. This is the biggest profit ever for any company anywhere in the world. 1 barrel of light sweet crude oil today on the NYMEX spot market: $ 57.42.
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January 29, 2007: Solar-powered boat halfway ocean. A few more days to go and the Sun21, the solar-powered boat, will reach the shores of the island of Martinique in the Caribbean. On December 23, last year I ran an item on this blog about the position near the Canary Islands at that moment. The ship and crew have bypassed the Cape Verdian Islands
Take a look at the website of SUN21 |
January 27, 2007: General Motors studies the Chevy Volt electrical 'plugin' hybrid car concept. In contrast to Toyota's Prius that runs essentially on gasoline and that has an electrical engine for the low speed city crawl situation, the Volt car is basically electric and has a small fossil or biofuel engine to recharge the batteries en route. Overnight the batteries are being charged via a cable that plugs into the main electricity grid. Since fossil fuel is not sustainable in the long run, both environmentally and commercially, I bet that this car, the plug-in hybrid, is going to make it. Hydrogen is too complicated compared with full electric and plug-in electric, and conversion losses may be too high.
January 24, 2007: ACTION against climate change. The French environmental group, L'Alliance pour la Planète calls every European citizen to switch off all lights in their homes on February 1, 19:55 to 20:00 pm to demonstrate their government that they want bold government action against climate change.
January
24, 2007: Germany world champion in renewable energy. German
renewable energy sector shows impressive growth
In Germany, the renewable energy sector showed impressive growth on all fronts
in 2006, reinforcing Germany’s position as the European leader in terms
of renewables. And Germany goes further; the environment ministry announced
that they will almost double investments in renewable energy in 2007, to €
83 million, and Environment Minister Sigmar Gabriel (SPD) announced plans
for a draft law to promote and oblige the use of renewable heating.
In Germany, the share of renewable energy in total energy consumed reached 7.7% in 2006 compared to 6.8% in 2005, according to a report published by the German federal renewable energy association, Bundesverband Erneuerbare Energie (BEE). Renewable electricity generation in Germany grew to 71.5 billion kWh in 2006, which represents 11.6% of total German electricity consumption and an increase of 12% compared to the previous year. This 2006 figure is only just below the German renewable electricity target for 2010 of 12%. The main renewable sources for electricity in 2006 were wind and biogas, followed by solar power.
German wind power in terms of installed capacity grew by 23.5% in 2006 and total installed capacity exceeded 20,000 MW, according to the German wind energy institute (DEWI). In 2006, 1,208 wind turbines were built in Germany. Total installed wind capacity amounts to 20,621 MW and accounts for 30.6 GWh (7 per cent) of German electricity consumption. Around €2.9 billion was invested in new wind parks in 2006.
The share of biofuels in the German transport fuel market jumped by 50% between 2006 and 2005. The share of biofuels in German fuel consumption grew to 5.4% from 3.6% in 2005, again already approaching the European target of a 5.75% share by 2010.
Renewable heat production rose by 10% in Germany in 2006. The contribution of renewable energy sources to heat production increased to 98 billion kWh, from 89 billion kWh in 2005.
In 2006, renewable energy in Germany saved 10 million tonnes of CO2 emissions, according to the BEE. The German environment ministry announced that they will increase the subsidies to energy efficient buildings from the current level of €360 million to €1.4 billion per year in 2007.
source: Greenprices
January 11, 2007: "One million energy saving lamps" is the title of the sweeping campaing by Greenpeace. Aim is to propagate the use of more energy saving lamps in Dutch households. How many lights does a regular home have? How many of these lamps are incandescents bulbs, how many save energy? I took a notepad and inspected my home from top to bottom, including the shed and the garden lights. I counted every lamp (a fixture with five lamps was counted as 5 lamps). The result was a bad surprise (I was considering myself an advanced energy efficient human being with only an occasional old fashioned 'glowing' light bulb). Still 13 incandescent bulbs, only 18 energy saving bulbs, 30 TL tubes of some sort (many in the kitchen, loft, shed), 7 LED-lights, 15 halogen spots. I also ran into 15 (yes, fifteen) devices that are on a 24/7 This situation has to change Let's arrange that every bulb that fails will be replaced by a energy saving lamp. In a few years my home must be free of every single 'glowing' light bulb (I won't allow even a spare one).
December 31, 2006: Production of my 6 Sunpower PV panels this year 399.1 kWh, or 66.5 kWh/panel. That is about the same as last year. We had a gorgeous month of July complemented by a hopeless August. See page Monthly Production
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December 23, 2006: Solar powered boat arrives at the Canary Islands. The 100% PV-powered catamaran, SUN21, in its attempt to cross the Atlantic Ocean, has arrived on the 19th of December at the Canary Islands. The next stop will be the Cape Verde Islands. See the SUN21 website. |
December 19, 2006: The Brits are doing it! In he next four years the biggest offshore wind farm in Europe will be constructed off the coast of Kent in the Thames Estuary. This is the big London Array Scheme: 341 wind turbines each 3 megawatts, alltogether 1,000 megawatts. The park will cover 29 square miles. Details at www.londonarray.com
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December 10, 2006: LEDs in the Christmas tree. Plenty of advantages to consider strings of LED lights to decorate the family's Christmas tree. The old strings of lamps are nasty (they never work immediately), they live short and they are a drain on your electricity bill. LED light twinkles, it is cool, multicolor, long lasting and energy-efficient. Especially the latter feature attracts me. I used to decorate my Christmas tree with two strings of lights. Each string (25 lamps, 2 Watts each) consumes 50 Watts, that is together 100 Watts. The Christmas season (21 days, six hours lights on per day) would consume 12.6 kilowatt hours. Just for the fun of it. There may be 5 million households in Holland buying a Christmas tree. The illumination (plus all the additional illuminated stuff: Santa's, reindeer, stars, special outdoor stuff, name it, is good for 5,000,000 multiplied with 100 Watts, that adds up to 500,000,000 Watts or 500 MW. Wow, this is exactly the power generated by the Borssele nuclear power station. One nuclear power station exclusively working full steam to radiate cosy Dutch Christmas feelings! At this point I disagree. Not the fun and easy feelings, o no. It is the idea that my Christmas tree lights may be powered by nucleare energy. Here the LEDs fit snugly. LED-light is e x t r e m e l y energy-efficient. The LED-Christmas tree illumination has been ordered. The old decripit Chinese stuff has been put aside. Now it's time to find a suitable tree. |
November 27, 2006: Euroscope in Rotterdam. One attraction of the Euromast of Rotterdam is the Euroscope, a tall steel structure right on top of the Euromast with a rotating platform that rises to a height of 185 meters above the city. The rewards is a breathtaking view on the city, especially on the kind of clear sunny autumn day we had yesterday. From this height one looks down at the roof of the Dijkzigt Hospital, part of the Erasmus University Medical Center. The Dijkzigt roof is equipped with 72 PV panels (red rectangles) and a Windwall horizontal wind turbine (green rectangle, see inset at higher magnification). A hospital producing its share of renewable energy! These guys are far ahead in innovation.
November 21, 2006: It's so simple to be a tiny little bit green, although it is much harder to be really green. I enjoyed the website on attempts toward being green.
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November 14, 2006: CO2 levels accelerating. The figure presented here was obtained from the US Department of Commerce's National Oceanographic & Atmospheric Administration. It shows the CO2 concentration in the air (in ppm) at the Mauna Loa Observatory, Hawaii. In spite of all Kyoto-efforts, it seems as if the rise in CO2 levels is accelerating alarmingly. Weather forecast for tomorrow, November 15, 2006: 15 degrees Centigrade. Expectations for the day after tomorrow, November 16: 17 degrees Centigrade. This is yet another record in a string of records this year. Average local temperatures in November are around 9 degrees Celsius. Now, what is the difference between climate and weather? |
October 30, 2006: Sir Nicholas Stern warns for global warming, Tony Blair agrees.
A report by economist Sir Nicholas Stern suggests that global warming could shrink the global economy by 20%. Taking action now would cost just 1% of global gross domestic product, the 700-page study says. Tony Blair said the Stern Review showed that scientific evidence of global warming was "overwhelming" and its consequences "disastrous". Full story: BBC
October 30, 2006: Two remarkable quotes:
1981 Bill Gates (CEO, Microsoft): "640 K memory is sufficient for a computer"
2006 John
Howard (Prime Minister, Australia: "The only things that will ever replace
the current dirty power stations are
cleaner uses of fossil fuel, or nuclear power. You will never replace them
with solar or wind."
October 28, 2006: China to spend 187.5 billion US$ on renewable energy. China will invest 1.5 trillion yuan (US$187.5 billion) to increase the ratio of renewable energy consumption, said Wu Guihui, vice-director-general of the Bureau of Energy under the National Development and Reform Commission.
Currently, 7.5 per cent of China's energy comes from renewable sources. The country's goal is to make it 10 per cent by 2010 and 16 per cent by 2020, revised from its initial goal of 20 per cent.
"Within 10 years, we will see a population of 30 million, in all the remote rural areas, have access to electricity, mainly from renewable energy-powered projects," Wu told the Great Wall World Renewable Energy Forum & Exhibition on Tuesday in Beijing.
Full story in China Daily
October 22, 2006: Donnachadh McCarthy has an environmentally friendly home in London featuring solar photovoltaic and solar thermal installations (retrofit!). See Donnachad's website
October 21, 2006: Out of funds. The UK's government's green credentials suffered an embarrassing blow yesterday after it emerged that a system of grants for renewable energy for householders has run out of money this year. As Tony Blair signed a letter with his Dutch counterpart warning that Europe only has 10-15 years to avoid "catastrophic" tipping points on climate change, solar and other renewable power groups said all the grants available for households had been used up, half-way through the current financial year. (source: The Guardian).
The unpalatable issue here is that the Dutch Government, under the visionary leadership of the 'counterpart of mr. Blair' has in the last three years of administration completely abandoned all grants in support of householders and business and agriculture and industry. How green are both UK and Dutch leaders? A spokesman of the Dutch opposition Labour party uttered the word "hypocrisy".
October
20, 2006: EU must become less dependent on imported energy: Danish
PM
Visiting Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen said on Thursday in Warsaw that a reduction in the dependence on imported energy should be one of the top priorities of the EU energy policy, the PAP news agency reported.
Rasmussen made the remarks at a press conference after meeting with Polish Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski. Rasmussen stressed that it was critical to obtain as much energy as possible from renewable sources in order to reduce the dependence on mineral fuels. Otherwise, the EU would depend even more on imported energy, he added.
According to Rasmussen, an energy network in the EU should be built in a way that increased solidarity among EU members. He also appealed for more efforts in research on new energy technologies.
Denmark has had extensive experience, especially in the field of energy saving and renewable sources. Danish experience in obtaining energy should be used by other EU countries, Kaczynski told reporters.
"We agreed that we should avoid a situation in Europe in which we are forced to do something because someone can use 'an energy weapon' against us," the Polish PM said.
The EU is reported to rely heavily on imported oil and natural gas, with only 46 percent of its gas supply and 21 percent of its oil supply being produced within its own member states. Russia is the biggest exporter of oil and gas to the EU.
October 17, 2006: Google to install 1.6 MWp solar photovoltaic panels on the roofs of their Google Campus., Mountain View, CA. Google has announced that they are going to have 197,000 square feet of PV panels on the roof of their headquarters. These panels will produce 6,6 million kWh annually. Story at http://www.eispv.com/success_stories/google.html
October 15, 2006: Americans to build big photovoltaic solar power generator in Colorado. Xcel Energy announced in late September its selection of SunEdison, LLC to build, own, and operate an 8-megawatt solar photovoltaic power plant, which will be the largest of its type in the USA. Xcel Energy released its request for proposals (RFP) for the solar facility in south central Colorado in late March. SunEdison's response includes 6.8 megawatts of advanced flat-plate solar panels (the type you might mount on your roof) as well as 1.2 megawatts of concentrating photovoltaic units, which track the sun to focus sunlight onto solar cells. The units will concentrate the sunlight by a factor of 500, employing a relatively small area of high-efficiency solar cells to convert that sunlight into electricity. Xcel Energy will purchase the power and the renewable energy credits associated with the plant, which is expected to be online by the end of next year. (source: XCel Energy)
October 12, 2006: Revolutionary LED-lighting. For some time now, Light-Emitting Diode (LED) technology has been regarded as the light of the future. It is efficient, durable, inexpensive, user-friendly and of high-quality. This revolutionary lighting technology is the foundation for a new innovation by Lemnis Lighting: a LED-based lamp of the same size as the regular ight bulb, yet with superior energy efficiency.
October 10, 2006: Descending into Amsterdam - fasten your seatbelts. . . . These are the 36 turbines at the new 100 MW near shore wind farm in the North Sea off the Dutch coast at Egmond (four rows of 9 wind turbines, each rated at 3 MW). The sandy beaches of Holland are visible in the distance. This picture was sent to me by one of the regular visitors of this web site.
October 7, 2006: Solar Tour USA. Today was the National Solar Tour with many events scheduled in most states in the USA. Take a look via the National Solar Tour website.
October 7, 2006: First North Sea wind turbines on grid. According to www.noordzeewind.nl, the website of the consortium involved in constructing the 100 MW near shore wind farm off the Dutch coast at Egmond, the first of the 36 wind turbines has started delivering electricity to the power grid. All wind turbines are scheduled to be operational December 2006.
6 oktober 2006: Supply and demand. The journal 'Renewable Energy World' recently published a table showing the world wide growth in production and installation of PV. Growth is occurring at breathtaking speed. Numbers in megawatt-peak.
| production | 2000 | 2001 | 2002 | 2003 | 2004 | 2006 |
average
growth/year
|
| USA | 76,2 | 96,7 | 107,8 | 91,5 | 140,6 | 133,6 |
12%
|
| Japan | 95,3 | 145 | 233,8 | 350,8 | 547 | 714 |
50%
|
| Europe | 58,5 | 85,4 | 123,4 | 173,1 | 272,9 | 406,9 |
47%
|
| rets of world | 22 | 25,8 | 39,9 | 60 | 89,2 | 153,2 |
47%
|
| afzet: | |||||||
| USA | 34,7 | 43,8 | 60,8 | 76 | 101,8 | 137,3 |
32%
|
| Japan | 77,9 | 109,8 | 176,2 | 243,8 | 295,9 | 392,4 |
39%
|
| Europe | 74,1 | 120 | 172,6 | 232,6 | 472,4 | 676,1 |
56%
|
| rest of world | 65,3 | 79,2 | 95,3 | 122,9 | 197,7 | 202 |
25%
|
|
September 28, 2006: Dutch Government supports plans for nuclear power plant. The State Secretary for the Environment of the minority Balkenende administration in the Netherlands, mr. Pieter van Geel, has sent a letter to the House of Commons that the Government is considering to support plans to construct one or two new 1600 MW nuclear power plants in the Low Countries. The arguments are that nuclear power generation does not contribute to CO2 emissions while another big argument is the need for more electricity combined with a stable energy supply. Is this a bold step forward? l don't think so. Nuclear energy is a energy source that belongs to the past, it's technology is vintage. Nuclear power is good for Sovjet type governments: large centralized facilities, centrally owned and centrally managed. Big and beautiful. No responsibilities whatsoever for consumers ("open your window when your heater produces excess heat"). No word about waste ("what waste?"). No responsibility for generations of citizens to come ("who cares?), no innovation (not necessary, plenty of energy to waste - too cheap to meter). We are already the proud inheritors of tons of hot radioactive waste that will outlive us for centuries. Should we accumulate more waste, and then, when th supply of Uranium is depleted, consider breeder technology? In my opinion we should massively invest in wind energy, solar energy, biomass, wave and tide energy and, first and most of all, invest in energy efficient devices. To the cemetery with all light bulbs! |
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September 3, 2006: Roller coaster weather. This sunday morning began with storm, showers and a low ceiling, clouds speeding inland over the roofs of Leiden city. In the early afternoon, gaps started to occur between the clouds, producing brief moments of intense sunshine. In one of these moments one of my OK4E inverters produced a record 93 Watts (see image). The type of weather as that of today: fast changes between cloudy and extremely sunny, is a challenge for inverters. |
August
22, 2006: California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger signs bill
for 1,000,000 solar roofs.
Concluding
a two-year effort to help make California the nation’s leader in solar
energy, Gov. Schwarzenegger signed SB 1 by Senator Kevin Murray (D-Los Angeles),
putting the finishing touches on the Governor’s Million Solar Roofs Plan.
“When I ran for governor, I vowed to make the environment the centerpiece of my administration and turn back the clock on pollution,” said Gov. Schwarzenegger. “My Million Solar Roofs Plan will provide 3,000 megawatts of additional clean energy and reduce the output of greenhouse gasses by 3 million tons which is like taking one million cars off the road. I want to thank Sen. Kevin Murray for his hard work in helping me make California the leader on solar power again.”
Last year, the Governor asked the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) to implement his Million Solar Roofs plan. Dubbed the California Solar Initiative by the CPUC, the plan will lead to one million solar roofs in California by 2018.
Specifically, SB 1 implements the portions of the Million Solar Roofs plan that the CPUC does not have the authority to mandate, including:
Expanding
the Program: The current implementation of the Million Solar Roofs plan only
applies to customers of Pacific Gas and Electric, Southern California Edison
and San Diego Gas and Electric. SB 1 expands the program to customers of the
municipal-owned utilities such as SMUD and LADWP.
Crediting
Consumers for Excess Power Produced: Consumers who install solar panels on
their homes and businesses can sell excess energy back to power companies
for credit on their monthly bills. This credit is a key incentive for consumers
to install solar panels. Currently, the cap on the number of customers who
can use this option is .5 percent. SB 1 raises this to 2.5 percent. Raising
the ceiling will provide part of the needed financial incentive to bring more
solar power on to the grid.
Making
Solar Power a Standard Item on New Homes: SB 1 would require a developer of
more than 50 new single family homes offer the option of a solar energy system
to all customers beginning January 1, 2011. One million solar roofs will greatly
increase the state’s rooftop solar energy capacity, providing the output
equivalent of five modern electric power plants. This program’s 3,000
megawatt goal, taken together with other aggressive solar initiatives such
as requiring utilities to acquire 20 percent of the power used within the
state from renewable sources, will make California once again a world leader
in solar power.
Since taking office, the Governor has made it a priority to develop a self-sustaining solar industry for California. In 2004, he introduced the Million Solar Roofs Initiative, which included $2.9 billion in incentives to homeowners and building owners who install solar electric systems. Attached is a fact sheet detailing the Governor’s environmental record.
source: http://gov.ca.gov/index.php/press-release/3588/
August 18, 2006: Dutch government de facto establishes moratorium on new renewable energy by halting per direct all grants for future renewable energy projects. I think this is outright murderous since any investor will think twice before drawing plans in such a draconian volatile environment. Sadly, there are many precedents. The wind turbine industry in the Netherlands was killed in the 1990's by erratic government behavior. In 2003, the same administration as today's abolished per direct all subsidy for solar energy which, predictably, killed the solar business. Now it is time for all renewable energy to vanish from the Netherlands.
So from what source will this country get its electricity from in the future when the wolf will burst through the door? Safe and clean nuclear energy, perhaps? Read the following.This happened just two weeks ago in the country with the most stringent nuclear reactor safety rules on earth.
STOCKHOLM, Sweden (AP) -- Swedish nuclear authorities held an emergency meeting Thursday after two reactors were shut down at a plant in the southeast of the country.The plant in Oskarshamn, about 250 kilometers (150 miles) south of the capital, Stockholm, shut down two of its three reactors late Wednesday after the company running the plant reported that "safety there could not be guaranteed. Source: CNN
August
3, 2006: Currys to sell solar photovoltaic panels in the
UK. The electric retailer, Currys
has announced that it is planning to sell solar panels in the UK manufactured
by the Sharp company.
Solar power can reduce electricity bills quite considerably, depending on
the number of solar panels and, never to forget, the attitude of the home
owner against unlimited or limited consumption of energy. by up to 50 per
cent and could cut down on a home’s carbon dioxide emissions by up to
two tons per year. The cost for an installation of nine solar panels –
enough to cover approximately half of the electricity requirements for an
average three bedroom house – is around £9,000. Grants ara available
through the Low Carbon Buildings Programme. Solar panels will initially be
on sale in three Currys stores, and information will also be available online.
Panels come with a performance warranty of 25 years, and minimum maintenance
is required by the customer. And the website you are looking at currently
proves that even in the lousy climate of northwestern Europe solar makes a
lot of sense. Source: BBC
July 31, 2006: Record sunshine in Western Europe has supported record production of my photovoltaic panels. Never in the history of my panels (5 years) have so many kilowatt hours been produced in one month: 63.8 kWh on the six Sunpower panels. Production in July was higher than in June 2003, the previous record month (63.7 kWh). An alltime high in spite of the fact that one of the inverters went down and had to be replaced.
We haven't been using much natural gas either. Most of this precious fuel is being used in winter for heating purposes, and throughout the year for cooking. In July 2006 we consumed only 7 cubic meters of natural gas. All hot water was produced by the solar thermal heater. The principal electricity meter has nearly continuously been spinning backward. At 18:00 sharp tonight the counter indicated 102 kilowatt hours below the readout one month ago. Negative consumption! To be honest; I have been away from home for a week.
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July 29, 2006: 60 miles in 4 seconds, not a bad performance for the Tesla Roadster, a new full-electric car that has hit the market in California. Jump in and accelerate! Top speed is 130 miles per hour, way more than the 55 mph speed limit. Not a single drop of fuel is burned by the engine since all energy is taken from a set of Lithium-ion batteries. The car was designed not in Detroit but instead in Silicon Valley. It is produced by Lotus Cars. Charging batteries takes 3.5 hours and then you are ready for another 250 miles or so. You can buy an extra battery set to be sure that power is always at hand. Prices are in the $100.000 plus range Watch out for speed traps and cops with laser guns. Who is behind the wheel? Yes, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. Burn rubber, no gasoline! is the advertising slogan of the company, Tesla Motors. |
July 27, 2006: Net metering in France. Effective August 1, 2006, French owners of solar photovoltaic installatuins will receive a generous handout from the governement. The new tariffs pay Euro 0.55/kWh [kilowatt-hour] for building-integrated solar photovoltaics, putting France on a par with world leader Germany. France also doubled payment for electricity from rooftop solar panels to Euro 0.30/kWh and provides a capital 50% subsidy on the cost of the solar panels and other equipment. Source: Renewable Access
July 22, 2006: Growing silicon. BP Solar has announced that it has developed a new silicon growth process that significantly increases cell efficiency over traditional multi-crystalline-based solar cells. The new technique, named Mono²™, enhances BP Solar’s technological expertise in the silicon growth and wafering arenas where silicon ingots and wafering technology are key to future growth.
Solar cells made with these wafers, in combination with other BP Solar advances in cell process technology, will be able to produce in excess of five to eight percent more power than solar cells made with conventional processes. This translates into an equivalent module power increase and hence a substantial cost reduction at the installed system level.
BP Solar plans to implement the Mono² technique in its existing equipment at the Frederick facility with the goal to achieve large-scale production.
According to Eric Daniels, vice president of technology for BP Solar, "BP Solar's implementation of this new growth technique will greatly improve wafer quality. This development is a great advance on the pioneering work conducted by BP Solar scientists when the first successful multi-crystal wafers were introduced more than 20 years ago.”
The first modules to incorporate this process will be available in 2007. The development of Mono² is funded in part through a manufacturing contract with the US Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory. Source: SolarBuzz
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July 17, 2006: Seen on vacation. The buildings of the United Nations at Vienna are situated comfortably on the Donauinsel. Line #U1 of the Vienna subway system runs here above ground and stops at the station Kaisersmühl. From here on can walk to the buildings and visit them. There is even a guided tour available. Seen through the windows of the metro coach a nice row of solar panels can be appreciated that decorates the roof of the entrance building. The complex houses the International Atomic Agency of the UN. The host country of the UN, Austria, is a sun-friendly and renewable energy-friendly country. If you like to have your own encounters with solar panels in exotic or unexpected places published here, please send me a picture. Please state the country, city, location and specifics. If you appreciate I may publish your name. Pictures to floris256@yahoo.com |
July 5, 2006: Oil $75 per barrel. The North Koreans launch a few flawed rockets and the jittery oil market jumps. What will happen this fall, the traditional season when demand surges? The wolf is sniffing at the door.
July 1, 2006: Students design a good-looking building-integrated wind energy solution.
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Students of Delft Polytechnic University (Faculty of Aerospace) have designed a new faculty building which has a wind turbine integrated in the building envelope. The pictures shows the award winning entry of the design competition. More examples of the student's engineering creativity can be enjoyed on the website, www.spaceforwind.nl. A building like this can export electricity into the public grid while at the same time acting as a playground and test site for projects in wind turbine technology. Source:: www.spaceforwind.nl. |
June 24, 2006: Today is the start in the city of Leeuwarden the Frisian Nuon Solar Challenge. Coming week the canals and lakes of Fryslân will witness a fleet of small solar-powered boats engaged in a race over more than 200 kilometers, taking the same route as the famous eleven-city skating race held in barren winters. More information also on the tourist promotion web site, BeleefFriesland.nl.
June 22, 2006: Warming up little by little. I read this today on the BBC website: It has been 2,000 years and possibly much longer since the Earth has run such a fever. The National Academy of Sciences, reaching that conclusion in a broad review of scientific work requested by Congress, reported Thursday that the "recent warmth is unprecedented for at least the last 400 years and potentially the last several millennia."
A panel of top climate scientists told lawmakers that the Earth is heating up and that "human activities are responsible for much of the recent warming." Their 155-page report said average global surface temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere rose about 1 degree during the 20th century.
June 19, 2006: Tired of soccer for a while? In between the matches you may visit the INTERSOLAR 2006 solar trade fair which is being held June 22 through 24 in Freiburg, Germany. Expected visitors: 20,000. Surf to the promotion website and you may download a catalogue of all exhibitors and their product. There's a lot going in dynamic solar and renewable Germany!
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June 16, 2006: Manchester CIS Tower renovation completed. The largest building in Manchester, UK (built 1962) has been renovated. The blue tiles have been replaced with 389 kWp worth of PV panels. These panels are expected to generate 180,000 kWh per year. Each megawatt hour (MWh) of electricity generated will be eligible for benefits under the governments Renewable Energy Obligation Certification Scheme. The value of the certificates earned by the Tower is estimated to be approximately £9,271 per year.. Image courtesy of Co-operative Financial Services Limited. |
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June 15, 2006: European Science Foundation (ESF) urges European governments to commit strongly to development of solar energy. The European Union and its member states are being urged by leading scientists to make a major multi million Euro commitment to solar driven production of environmentally clean electricity, hydrogen and other fuels, as the only sustainable long-term solution for global energy needs.
The most promising routes to eventual full-scale commercial solar energy conversion directly into fuels were identified at a recent international meeting in Regensburg, sponsored by the European Science Foundation (ESF). An interdisplinary task force was established at this meeting to make the case for substantial investments in these technologies to EU and national government decision makers.
The fundamental issue is that total annual global energy consumption is set to at least double from its current level of 14 TW by 2050, while fossil fuels will start to run out. The use of fossil fuels also produces unacceptable levels of carbon dioxide, causing global warming and has disastrous effects in many areas, such as food production.
Apart from solar energy, the shortfall can only be made up by renewable sources such as wind, along with the other non-fossil, non-renewable fuel source of energy, nuclear. But these will be unable to satisfy the predicted increased energy needs and certainly will not be able to replace fossil fuels entirely, even for electricity production alone. Another problem is that they will not readily yield stored fuels. Without an unexpected breakthrough in electricity storage, there will be a continued need for fuels for around 70% of total global energy requirements, particularly in transportation, manufacturing, and domestic heating. Electricity only accounts for 30% of global energy consumption at present. Source: ESF
June 11, 2006: 16.1 kilowatt-hours harvested last week by my six original PV panels (the ones shown on the home page). To be exact: 2683 Watt-hours per panel. This is the best yield for this year (for the time being). Immediately the question comes up: is this a phantastic performance good for the book of records? Does such a performance happen more often? A search through my spreadsheet produced the following list (since the summer has not yet begun, consider this list to be preliminary).
|
year
|
week
number
|
month
|
performance
(Watt-hours)
|
|
|
1
|
2001
|
19
|
may
|
3477
|
|
2
|
2001
|
18
|
may
|
3198
|
|
4
|
2003
|
22
|
june
|
2979
|
|
3
|
2003
|
16
|
april
|
2900
|
|
5
|
2003
|
15
|
april
|
2841
|
|
6
|
2003
|
28
|
july
|
2808
|
|
7
|
2005
|
21
|
may
|
2783
|
|
8
|
2001
|
30
|
july
|
2712
|
|
9
|
2003
|
25
|
july
|
2711
|
|
10
|
2001
|
23
|
june
|
2696
|
|
11
|
2006
|
23
|
june
|
2683
|
Last week settled at the 11th position. Especially 2003 and 2001 are well represented in the list. The year 2001 featured a perfect month of May: cool weather, bone-dry and clean air, lots of sunshine, while 2003 of course had a dream summer that will last long in our memory.
June 8, 2006: Ground broken for the largest photovoltaic power generating station in the world (as long as the record will stand - there's a lot of exciting PV stuff in the pipeline). Close to the Portuguese town of Serpa, on a terrain of 60 hectares, 52.000 PV panels will be installed on trackers. A herd of sheep will keep the grass under the trackers under control. Source: BBC
June
4, 2006: 400 kWh per panel in 5 years. In June 2001, I installed
two PV panels on the loft on the back of my home. The picture shows one of
them. Although they face the south-west, the height of the roof in front prevents
them from being hit by direct sunshine November through January. Now, after
an uninterrupted production period of 5 years, the inverters (OK4E) broke
through the 400 kWh boundary. This means that in spite of their handicap the
panels have produced every year 80 kWh of supergreen CO2-free and clean electricity.
This is exactly what had been predicted for the OK4E inverter. These are the
original OK4E's, mounted inside the home from the very beginning.
It needs to be said here that these are MSX-120 Wp PV panels, but the loft on the back roof gets sun only 8 out of 12 months. The PV panels on the street-facing roof (oriented S-E - see picture on the home page) receive much more sun. Yet these front panels produce 'only' 70 kWh/year, but this is due to the fact that these are 95 Wp Shell ACM panels. Their inverters have been replaced in 2004.
One conclusion of my long-term data acquisition is that size of the panels, the solar insolation and the load of the inverter are parameters that need to be on par with each other in order to get an optimally performing PV system.
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June 2, 2006: End of grand-grandpa light bulb?One might ask whether the time has arrived to bury the good old incandescent light source. The thing has reached a venerable age of 150 years or so. Modern fluorescent energy saving lamps use 60 to 80 per cent less electricity, and their lifespan is much longer than that of the common bulb. A light saving lamp of 18 Watts produces the same amount of light as a 75 Watt light bulb. The difference? Heat! It is very expensive to heat one's house through electric light bulbs. Let's carry the the good old bulb to the graveyard! |
May 29, 2006: Solar Soccer Stadium!The Fritz-Walter stadium in the German city of Kaiserslautern will host several matches of Group E in the World Soccer championship (USA, Italy, Japan, Australia). The Kaiserslautern people have completely renovated the place and invested 71 million euros to upgrade the venerable old lady. One of the innovations is the roof which is complely covered with 5,000 solar photovoltaic panels. Together 800,000 Watt-peak. Let the match begin and the sun shine!
May 26, 2006: REC doubles its production of solar grade silicon. The Norway-based company, REC (www.recgroup.com), world's largest producer of silicon from which solar cells are manufactured (production 2005: equivalent of 600 MWp) has announced on May 23 that they are going to more than double their solar grade silicon production. Also, a third silicon manufacturing plant will be constructed. This announcement means a breakthrough in alleviating the world-wide silicon shortage hampering the explosively expanding PV industry.
May 2, 2006: 645 million watt-peak worth of PV panels was installed in the European Union countries in 2005. See the page Installed Base Europe of this website.
May 23, 2006: Interesting exhibition/conference in Aberdeen. If you might by chance happen to be in this Scottish town tomorrow or the day after, you may be attracted by the 200 or so exhibitors in the Aberdeen Exhibition and Conference Center. Here, the exhibition All Energy has been organized (May 24,-25) to show the world the latest trends and gear in renewable energy: solar electricity, solar thermal, wave bobbers and buoys, hydrogen technology, underwater turbines, wind turbines big and small, bio stuff, everything. And if you get tired strolling the place, join the conference where the experts will freshen up your knowledge in renewable energy subjects.
| May 22, 2006: Tree on car, this fall inceased yield of the PV panels |
 |
| Last Friday the weather was bad. A giant branch of my neighbour's tree broke off and hit the pavement, my car and the street. Fortunately nobody was hurt. Members of the fire brigade cleared the mess. An expert concluded that the remaining tree was wounded to such a degree that it was beyond healing and had to be taken down completely. Today the chainsaw men came and concluded the story. Because the tree was so tall that in the fall it overshadowed my roof completely, I will enjoy a higher yield of my PV panels and solar thermal installation coming fall and winter. It is a pity of this magnificent tree. Expert maintenance might have avoided this drama. |
May 20, 2006: China's Three Gorges Dam completed, that is, the last batch of concrete has been poored and the concrete-engineers have thrown a party. When the dam will be fully operational in 2009, its capacity will be a stunning 18,000 MW of electricity generation. Renewable? Hydro has its pros and contras. One million Chinese had to move to make way for the reservoir, cities and hamlets had to be abandoned. Does hydro replaces CO2? Yes it does, but there is a human and environmental price to pay. Source: BBC
| May 14, 2006: Spic & span. |
 |
| The recent dry weather spell resulted in dirty solar panels: dust, seeds, blossom, bird droppings. A grey layer of dust formed a dirty filter. Does cleaning panels make much difference? So I took water and soap, went up a ladder and cleaned this solar panel. Left: before the operation: load 77 Watt (the panel is equipped with an OK4E inverter). Right: 10 minutes later, after the cleaning operation and after a short period to allow the panel to return no working temperature. This is important since temperature is an important factor in the conversion efficiency of any solar panel. Insolation had not changed. Load after cleaning 79 Watt. Not a dramatic change, so I will not undertake further effort to clean all solar panels on my roof. I will wait until the first shower will wipe the dust off. |
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May 10, 2006: Offshore Wind Farm Egmond. If you would stroll the beaches of Egmond aan Zee, a tall crane ship will almost certainly catch your eye. The name of this ship is "Svanen", and it is operated by Bouw Combinatie Egmond (BCE), a joint operation of Ballast Nedam (Netherlands) and Vestas (Denmark). This very moment the company is ramming 36 big poles into the sea floor, sprawled over an area of 20 square kilometers. On each of these poles a giant 3 MW wind tubine will be installed. Thus, in total the capacity of the wind farm will be 108 MW. The distance between the coast and the nearest wind turbine will be 10 kilometers. Building materials are being shipped to the construction site via the port of IJmuiden. This fall the installation will be completed and coming winter the wind park will start delivering electricity to the national grid. The electricity generated by the wind farm will be sufficient to cover the needs of 100,000 households on a yearly basis. If you want to follow progress in this giant enterprise: visit the company's website, Noordzeewind. The Offshore Wind Farm Egmond project is a joint venture of Shell and Nuon, an investment of over 250 million US dollars. Photo generously supplied by Noordzeewind. |
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| May
7, 2006: Solar bike. The Canadian engineer, Peter Sandler
has developed a solar powered bicycle. The secret of his E-V Sunny Bicycle
are its wheels. These are also solar panels. A 500 watt engine hub motor
powers the bike. Max speed is 30 kilometers per hour. On the back is a
box with a charge regulator and batteries. As long as light shines on
the bike the batteries are charged, so one can ride the bike on battery
power by night.
Cost of the bike is 1295 Canadian dollars for the platform and 795 Canadian dollars for teh soalr kit. Taken together approximately Euro 1500. What would shipping and import duties ad to this attractive bargain? Should one have to insure the wheels? You can order the bike via info@therapyproducts.com. The website of Peter's company is at www.therapyproducts.com. |
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May 5, 2006: Pennsylvania's universities turn solar. PA is the first state in the U.S. to have PV systems installed on each of its 152 institutions of higher learning by the end of 2008 (source: http://www.thesef.org/programs/solarscholars.asp).
April 27, 2006: Gorby goes solar! Former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev today pleads the world's biggest industrialized nations (G8) to set up a fund worth 50 billion US dollars. The money could easily be collected by rechanneling existing subsidies for fossil fuels. It should be used to support further development of solar power generation. See Gorby's website.
April 24, 2006: Oil 75 dollar per barrel. West Texas Intermediate Crude hit record high last Friday: $75,17 per barrel. source: NYMEX
March 29, 2006: If I were Mr. Blair! On the BBC- website you can try to secure the future British electricity supply by formulating a policy to install large numbers of (expensive) wind turbines, start burning bio-rubbish on a grand scale, or to decree the building of a selective number of rather cheap [in the short run, of course] nuclear power stations. There is even a possibility to promote saving energy! I have been puzzling for a while and had a lot of fun. You should try playing Mr. Blair as well.
March 25, 2006: The Solar Chapter of ODE (Dutch Organization for Renewable Energy) visited the headquarters of Oskomera Solar Power Solutions, Deurne. One of the big manufacturing halls has an aluminum facade with amorphous silicium semitransparant windows from top to bottom. From outside these windows are shiny brown, while inside the hall there is a rather normal view on the outside world. The wiring is hidden in the frames. Each of the windows yields 44 Wp worth of electricity. Cool!
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|
inspectie
van de buitenkant van de PV ramen
|
van
binnen gezien
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March 19, 2006: German solar industry market volume is 2005 3.7 billion euros. According to 2006 the German solar industry has performed extremely well last year. A whopping 600 Mwp solar PV was installed, mostly by private investors. (compare this with the total accumulated volume of installed PV in Holland between 1998 and 2005 of approximately 55 MWp). Germany has 4000 companies in solar PV and solar thermal field, employing 42.500 people. Over 10% of electricity generation in Germany is renewable (all renewable sources combined - solar accounts currently for 0.1%). Market is expanding 30% per annum.
| March 17,2006: The Sun Cube is coming! Greg Watson of Adelaide, Australia, has launched his Sun Cube after previously presenting the prototype spherical version, Sun Ball. The 'cube' is just like the 'ball' a solar concentrator system, that is to say a Fresnel lens concentrates sunlight onto a highly efficient triple-junction solar PV cell. This Sun Cube system is equipped with four such units. The big advantage is low cost, a disadvantage is that the system has to be directed at the sun all the time to be most profitable. Ideally for Ozzie sunlight conditions. More on Greg's website: www.greeanandgoldenergy.com.au. Personally I was caught by the Sun Ball's design. |  |
March14, 2006. Single Solar Family Homes in San Luis Obispo, CA.[The Tribune] By 2020 more than half of the new single family homes built in San Luis Obispo must have solar power ability. 5 percent of all new single family homes built in 2008 must include solar panels. The percentage will jump by 4 percent of new homes built every year until 2020.
March 8, 2006. According to Jose Manuel Barroso (President of the EC): " We are in a new energy century, demand is rising, Europe's reserves are declining, there is underinvestment and the climate is changing".
February 20, 2006. Olive orchards or solar gardens? Spanish Acciona Energia (part of the giant Acciona construction and investment group) has put the largest photovoltaic facility in Spain into service at Castejón (region of Navarra). The facility consists of 400 solar trackers each carrying 36 PV panels 170 rated Wattpeak each. The total output of the solar garden is 2.44 megawattpeak. The project is a collective investment with 279 participants. While in Britain and Holland mostly individual homeowners install PV panels on the roofs of their homes, in Germany and in Spain there are groups of private people who collectively own solar arrays. In Germany this phenomenon is called "Solar Bürgerverein", while in Spain the concept of "solar garden" has been developed. Private investors buy participations in giant solar farms. Thanks to tax incentives, government subsidies, energy prices that ever go up, such participations pay back in 10 years. The Castejón facility is the sixth solar garden developed by Acciona. The others are located at Sesma (1.57 MWp), Arguedas I (0.98 MWp), Arguedas II (2.05 MWp), Rada (1.71 MWp) and Cintruénigo (1.46 MWp).
The trackers on the Castejónsite will generate around 4.4 million kilowatt-hours per year of clean and renewable electricity, with production equivalent to the consumption of more than 1,400 households, reducing carbon emissions each year with 4,307 tonnes. According to Acciona the solar garden model responds to the need to make investment in solar power affordable to a larger part of society. More solar gardens are being planned.
February 8, 2006. Nevada to get world's largest photovoltaic array. Powered by Renewables (PBR) of Nevada announced that it will partner with SunEdison of Maryland to develop the world's largest solar photovoltaic project (18 MWp) in Nevada. The total PBR and SunEdison will develop across Nevada will amount to MWp generating power, producing on a yearly basis sufficient energy to power 36,000 homes. Construction in Clark County is scheduled to begin in July 2006. (source: www.solarbuzz.com)
January
25, 2006. British worried about energy future - A recent
survey of the British public's attitudes toward future energy options revealed
high levels of concern about climate change. While polls over the past four
years have shown a gradual lessening of opposition to replacing nuclear power
stations, the new results still show more opposition than support.
The data reveal that most people believe that promoting renewable energy sources (78%), and reducing energy use through lifestyle changes and energy efficiency (76%), are better ways of tackling climate change than nuclear power.
Part of the government's impending energy review will consider whether the UK needs to replace its aging nuclear power stations as one way toward achieving its climate change objectives.
A few of the detailed survey findings on public sentiment about climate change follow:
-- 62% of respondents indicated that every possible action should be taken to limit climate change, and a further 32% that some action should be taken. The public believes changes in behavior to reduce energy consumption (69%), and expanding use of renewables (68%) and of energy efficient technologies (54%) are the best ways of tackling climate change.
-- 34% of adults now think that Britain's existing nuclear power stations should be replaced, while the same proportion do not want them replaced when they reach the end of their lives. Only 9% want to see the number of nuclear stations increased, while 15% would close all existing stations today.
-- 54% of people would be willing to accept the building of new nuclear power stations if it would help to tackle climate change, and 48% agreed that the nation needs nuclear power because renewables alone are not able to meet its electricity needs.
The survey was carried out jointly by researchers from the Centre for Environmental Risk and the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research at the University of East Anglia, in conjunction with Ipsos MORI. Research was jointly funded by The Leverhulme Trust (www.leverhulme.org.uk), the Economic and Social Research Council (www.esrcsocietytoday.ac.uk) and The Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research (www.tyndall.ac.uk). source: [RenewableEnergyAccess.com]
January 17, 2006. Welsh Secretary Peter Hain has installed solar energy panels at his home after becoming "deeply disturbed about climate change". The £16,000 panels, half paid for with a government grant, generate electricity which can be used to cut bills or sold to the national grid. Mr Hain said the work was "not cheap" but he wanted to demonstrate his concern about global warming. "I am a strong believer in green energy," he said. He added: "I am deeply disturbed about climate change, and I put my money where my mouth is" (source: BBC).
January 16, 2006. Hawks on the loose! Two Dutch think tanks, the National Energy Council (AER) and the Netherlands Advisory Board for International Affairs (AIV) have recently proposed to give the Foreign Affairs Office an important voice in securing the national oil and gas supply. They correctly ote that with unchanged policy, Europe will be in the near future hopelessly dependent on Russian, Middle East and North African energy suppliers (personal note: if Europe submits to the seduction to go nuclear, it will become hopelessly dependent on foreign supply as well). Most disturbing is the note that the military might be used to provide security to the supply line .
Someone has dubbed this behavior "Petrolism" (total unconditional addiction to fossil fuels, leading to the use of military options when the supply is thereatened or interrupted). This is the worst of peak oil scenarios. It is really time to save energy and to turn massively into wind, solar, wave and tide power. There is more than sufficient of this stuff in our own part of the world to keep our economies humming.
January 12, 2006. Historical: California Solar Initiative (CSI) San Francisco, California [RenewableEnergyAccess.com] The California Public Utilities Commission has just passed the California Solar Initiative (CSI) by a vote of 3 to 1, with one abstention. This will secure USD $3.2 billion for solar energy rebates in the state for the next 11 years. The CPUC will provide $2.8 billion in customer incentives for solar projects on existing residential buildings, as well as all public buildings, industrial facilities, businesses, and agricultural facilities. The California Energy Commission, meanwhile, will provide $400 million in incentives for new homes, specifically targeting collaborations with the builder / developer community.
Over the last three months, 50,000 people have written to the California Public Utilities Commissioners to ask them to pass a long-term solar rebate program -- more public comment than the CPUC has received on any issue they have ever considered, including the 2001 energy crisis. The CPUC has heard the message loud and clear and responded today by approving the plan, called the California Solar Initiative (CSI). The CSI will provide for the installation of approximately 3000 MW of solar energy, roughly the power equivalent of six large natural-gas fired power plants. It is historic for solar, representing the largest solar energy policy package ever approved in the United States and second only to Germany's solar rebates on a global scale..
January 3, 2006: The natural gas war between Russia and Ukraine shows how dependent Western Europe has become on the Russian gas supply. One Kremlin guy coughs and sheer panic breaks out in various European capitals! This situation already exists in the oil realm. My advice to European energy policy makers: first promote saving energy in earnest, while diversifying, diversifying, and more diversifying into energy sources than can never be monopolized because they are abundant and renewable: wind energy, biomass, decentralized solar, tides, wave energy, and hydrogen in the end. And, ladies and gentlemen, forget the nuclear fission option because this way of energy generation is dependent on monopolized sources of uranium ore (these mines are all outside Europe), there is the eternal problem of highly radioactive waste. Finally, in an all-out nuclear scenario uranium will run out even faster than oil currently does.
'Extremely old news': 2005 through 2001, can be found in the archive
