IHS Warns of Potential Solar Wafer Supply Shortage in 1H 2016
As a result of strong market demand and insufficient supply, wafer ASPs have slowly started to rise since June. This price increase is significant, considering the declining prices for polysilicon -- and costs of wafer production - this year.
UK building the world's largest offshore wind farm
By Kelly Hodgkins for Digital Trends: Danish state-owned company Dong Energy A/S plans to set a new world record for the world’s largest offshore wind farm, breaking the existing record currently held by the 630-megawatt London Array, another facility built by Dong. The new U.K. wind farm will be located in the Irish Sea, about 12 miles off the west coast of Great Britain. When commissioned, it will provide enough energy to power almost a half million homes.
It’s no surprise that Dong is behind this effort, as it is Denmark’s largest energy company and the world’s largest developer of offshore wind power. The company has a longstanding relationship with the UK, constructing and, in some cases, operating multiple offshore wind facilities, including those in Barrow, Burbo Bank, and Walney Island. Between these projects and others in Germany, Dong now has a total of 5.1 gigawatts of offshore wind capacity. It aims to expand this capacity even further with a projected goal of 6.5 gigawatts of offshore wind energy production by 2020. Cont'd...
Thin film perovskite solar cell passes the efficiency test
Matthew Gunther for Chemistry World: Perovskite solar cells may one day rival silicon-based technologies, but their performance outside the laboratory has been a constant source of contention in the past year. Now, an international team of scientists has manufactured the first thin film perovskite solar cell with a reported efficiency that has beenofficially recognised by an accredited national test laboratory.1
Since their development in 2012, the performance of light-harvesting metal–organo halide structures has seemingly improved at a staggering rate, with their efficiency increasing by six percentage points in just two years – the same increase took multi-crystalline solar cells over two decades.
But their stability has been brought into question, with some international test centres taking issue with perovskite solar cells that are so unstable that they may degrade spontaneously in air, making it hard for them to assess their performance.
It’s a state of affairs that Michael Grätzel from the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland has had trouble dealing with. ‘Conspicuously, you could see that from the very beginning there was very scarce information on the stability of these devices,’ comments Grätzel. ‘I have raised that issue many times – one would think that now everybody does stability work after this alarm was sounded, but not so.' Cont'd...
Next Generation Inverters - HD-Wave Technology
With HD-Wave technology, SolarEdge initially creates a much smoother sine wave (a high-definition wave) thus avoiding the heavy and costly magnetic components while gaining efficiency.
Morocco to Build World's Largest Concentrated Solar Power Plant
Cole Mellino for EcoWatch: Morocco imports 97 percent of its energy, and yet it has one of the highest rates of solarinsolation of any country—about 3,000 hours of sunshine per year, according to the Solar GCC Alliance. To put that in perspective, the Guinness Book of World Records puts Yuma, Arizona as the sunniest place on Earth with an average of 4,055 hours of sunshine per year (the theoretical maximum is 4,456), whereas the sunniest place in Germany, which still has a robust solar industry, gets a mere 1,800 sunshine hours a year. So it’s no surprise that Morocco is tapping into its abundant sunshine for energy.
Morocco is building “a complex of four linked solar mega-plants that, alongside hydro andwind, will help provide nearly half of Morocco’s electricity from renewables by 2020,” reports The Guardian. When the entire project is finished, it will be the world’s largest concentrated solar power plant in the world. The first phase, Noor 1, will go live next month. Cont'd...
Growth in Wind Consumption for Top 20 Countries
The BNEF study shows that the global average levelised cost of electricity, or LCOE, for onshore wind nudged downwards from $85 per megawatt-hour in the first half of the year, to $83 in H2, while that for crystalline silicon PV solar fell from $129 to $122.
United Utilities installs Europe's largest floating solar power project on reservoir
By Emily Gosden, Energy Editor for Telegraph UK: Water giant United Utilities is to install Europe’s biggest floating solar power system on a reservoir near Manchester, as it seeks to capitalise on the novel technology to cut its energy costs.
The 12,000 panel, £3.5m development will be only the second of its kind in Britain, dwarfing an 800-panel pilot in Berkshire last year, and will be the second biggest in the world after a scheme in Japan.
Installation of the panels is due to begin on Monday at the Godley reservoir in Greater Manchester, where it will provide a third of the power for a water treatment works.
The system is scheduled to be completed before Christmas, in order to qualify for subsidies before they are due to be drastically cut in the new year. Cont'd...
Texas hits new wind power milestone on Thursday
By Jordan Blum for Fuel Fix: The Texas electric grid hit a new record for wind power use early Thursday, as the state continues dominating the rest of the nation in wind farm growth.
At 12:30 am Thursday, the main Texas grid operator reported that nearly 37 percent of demand was met with wind power. The Electricity Reliability Council of Texas, which manages nearly 90 percent of the state’s electric needs, said it used 12,237.6 megawatts of wind power at the time. That bested a previous record set on Sept. 13 of 11,467 megawatts.
A megawatt powers about 500 typical Texas residences during periods of normal demand.
The new record came the same day as the American Wind Energy Association reported Texas accounted for nearly half of the nation’s wind power growth in the third quarter of the year. Texas added 771 megawatts of wind generation in the third quarter and, nationwide, about 1,600 megawatts were put online. Texas now has about 16,400 megawatts of wind power, according to the AWEA, which is about 10,000 megawatts more than the second and third windiest states, California and Iowa. Cont'd...
California Has More PV Systems Than The Rest Of The Us Combined
California installed 291,513 Photovoltaic (PV) systems while the rest of the country has 191,612 systems.
Extreme Winter Weather Hurts 2015 European Solar Performance
Conducting thorough weather analysis is essential for understanding in the short-term whether a project is performing as it should be, based on the available resource.
How Solar+Storage Could Protect Multifamily Affordable Housing from Power Outages
Clearly, states are beginning to focus on providing clean energy power solutions in the face of ever increasing severity of storms and the need to have resilient power available for disaster response.
UK solar power industry proposes emergency plan to save renewables
Mark Tran for The Guardian: The solar power industry has proposed an emergency plan to rescue renewables, which it says would add just £1 to consumer bills by 2019, on top of the £9 a year that clean technology subsidies cost bill payers.
The scheme is a response to government plans to cut subsidies for rooftop solar panel installations by 87% from 1 January. The Solar Trade Association (STA) has warned the move could cost up to 27,000 jobs and waste public money already spent on supporting the technology.
Solar companies are already going bust as a result of the changes, with an estimated 1,000 jobs lost so far. On Friday, a company backed by the billionaire inventor Elon Musk pulled out of the UK, blaming the government for not supporting the technology.
Zep Solar UK, which is owned by SolarCity where the Tesla boss is chairman, was the fourth UK solar business to close in a fortnight. SolarCity blamed cuts to solar subsidies announced by the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) in the summer.
The STA plan would include higher initial tariffs for subsidies to make investing in the technology viable, with reductions set out to allow the government to control costs and give the industry certainty. The plan would ensure that families, farmers, housing associations and community groups could continue to be involved in the move towards low-carbon power and give them more control over their energy, the STA argues. Cont'd...
The Importance of Pyranometer Temperature Response
One of the main parameters affecting the real-world measurement of solar radiation by pyranometers is temperature response.
Technology Helps Wind Industry Through PTC Debate
Despite the historic success of tax credits in helping to move renewable energy industries forward, the reality is that these credits might not be renewed. Industries will have to rely more heavily on the savings possible through equipment and technology improvements.
Increasing Wind Turbine AEP with Vortex Generators
Vortex Generators are small attachments made from durable material that energizes the flow around the blade and reduce flow separation.
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