Tag: Solar Energy

India, Uncategorized

Solar Growing by leaps and Bounds in India, fueling Irrigation and Jobs

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Sky New’s Peta Credlin was paid by Adani to do an advertorial on coal entrely ignoring the real facts of what is occurring in India and why Adani is divesting away from coal and to Solar energy. The total avoidance of mentioning the reality of what is occurring  renders that Sky News as Fake (ODT)

India is now for the first time in history investing more in solar energy than in coal.

There is a simple reason for this. Coal costs roughly 5 cents a kilowatt hour to generate electricity. India just let a bid for 1.2 gigawatts of solar energy and four companies scooped it up at 3.6 cents a kilowatt hour. The only advantage coal and gas had is that the sunk costs of plant construction have already been written off. But in India today, it is actually cheaper to build a new solar park than to go on operating a coal plant.

Over-all, India is now the lowest-cost producer of solar electricity, at about 8.5 cents a kilowatt hour. Solar photovoltaic has been declining annually by about 23% year on year since 2010.

Asia hosts over 3 million photovoltaic power jobs, nearly 90% of the global total.

India has grown from 3 gigawatts of installed capacity in 2014 to over 30 GW in 2019!

India might not be able to triple that amount but it will at least double it to 60 gigawatts. From the beginning of time till now, the US has only put in 63 gigawatts of solar, total, and Japan has done 60. For India to catch up to those two countries (#2 and #3 for solar panels) in only two years will be almost a miracle.

via Solar Growing by leaps and Bounds in India, fueling Irrigation and Jobs

Israel

In Israeli desert, the world’s highest solar tower looks to future – Your Middle East

Once completed in late 2017, the Ashalim Tower will rise to 240 metres (787 feet), taller than Paris’s Montparnasse Tower and London’s Gherkin, according to the Is

Source: In Israeli desert, the world’s highest solar tower looks to future – Your Middle East

increased efficiency, Martin Green

Solar energy world first in Australia

Pioneer: Professor Martin Green, director of the Australian Centre for Advanced Photovoltaics at the University of NSW.

Pioneer: Professor Martin Green, director of the Australian Centre for Advanced Photovoltaics at the University of NSW.

Australian solar power researchers have achieved world-beating levels of efficiency, potentially making large solar plants more competitive with other energy sources such as coal.

A team from the Australian Centre for Advanced Photovoltaics (PV) at the University of NSW has achieved 40.4 per cent “conversion efficiency” by using commercially available solar cells combined with a mirror and filters that reduce wasted energy.

It’s horse and buggy days as far as solar is concerned at the moment.

Martin Green, director of the Australian Centre for Advanced Photovoltaics

Martin Green, the centre’s director, said the independently verified breakthrough eclipsed previous records without resorting to special laboratory PV cells that “you’ve got no chance of buying commercially”. Other top-performing solar panels convert about 36 per cent of the sunlight that falls on them into electricity.

The advance involved two steps. Three solar panels were stacked to capture energy from different wave lengths of sunlight, and then excess light from the stacked panels was directed by a mirror and filters to a fourth PV cell, making use of energy previously discarded

“This is our first re-emergence into the focused-sunlight area,” said Professor Green, who pioneered 20 per cent-efficiency levels in similar technology in 1989.

The institute was prompted to revisit the technology in part because of Australian companies’ efforts to develop large-scale solar towers using arrays of mirrors to focus sunlight on PV cells.

One of those firms, Melbourne-based RayGen, collaborated with UNSW on the project. It is building a plant in China with an solar conversion rate of about 28 per cent across the year.. “We’d take them to the mid-30s” for future projects with the technology jump, Professor Green said.

Professor Green was critical of the federal government’s efforts to scrap the Australian Renewable Energy Agency – which chipped in $550,000 to the $1.3 million Power Cube project – and for its ongoing attempts to reduce the Renewable Energy Target set for 2020.

“A positive attitude to renewables would boost all these initiatives, a negative attitude will suppress them,” he said. “Clamping down on deployment of renewables will make it more difficult for developments like this to see the light of day.”

The next goal is to raise efficiency levels of concentrating solar to 42 per cent next year, about half way to the theoretical maximum level of 86 per cent. It’s an issue likely to be discussed as Sydney plays host to the Asia-Pacific Solar Research Conference this week.

“It’s horse and buggy days as far as solar is concerned at the moment. There’s just this enormous potential for improvement in efficiency,” Professor Green said.

“To turn your back on those types of developments doesn’t seem to me to be a very sensible strategy.”

The university’s Mark Keevers led the engineering work on the so-called high efficiency spectrum splitting prototype, and its results were confirmed by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) at its outdoor test facility in the US