In September, Dan Arvizu, who heads the U.S. National Renewable Energy Laboratory, made a prescient prediction during a European solar energy conference. He said the meteoric growth of photovoltaic installations over the last six years would cause fossil fuel and nuclear interests to demonize solar cells in hope of killing what they might see as a powerful threat. Days later, Washington politicians started ramping up an investigation into Solyndra, a leading maker of thin-film solar cells that had gone bankrupt two years after receiving a $535 million loan guarantee from the U.S. ... Read More
Solar Showdown: Are New Solar Power Projects Anti-Environmental?
April 18, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
Last December, I flew to Phoenix, rented a car and drove two hours west on Interstate 10 to Blythe, Calif., a sun-baked town of 13,000 on the lower Colorado River surrounded by orange groves and irrigated farmland. In the winter, this area attracts tens of thousands of snowbirds, many of whom park their recreational trailers along dirt roads in the desert and tool around in all-terrain vehicles. I hadn't come to see them, though. I wanted to learn about another new arrival, an international consortium called Solar Millennium LLC, which is building a 7,000-acre solar power generating station ... Read More
Inventor of Plastic Solar Cells Sees Bright Future
January 28, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
In 1974, future Nobel laureates Alan Heeger, Alan MacDiarmid and Hideki Shirakawa discovered a new type of plastic — conjugated conducting polymers. "This polymer was a completely new type that acted more like a metal than like other plastics as it was an excellent conductor of electricity," recalled Niyazi Serdar Sariciftci, who started working with the polymers as a doctoral student at the University of Vienna in the mid-1980s. "It became quite the rage and elicited great interest due to its unique behavior." Drawing on that breakthrough, Sariciftci would create the plastic solar ... Read More
Slashing Solar Subsidies, and Lighting Way for China
January 26, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
Germany's famous solar subsidies — which I wrote about ("Germany's Fine Failure") a year and a half ago — have come under steady pressure from Berlin since Angela Merkel’s government shifted rightward in an election at the end of 2009. For the second year in a row, Germany has trimmed the public incentives that helped make this damp and overcast nation the largest solar panel market in the world. At first it sounds like a cruel idea, particularly since Merkel and her allies have also reversed the nation's historic phase-out of nuclear power. But in fact it's a sign of health. The ... Read More
Solar on the Cheap: Thanks Purple Pokeberry!
September 13, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
“A valueless plant growing wild…” might be dictionary.com’s definition of purple pokeberries, but David Carroll, director of Wake Forest University’s Center for Nanotechnology and Molecular Materials, says the omnipresent “weed” will soon play a role in improving solar power in places ranging from residential green building in the United States to areas in the developing world cut off from the power grid. Carroll says a red dye made from pokeberries can be used to coat a new type of solar cell that’s produced from millions of tiny plastic fibers. Unlike traditional solar ... Read More
Europe Boasts of its Solar Power Strength
September 7, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
The European Union's Joint Research Centre reports that photovoltaic modules installed globally in 2009 had a capacity to generate more than 7 gigawatts of electricity — the equivalent of about seven nuclear power plants. Out of these, almost 6 gigawatts were installed in Europe. This means that 75 percent of the world's photovoltaic systems went up in Europe alone during last year. The cumulative installed PV capacity in the world comes to 22 gigawatts, with 70 percent being European. The United States, though enjoying far more sunshine and being the birthplace of modern photovoltaics, ... Read More
Solar System
June 23, 2009 • By • 1 Comment
Francisco DeVries was familiar with all the grand plans and high-flown talk about solarizing the world's power mix to fight global warming. Then he found himself staring at a problem that seems, somehow, to have repeatedly escaped the climate evangelists' attention. DeVries is a confessed save-the-climate junkie, and his professional credentials include a stint as an appointee in the U.S. Department of Energy under President Clinton. More recently, though, he earned his paycheck as the chief of staff for Berkeley, Calif., Mayor Tom Bates. About two years ago, DeVries was charged with ... Read More
Green Recovery: Welcome to SolarWorld
January 23, 2009 • By • Leave a Comment
It was a typically cloudy day last October when Oregon Gov. Ted Kulongoski, Rep. David Wu and Sen. Ron Wyden came out to cut the ribbon for the grand opening of the largest solar panel manufacturing plant in North America. Above them, at this 480,000-square-foot facility in Hillsboro — about 20 miles west of Portland — bright yellow-and-blue lettering towered against an overcast sky. "SolarWorld: The sunpowered company." The governor has staked much of his legacy in recent years on attracting to Oregon such companies as German-based SolarWorld AG. So far, it's working. Despite a ... Read More
