Wind Power Grows 39% for the Year

by JAD MOUAWAD, New York Times, January 26, 2010 

 

Despite a crippling recession and tight credit markets, the American wind power industry grew at a blistering pace in 2009, adding 39 percent more capacity. The country is close to the point where 2% of its electricity will come from wind turbines.


While that is still a small share, it is up from virtually nothing a few years ago. Continued growth at such a fast pace could help the nation lower its emissions of the gases that cause global warming.

The American Wind Energy Association, in its annual report to be released on Tuesday, said the amount of capacity added last year, 9,900 megawatts, was the largest on record, and was 18% above the capacity added in 2008, also a banner year.

The group said the growth of wind power was helped by the federal stimulus package that passed a year ago, which extended a tax credit and provided other investment incentives for the industry.

But the group warned that the growth could slow. Much of the wind development in 2009 was caused by momentum from 2008, as huge turbines ordered then were delivered to wind farms. In 2009, the recession idled many manufacturers and new orders weakened, which could portend an installation slowdown this year.

“The U.S. wind industry shattered all installation records in 2009, and this was directly attributable to the lifeline that was provided by the stimulus package,” said Denise Bode, the trade association’s chief executive. “The second half of the year was extraordinary. But manufacturers didn’t see much growth because they had built up so much inventory.”

About as much new power-generating capacity came from wind as from natural gas last year, Ms. Bode said. Together, new wind and natural gas projects accounted for about 80 percent of all new generating capacity added in the country.

The wind industry has undergone rapid growth in recent years. Since 2002, the country’s installed base of wind turbines has jumped almost sevenfold.

Even so, the American industry has lagged behind Europe, which gets about 5% of its electricity from wind. The European Commission has set an ambitious mandate to achieve 20% of electrical production from wind and other renewable sources by 2020. Denmark has essentially achieved that goal already, and sometimes produces more wind power than it can use.

Last year, China also outlined plans to more than double the country’s wind capacity by the end of this year by investing $14.6 billion, with rapid growth planned through the end of the decade.

Concerns about global warming have sparked interest in renewable power in the United States and spurred the creation of a domestic manufacturing industry that now employs 85,000 people. Today, about half the components used in wind farms are made in the United States, compared with 25% in 2004, the trade group said.

Much of the growth is attributable to state laws that mandate that a portion of the local power come from renewable sources. But many hurdles remain in getting to 10 or 20% wind power nationally.

Wind investors have called for long-distance transmission lines between the nation’s wind-intensive regions, mostly in the Great Plains and Texas, and its biggest population centers, mostly on the coasts. The lack of such transmission is seen as a major obstacle to further expansion.

“It is not a question of lack of resources,” said Tim Stephure, an analyst at Emerging Energy Research, a consulting firm in Cambridge, Mass. “Unlike the federal highway system or the national gas system, there is a huge lack of federal oversight for electricity. This is something that will take time, while the need for the industry is now.”

Still, the potential for wind is enormous. Mr. Stephure said that by 2020, wind’s installed capacity could be five times higher than it is today, reaching about 180,000 megawatts.

The industry has also called on Congress to pass a federal mandate requiring that a certain percentage of power come from renewable sources. Such mandates are already in place throughout the European Union and in China. In the United States, 29 states have adopted such a renewable power standard.

“The wind manufacturing sector has the potential to employ many more Americans in green jobs, but without a renewable electricity standard to provide a long-term market, the sector will be slow to grow,” the trade group said in its report.

The nation’s wind turbines generate enough electricity to power the equivalent of 9.7 million homes, according to the report. Last year, Texas consolidated its lead as the nation’s top wind producer, with a total capacity of 9,410 megawatts, about three times more than the second-largest producer, Iowa. They were followed by California, Washington and Minnesota.

Link:  http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/26/business/energy-environment/26wind.html

New York Times, Green Inc. blog, February 24, 2009, 4:30 pm

First Solar Claims $1-a-Watt ‘Industry Milestone’

by James Kanter

Current solar plants need large mobile mirrors to produce energy

A new way of capturing the energy from the Sun could increase the power generated by solar panels tenfold, a team of American scientists has shown.

The new technique involves coating glass with a specific mixture of transparent dyes which redirect light to photovoltaic cells in the frame.

The technology, outlined in the journal Science, could be used to convert glass buildings into vast energy plants.

The technology could be in production within three years, the team said.

"It makes sense to coat the side of [very tall] buildings with these new panes," Professor Marc Baldo, one of the researchers on the team, told BBC News. "It's not far fetched at all."

Colour trick

The most advanced attempts to generate large amounts of electricity via the Sun require the use of a solar concentrator.

These are often bulky mobile mirrors that work by tracking the progress of the Sun and concentrating its beams on the cell at its heart.

But there are downsides to this technology: the cells at the centre have to be constantly cooled, and each concentrator requires a large amount of space to avoid shadowing its neighbour.

The technology collects and focuses different colours of sunlight

The new technology does away with the need for mirrors and mobility.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) team has found a way to coat panes of glass or plastic with a mixture of several dyes that essentially do the same job.

"What we have is a piece of glass, with a very thin layer of paint or dye on top," explained Professor Baldo.

"The light comes in and hits the dye and which absorbs it and re-emits the light, but now it's inside the glass so it bounces along there until it gets to the edge. So you only need to mount the solar cells around the edge."

The idea was first developed in the 1970s but was abandoned because much of the light energy was lost en route to the cell.

But using its expertise in optical techniques and a specific mixture of dyes, the MIT team has found a way to make the light travel much farther without losing as much energy along the way.

Window future

"When you do this there is a little bit of energy loss with the dye," said Professor Baldo.

"The main benefit is with the cost. You use a far smaller amount of solar cells. For the same area of solar cells, you get much more electricity."

Existing solar installations could also benefit from the new concentrator, he said.

"You could take this new kind of glass and put it on top of an existing solar cell so the cell still generates electricity but this glass pane with the dye on top captures a certain part of the spectrum and converts it more efficiently than the solar cell would do on its own."

The MIT team believes it could improve existing panels by 50%.

In addition, the system is simple to manufacture, requiring little more than to coat glass or plastic with the combination of dyes. It could be in production within three years, the researchers believe.

If that becomes a reality, one obvious application, they said, was converting windows into energy plants.

"The coated glass would let through about 10% of the Sun to light up the room, and the remainder would be captured and funnelled to the edges to solar cells to generate electricity," said Professor Baldo.

"It would look like smoked glass because of the dyes."

HOW NEW SOLAR PANEL TECHNOLOGY WORKS 1. First solar concentrator coated with transparent dyes absorbs sunlight and transmits it to glass panel edge 2. High voltage solar cells on edge of glass capture sunlight. 3. Low voltage solar cells trap light escaping through first panel. 4. The first panel can also be used alone as a window pane. In the future, glass buildings could produce their own electrical energy.

Link to article: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7501476.stm

ScienceDaily, July 11, 2008 — Imagine windows that not only provide a clear view and illuminate rooms, but also use sunlight to efficiently help power the building they are part of. MIT engineers report a new approach to harnessing the sun's energy that could allow just that. The work, reported in the July 11, 2008, issue of Science, involves the creation of a novel "solar concentrator." "Light is collected over a large area [like a window] and gathered, or concentrated, at the edges," explains Marc A. Baldo, leader of the work, and the Esther and Harold E. Edgerton Career Development Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering.

As a result, rather than covering a roof with expensive solar cells (the semiconductor devices that transform sunlight into electricity), the cells only need to be around the edges of a flat glass panel. In addition, the focused light increases the electrical power obtained from each solar cell "by a factor of over 40," Baldo says.

Because the system is simple to manufacture, the team believes that it could be implemented within three years -- even added onto existing solar-panel systems to increase their efficiency by 50% for minimal additional cost. That, in turn, would substantially reduce the cost of solar electricity.

In addition to Baldo, the researchers involved are Michael Currie, Jon Mapel, and Timothy Heidel, all graduate students in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and Shalom Goffri, a postdoctoral associate in MIT's Research Laboratory of Electronics.

"Professor Baldo's project utilizes innovative design to achieve superior solar conversion without optical tracking," says Dr. Aravinda Kini, program manager in the Office of Basic Energy Sciences in the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Science, a sponsor of the work. "This accomplishment demonstrates the critical importance of innovative basic research in bringing about revolutionary advances in solar energy utilization in a cost-effective manner."

Solar concentrators in use today "track the sun to generate high optical intensities, often by using large mobile mirrors that are expensive to deploy and maintain," Baldo and colleagues write in Science. Further, "solar cells at the focal point of the mirrors must be cooled, and the entire assembly wastes space around the perimeter to avoid shadowing neighboring concentrators."

The MIT solar concentrator involves a mixture of two or more dyes that is essentially painted onto a pane of glass or plastic. The dyes work together to absorb light across a range of wavelengths, which is then re-emitted at a different wavelength and transported across the pane to waiting solar cells at the edges.

In the 1970s, similar solar concentrators were developed by impregnating dyes in plastic. But the idea was abandoned because, among other things, not enough of the collected light could reach the edges of the concentrator. Much of it was lost en route.

The MIT engineers, experts in optical techniques developed for lasers and organic light-emitting diodes, realized that perhaps those same advances could be applied to solar concentrators. The result? A mixture of dyes in specific ratios, applied only to the surface of the glass, that allows some level of control over light absorption and emission. "We made it so the light can travel a much longer distance," Mapel says. "We were able to substantially reduce light transport losses, resulting in a tenfold increase in the amount of power converted by the solar cells."

This work was also supported by the National Science Foundation. Baldo is also affiliated with MIT's Research Laboratory of Electronics, Microsystems Technology Laboratories, and Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies.

Mapel, Currie and Goffri are starting a company, Covalent Solar, to develop and commercialize the new technology. Earlier this year Covalent Solar won two prizes in the MIT $100K Entrepreneurship Competition. The company placed first in the Energy category ($20,000) and won the Audience Judging Award ($10,000), voted on by all who attended the awards.

---

The Suntory Mermaid II successfully completed late Friday night a 4,350-mile trip from Honolulu, Hawaii, to the Kii Channel off the east coast of Japan, marking the longest known voyage by a wave-powered boat.

The journey was undertaken by a Japanese team to demonstrate that an environmentally sensitive propulsion system powered exclusively by waves can operate in real-world conditions.

The bow-mounted mechanism, which harnesses wave power to provide a dolphinlike tail kick from two independently mounted flippers, was designed and built by Dr. Yutaka Terao of the department of naval architecture and ocean engineering at the Tokai University School of Marine Science and Technology in Japan.

The design team originally estimated that the 31-foot-long, three-ton catamaran would average 3-4 knots and arrive off the east coast of Japan about 60 days after its departure on March 16. But, unusually good weather and calm seas resulted in the boat traveling an average of only 1.5 knots, and the Mermaid’s maiden voyage ended up taking 111 days. Nevertheless, Dr. Terao and his team were satisfied with the result.

“We were able to prove that our propulsion system delivers a 7,000-kilometer voyage,” Dr. Terao said in an e-mail interview from Japan. “And we can easily improve the speed. In fact, the improvements have already started.”

Kenichi Horie, the ecologically minded sailor who captained the Mermaid, has set two world records for piloting environmentally sensitive boats, the first in 1993 for the longest distance traveled in a human-powered pedal boat (4,660 nautical miles) and the second in 1996 for the fastest Pacific crossing in a solar-powered boat (148 days).

At a dockside celebration on Sunday at Shin Nishinomiya Yacht Harbor, Mr. Horie told the gathering: “The time has come for us to shift from fossil fuels. I hope this voyage will increase awareness and interest in natural energy.”

Mr. Horie, 69, appeared energetic if noticeably thinner after his three and a half months at sea.

“I had some food left, so I could have enjoyed the trip a bit longer,” he said with a smile. “But I think I’ll save it for the next voyage.”

Link to article: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/08/science/08wave.html