A big step in helping perovskites reach their potential as the basis for far cheaper and more efficient types of solar cells came this week from a team at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
The scientists found that the surfaces of materials with this distinctive crystal structure vary dramatically in performance. Perovskites are made up of tiny grains that are faceted, not unlike diamonds, says Alexander Weber-Bargioni, one of the lead researchers, and some facets turn out to be much more efficient at producing electrical current than adjacent ones.
Vowing to create “the world’s only vertically integrated energy company offering end-to-end clean energy products to our customers,” Tesla CEO Elon Musk said on Tuesday that the electric-vehicle maker plans to acquire SolarCity, the largest U.S. installer of rooftop solar arrays. Musk is also the chairman and cofounder of SolarCity, and his cousin Lyndon Rive is the company’s CEO.
Attempting to harness the power of distributed rooftop solar installations to make its grid more flexible and reliable, New York utility Consolidated Edison is launching a pilot program this summer to link dozens of small solar arrays into a single, software-connected power plant. The utility is working with solar power developer SunPower and energy storage company Sunverge to create a “virtual power plant”—a network of distributed assets that functions as a unified resource on the grid.
Son dos proyectos que se desarrollan por separado, pero ambas investigaciones, como otras muchas en curso, tienen como finalidad incrementar la eficiencia de los paneles solares para obtener más electricidad por cada unidad de superficie instalada. Tanta como sea posible.
This week energy forecaster GTM Research predicted that the price of building big solar-power farms will drop below $1 a watt by 2020. That’s a big deal because it’s seen as the threshold below which building solar power arrays becomes competitive, without subsidies, with the cost of fossil-fuel plants. It’s also the target set in 2011 by the U.S. Department of Energy’s SunShot Initiative. But there are important caveats.
To date, growth in residential rooftop solar has been driven largely by leasing models, in which installers own the panels and homeowners make monthly payments that can span up to 20 years.
Skin-like wearables—sensors and other electronics that can be worn comfortably for days at a time because they stretch and feel just like skin—made a big splash at CES. But the first generation of these “electronic tattoos” are externally powered, that is, they harvest RF energy to respond to an external reader. That’s fine for a limited range of applications, when you want to make spot checks of somebody’s temperature, say.
In a warehouse in an anonymous industrial district just off the 101 freeway, in Santa Clara, First Solar is testing the limits of solar-cell technology. Inside the white-walled space, machines deposit cadmium telluride onto sheets of super-pure glass to make solar panels. On the day I visited, this spring, the place had the hushed, intense air of a hospital operating theater.
In a warehouse in an anonymous industrial district just off the 101 freeway, in Santa Clara, First Solar is testing the limits of solar-cell technology. Inside the white-walled space, machines deposit cadmium-telluride onto sheets of super-pure glass to make solar panels. On the day I visited, this spring, the place had the hushed, intense air of a hospital operating theater.
