Southern California Edison (SCE) announced the launch of a project to place 250 megawatts of solar panel capacity on company buildings in Riverside and San Bernardino counties.  The project hopes to add 1 megawatts of capacity each week of the 5 year project. The project is expected to cost nearly $900 million dollars, based on current estimates.  SCE points out that by scattering the installations throughout their service area and connecting directly to local sub stations, this project will reduce transmission related power loss and reduce stress on the regional grid. 

“Not only does this project bring carbon free energy, it also is likely to generate several million dollars a year in CO2 offset credits for SCE”, 4Offsets CEO Fred Weiss noted when interviewed on this news.  Assuming that these panels generate full power for 10 hours a day 300 days a year, which is likely in this desert location, the project will generate approximately 300,000 tons of offsets each year.  “When you add it up, it’s about $2 million worth of US voluntary credits or $12 million if credits are sold in Europe. This is a great example of how offsets can cause real change by providing investors with a better return”, Mr. Weiss added.

Scientists estimate that the Earth has been around for more than 4-billion years. In that relatively short timeframe by universe standards, our planet has witnessed more changes take place than any other body in our solar system. Once a desolate place, the Earth was uninhabitable, nothing thrived here but water and ice which almost covered the entire planet. Eventually, climate changes and some geological events produced an environment in which life slowly started to grow and adapt.Over the course of 4-billion years, life of all types has roamed our planet. From the dinosaurs before us to our hairy ancestors, the apes, Earth has been the home of many species. Of all the steps among the evolutionary scale, humans are without a doubt the most deadly to our loving mother. Apes walked upright and became men before the tectonic shifting of the plates moved continents to where we now know them to be on our globe. We were all in one relatively small area as humans. Our species evolved with a few key characteristics and dispositions. We needed to eat, be safe, and procreate. They were early mans only concerns.

As the years passed, the Earth slowly started to fill up with people. As the thinking-man became king of the evolutionary chart, humans started to divide, conquer, and inhabit all the continents in the world. From humble beginnings to over 6-billion people on today’s planet, we’ve caused more than our share of harm to the Earth’s natural resources. People produce waste; it’s just a byproduct of living. Both human waste which occurs naturally through the ingestion and digesting of food, and man-made waste like plastics and chemicals that we dump into the oceans.

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With the serious threat of global warming increasing, people are mixed on how to feel. Some rush to save the planet; doing everything they can to stop their usage of fossil fuel consumption. And some dismiss global warming as nothing but a theory, refusing to admit its existence. Regardless of your personal feelings about the potential crisis, energy costs are still at an all time high, with no high-water mark set yet. Every day across the globe, people are doing more to save energy in their homes. They’re drastically cutting back on energy consumption, both for the planet, and for their pockets.

Many people consider making these changes while their home is being constructed. More and more people are building energy-efficient homes across the globe. The demand for energy efficiency is surging due to the rapid rise of energy costs. Consumers understand this and are turning to home builders and architects for advisement.

How to incorporate energy efficiencies into your new homes construction:

Make sure you get solar panels for your home. This will be your homes main energy source. There’s no more paying your town or city’s outrageous bill. The sunlight on your solar panels will provide all the energy you will need to run all of your appliances.

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Our Earth is a very fascinating place. The atmosphere that surrounds our Earth acts as a shield from the Sun’s massive amounts of radiant energy and heat. It is a filter of sorts, it keeps the Earth’s temperate at an approximate area, which helped spawn and sustain life. Half of the Sun’s energy is absorbed by the Earth’s surface. The rest is reflected back into the atmosphere where it is then absorbed by the gases which are present there. Nitrogen oxide, carbon dioxide and methane gases absorb the heat, these are called Greenhouse Gases.

Though these greenhouse gases occur naturally in our atmosphere, the human race has added much more to the equation. The more fossil fuels and wood we burn, the more greenhouse gas we produce. This means that our atmosphere can retain much more heat. And in turn, our planet’s temperature begins to rise. This “Greenhouse Effect” is commonly known as Global Warming.

Global Warming has always been a dangerous prospect. Though it is happening, the pace at which it increases isn’t enough to deter people from their dangerous consumption of woods and fossil fuels. In 1900, the average temperature of our planet was 59.8 degrees F. Scientists have predicted that over the next hundreds years, this temperature will increase by 3.6 - 6.3 degrees F. This is the highest rate of global warming our planet has seen in 10,000 years.

Our planet is completely stabilized. Scientists predict that it took upwards of millions of years for the ice caps to set, creating a consistent weather pattern and livable temperature. Unfortunately for mankind, global warming is melting these polar ice caps, and many aspects of life on this planet are already suffering their adverse effects. The ice caps melting are forcing the sea level to rise. This is known as Thermal Expansion.

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Urban wind power systems aren’t new. Way back in the mid-70’s, the first rooftop windmill was installed on top of a NY City co-op building. The wind turbine generated enough electricity monthly - 200 kilowatt-hours - to power the building with enough electricity left over to deliver some to the Northeast power grid. So why didn’t urban wind generation catch on? For one thing, the technology was primitive compared to today’s. The early models were noisy and vibrated enough to be felt throughout the buildings. They looked like propellers on sticks to some people and weren’t aesthetically pleasing at all.

Things have certainly changed. When Chicago turned to Bil Becker, of Aerotecture International, http://www.aerotecture.com, he was able to provide the city with vertical-axis wind turbines that are almost beautiful. More like modern sculptures, these new rooftop turbines are able to generate electricity no matter the wind direction. Unlike horizontal-axis turbines, they can do that even when the wind is blowing with 100 mph gusts! Their price — under $4,000 and falling –make them accessible to the residential market also. Thanks to new design technology, vertical-axis turbines are almost no hazard to wildlife, they don’t vibrate at all and produce very little noise.

With very little fanfare, these rooftop arrays have multiplied at an increasing rate over the last decade, according to the American Wind Energy Association, and the industry is expanding exponentially. Phillipa Rogers, a spokesperson for Quiet Revolution, says, “We can’t make the turbines fast enough.” Company president, Phil Watkins, sees more than 40,000 turbines distributed by next fall. (http://www.plentymag.com/features/2007/09/a_mighty_wind.php)

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In 1970 at Odeillo, France, a solar furnace was built. Focusing the sun’s light, thousands of mirrors combine to produce temperatures up to 5,400 F. The furnace has applications in scientific research, can fire ceramics, and could even generate hydrogen. It was also in France, much earlier in 1949, that the first known modern solar furnace was built by Professor Felix Trombe. It was also built in the Pyrenees due to the almost 300 days of sunshine. Over fifty years old, it is back online and attracts 30,000 visitors annually. It is a dual reflection solar furnace with an array of 1,420 mirrors.Solar furnaces produce extremely high temperatures by using mirrors to parabolically reflect light onto a relatively small area of focus. This effect is similar, only on a larger scale, to the effect of focusing the sun’s rays through a magnifying glass to set fire to a piece of paper. (It’s also reputed to be the method that Archimedes used to burn Roman ships at the Siege of Syracuse.  (source: MIT)
While the heat of a solar furnace can melt steel, whether or not Archimedes’s Death Ray actually worked is unknown.

While some solar furnaces are used to refine metals, coat building materials, incinerate hazardous waste and fire ceramics, others are used for power generation. A type of solar furnace that generates electricity transfers the collected or focused energy of the sun and stores it in a substance for later use. Although water was originally used for a storage medium, liquid sodium is now used due to its higher capacity for heat retention. The stored energy can be used to boil water into steam to power turbines that generate electricity and can also be accessed even during darkness or cloudy days. Spain’s 15 MW Solar Tres Power Tower and 11 MW PS10 Solar Power Tower are based on this design. Other countries, including South Africa, have solar furnace based Solar Power Towers in the planning stages.

The PS10 tower is 40 stories high and is surrounded by an array of 600 heliostats or mirrors which are focused on water-filled plastic tubing at the top of the tower. Because of the reflected light, dust and water vapor in the air are illuminated into a pale fog which surrounds the tower. The tower is projected one day to provide enough power for the 600,000 inhabitants of the city of Seville, but is currently not up to that capacity at 11 Megawatts. Heliostats are being added and as they come online, capacity will increase. Abengoa, the company which owns the tower facility, and Solucar, the operator, report that the cost of generation is three times the cost of conventional power generation, but the tower produces no greenhouse gases, a fact that must be figured into the cost/benefit ratio. And as gas and oil prices rise and more solar furnace technology is adopted, construction and generating costs will no-doubt come more into line with conventional power plant costs. The subject of intense interest, PS10 is Europe’s first commercial Solar Power Tower operation. (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/6616651.stm)

In the US, two Solar Power Tower projects were funded by the Department of Energy. Solar One and Solar Two, sited in the Mojave Desert in the Southwestern US, were limited successes and resulted in research which proved that liquid sodium is a much better medium for heat storage than water and that the Power Tower design was feasible. Spain’s Solar Tres was based on these projects and used Solar Two as a partial model for its tower design.

Crystalline silicon wafers have many drawbacks. They’re expensive. They’re usually encased in glass, which makes them heavy and brittle. Their manufacture is dependent on fossil fuels and results in pollution and waste. In spite of this, they dominate the PV cell market. Because crystalline cells are connected in series, if one breaks, is shaded or isn’t connected properly, the array is dysfunctional. Although technically they are more efficient than other kinds of photovoltaic cells, they often don’t perform as well because of the high temperatures on rooftops which reduce their efficiency. Enter amorphous photovoltaic cells made by Energy Conversion Devices or ECD.

In the late 1990’s, a subsidiary of ECD — Uni-Solar — revealed a new class of PV cells. Triple Junction PV modules are named for the three layers of PV junctions that are stacked atop one another, with each layer attuned to a different wave length of light i.e blue, yellow/green and red. Compared to old-style glass type panels, Triple Junction PV modules are 30% more powerful and are much more effective in high temperature applications. Because they are coated with Dupont Tefzel glaze, they are able to withstand golf ball-sized hail and similar impacts. An installation funded by the Department of Energy in Hawaii in 1998 is still holding up and working well.

Perhaps the most surprising and promising facet of the Triple Junction line is that it can be used for roofing, just like normal shingles, and even looks like conventional shingles. Because, unlike glass encased PV panels, there is no need for an aluminum frame, it takes far less time to install Triple Junction PV modules. The flexible panels are laminated to metal roofing, on site, and in some instances are actually less expensive than composite shingles. According to Stan Ovshinsky, the inventor of amorphous PV cells and ECD’s founder and former CEO, “production costs are well below any other PV product. Our problem is keeping up with demand.” (http://www.renewable-energy-world.com) Because of these lower production costs, Triple Junction PV modules have the fastest energy payback — the time it takes to recover the costs of making them — of any PV cell.

When compared to fossil fuels or nuclear power, the ECD product is miles ahead in terms of efficiency and even cost, when factors like pollution, land area to return and transportation costs are taken into consideration. Coal for instance, involves mining land and the disposal of waste which covers vast areas in some places in the US and other countries. Nuclear power is dangerous, subject to terrorist threats and has an unsolved problem with waste disposal. Nuclear power also depends heavily on government subsidies, a hidden but real cost.

ECD is the biggest player in the amorphous film PV cell industry, as well as a key manufacturer of other renewable energy technology. The Ovshinskys, Stan and his late wife, Iris, his working partner for more than fifty years, concentrated their research in two areas: information and energy, which Stan called the “twin pillars of the global economy.” Their subsidiary, Ovonics Universal Memory, is involved in multi-level technology, phase-change research and innovative approaches to memory storage and artificial intelligence. In addition to amorphous PV cell modules and IT technology, ECD and its subsidiaries produce NiMH batteries, hydrogen-based vehicles, hydrogen storage systems and fuel cells.

The Ovshinskys have received many awards including the Popular Science Grand Award. They have been featured in two PBS documentaries and honored by the American Chemical Society for “significant and lasting contributions to global human welfare with their invention of environmentally sustainable energy generation and energy storage applications.” Their IT work funds their PV cell research, which gives them much more latitude in research than companies with a single-technology approach to PV cell manufacture. Add to that their many other lines of hydrogen-based technologies and it’s clear that amorphous PV cell research will be fully supported at ECD far into the future. In 2001, the Forum of Chalcogeniders established the Stanford Ovshinsky Award for Excellence in Non-Crystalline Chalcogenides to honor his pioneering work and recognize the contributions of scientists and technologists in this field. (http://www.ovonic.com)

Although a French physicist named Becquerel first reported the photovoltaic effect, the first solar cell was probably constructed by Charles Fritts in the early 1880’s. Fritts coated selenium with a very thin gold layer, but the efficiency of this first solar cell was abysmal. It wasn’t until 1941 when Russell Ohl patented the silicon solar cell that efficiency started to improve appreciably. Soon, other scientists had improved on Ohl’s silicon solar cell to achieve a 6 percent return on energy conversion in strong sunlight. Bell Laboratories produced the first crystalline silicon solar cell in 1954, but its efficiency was merely 4%.Because the first large-scale use for solar cells was space satellites, government funding began to power the research, which had a galvanizing effect on solar cell research. By the 1970’s, the USSR had created Gas heterostructure solar cells with a high efficiency, although production was very limited until equipment design caught up to design theory. By the 1980’s, the US had produced a cell with 20% efficiency for use in the space program. And by early in 2000, efficiency was up to 24%. As of 2007, solar cells with an efficiency of 28% are manufactured by the two companies that dominate world solar cell production, Spectrolab and Emcore Photovoltaics.

While silicon wafer-based first-generation solar cells make up almost 90% of the solar cell market for terrestrial applications, second generation or thin-film solar cells make up the same percentage of the space applications. While nowhere near as efficient as their first generation relatives, these thin-film cells are much lighter and more pliable, prime considerations for space flight. Other cells are being developed at the present time including some that are dye sensitized, and thus able to respond to all light frequencies, unlike the silicon-based cells. There are even cells that are capable of using infrared frequencies, which would allow them to operate at night to some extent. Solar cell technology now in the research stage includes nanocrystal solar cells, photo electrochemical cells and polymer solar cells. One emerging leader in the solar cell technology race is Nanosolar at http://www.nanosolar.com, a company that is partially owned by the founders of Google, Sergey Brin and Larry Page.

There is very little to wear out on photovoltaic cells. It’s reasonable to expect a well-designed and properly installed system to have a lifetime of three decades or more. The most common failure in a photovoltaic system are the other components that are needed to convert electrons to AC current. The inverter, the batteries, the wiring — all are subject to corrosion, wear and aging. Batteries will need to be replaced at proper intervals, for instance. The cells themselves, however, should need no maintenance over the course of their lifetime unless they’re exposed to unusually harsh weather conditions.

Something that needs to be taken into consideration is the amount of sunlight that falls on the solar cells. This can significantly affect the electrical output. Mechanical devices to assist the cells in “tracking” the sun are often built into solar modules and arrays. Before installing photovoltaic cells, contractors often research the sun’s irradiance at the latitude of the installation. Irradiance can be determined by consulting the Department of Energy’s charts or at Advanced Energy Group’s website at http://www.solar4power.com.

Modules are groups of solar cells connected in a series and attached to a panel. Modules are constructed to deliver a range of output. Depending on the application, output is measured in watts or kilowatts and is calculated using a formula that takes into consideration peak power usage and average power output of each cell. Arrays are groups of modules and several thousand may be used in an electrical generating plant designed to power hundreds or even thousands of houses. Solar power is extremely adaptable to a wide range of applications, which puts it at the forefront of renewable energy sources.