Technology Review: A Better Solar Collector

Here’s another screamingly cool addition to the panoply of   new solar innovations happening these days. A small  company based in Cambridge, Ma, Covalent Solar, is introducing its concept for dramatically increasing the efficiency of polysilicon photovoltaic power cells.  Specifically, their innovation places a sheet of chemically dyed glass (or plastic conceivably) over an existing PV panel. The dyed glass actually shunts a specfic wavelength of sunlight sideways..that’s right…at a 90 degree angle to the direction of travel, forcing it out the edges of the glass panel and into a PV panel waiting there. It concentrates the light and allows a much smaller PV panel to capture roughly as much as a full-sized standard PV panel. If you put this literally on top of an existin PV panel you could nearly double the efficiency of the panel alone.  Founded by researchers at MIT, Covalent Solar is a new startup and the technology is still developing, but I love the simple elegance of the idea. I can definitely see how this could work either stand alone or in conjunction with traditional PV panels.  Way effin cool.

Here’s a cool idea for generating energy: Harness the power of one of Nature’s baddest mammajammas and use it to do good. Tornados: They suck, a knowledge gained firsthand by many a hapless trailer park inhabitant across the American midwest. Well, a Canadian engineer has decided to try to capitalize on cyclonic power to spin turbine engines and generate electricity. He thinks he’s found a way to basically create a tornadic vortex in a controlled environment for just such a purpose. Better yet, he figures he can do it using waste heat from existing power plants.

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Check this thing out. It’s a parabolic solar array from Stirling Energy Systems. The thing in the center, the Power Conversion Unit, collects the concentrated solar energy and converts it to mechanical energy by heating gas and letting it move some pistons. Stirling Energy Systems have developed this puppy based on the design of the Stirling Cycle Engine designed in 1816.

Since it’s a dish shape much like any radio telescope or satellite dish, it’s fully motorized and gimbaled, thus able to automatically track the sun. The electricity output can be pumped right into the grid too.

Stirling Energy recently broke the standing grid efficiency record too apparently. They achieved 31.25% net efficiency putting power into the grid. The old record of 29.4 has stood since 1984. Moving ever closer to the elusive “Grid parity”.

This is cool stuff.

Wow. I’m swooning over the prospects put forth in an article I just read. Jane’s Addiction’s song “Jane Says” came immediately to mind while reading it because oil is after all the new heroin.

The article, appearing in the January ‘08 Scientific American, is titled A Solar Grand Plan, by Ken Zweibel, James Mason and Vasilis Fthenakis. It’s a very sober, and hope-evincing, look at what it will take to get the Fossil Fuel Monkey off our national back and get us on the road to sensible, sustainable energy self-sufficiency by 2050. No methadone-esque ethanol plan this, these guys propose a warm-turkey weaning by implementing a solar grid. Sounds pretty damn good to me.

Here are the article’s highlights, as presented by the authors:

KEY CONCEPTS:

â– A massive switch from
coal, oil, natural gas and
nuclear power plants to solar
power plants could supply
69 percent of the U.S.’s
electricity and 35 percent
of its total energy by 2050.

â– A vast area of photovoltaic
cells would have to be
erected in the Southwest.
Excess daytime energy
would be stored as compressed
air in underground
caverns to be tapped during
nighttime hours.

â– Large solar concentrator
power plants would be
built as well.

â– A new direct-current power
transmission backbone
would deliver solar electricity
across the country.

â– But $420 billion in subsidies
from 2011 to 2050
would be required to fund
the infrastructure and
make it cost-competitive.
—The Editors

I’m good with all of that. $420 Billion over the next 40 years?? Even if they’re wrong by half, $800 Billion is peanuts in the larger scheme of things. We could fund that in 10 years if we chose to. The payoff would be immediate and the benefits almost inconceivably luscious economically, politically and environmentally.

Consider what we spend on the damn Irag/Afghanistan boondoggle…nearly $193 Billion is going to be spent in 2008 alone. Since the war began in 2001, we’ve disgorged in excess of $570 Billion. And for what? Despite being rabid neo-cons, I don’t think the Bush babies did a proper RoI analysis on this little muscle-flexing jaunt. Hmmm, $570 Billion + Total loss of all international credibility + increased global terrorism VS. a possibly steady supply of oil at $100+ a barrel until extremists blow up the infrastructure. For that kind of dough we could be well on the way to funding and implementing a new solar energy industry and national infrastructure and actually making the Middle East and OPEC fairly beside the point.

I’m sure there are flaws and miscalculations in the proposed Solar Grand Plan, though I don’t see them. It’s still a well-thought feasibility study of what it would take to become energy independent using the free, abundant energy of the sun.

The BBC reported today on a news item that’s both heartening and deeply unsettling at the same time. Scientists at the Svalbard Global Seed Bank have created a special vault deep inside a mountain on Spitzbergen, one of Norway’s four Svalbard Islands to safely house seeds of important crops and plantlife against the possibility of a global catastrophe.

The facility’s location makes it quite safe from most catastrophic events, be they climactic, nuclear or what have you. It also will keep the seeds at a relatively constant 18 degrees Celsius (0 Farhenheit) which will allow them to stay safely stashed for over 1000 years.

The vault is intended to act as insurance so that food production can be restarted anywhere on Earth after a regional or global catastrophe.

Built deep inside a mountain, the structure will eventually house a vast collection of seeds; safeguarding world crops against possible future disasters including nuclear wars and dangerous climate change.
______________
The collection and maintenance of the seeds is being co-ordinated by the Global Crop Diversity Trust, which has responsibility of ensuring the “conservation of crop diversity in perpetuity”.

So, while I think this is very forward thinking and rational, I gotta wonder….cowpeas? What is a cowpea? Is it food? Sounds made up to me, kind of like “dirtweed” or “tater tot”. And what do they know that I don’t? Global warming climate crises aside, are we preparing for the 2012 Mayan apocalypse here? A Jerry Lewis Film Festival? Alien invasion? Will ET even like wheat?

Full story at the BBC

A new startup has announced that it can produce Ethanol for roughly $1 a gallon, anywhere in the world.Coskata claims that creating ecologically responsible biofuels is possible with it’s patented process. No irresponsible feed-stocks are necessary, meaning we could finally curtail the wrong-headed corn ethanol panacea model the US is so gung-ho about. Instead, Coskata’s enzymatic process can use municipal waste, crop residues and all manner of biomass as the raw material to be converted into 99% pure ethanol. Whoa! Technology that serves more than a single purpose?? Science gets crunchy…what’s a thoughtless consumerist proleroid to think?

Using patented microorganisms and transformative bioreactor designs, Coskata ethanol is produced via a unique three-step conversion process that turns virtually any carbon-based feedstock, including biomass, municipal solid waste, bagasse and other agricultural waste into ethanol, making production a possibility in almost any geography. Coskata’s process technology is ethanol-specific and enzyme independent, requiring no additional chemicals or pre-treatments; environmentally superior, reducing carbon dioxide emissions by as much as 84% compared to conventional gasoline; and has the ability to generate 7.7 times as much energy as is required to produce the ethanol, compared to corn ethanol which generates approximately 1.3 times as much energy according to Argonne National Labs.