Humans are hogging the Sun's energy.

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Using solar energy at night...

MIT develops way to bank solar energy at home
Thu Jul 31, 2008 - A U.S. scientist has developed a new way of powering fuel cells that could make it practical for home owners to store solar energy and produce electricity to run lights and appliances at night.

A new catalyst produces the oxygen and hydrogen that fuel cells use to generate electricity, while using far less energy than current methods. With this catalyst, users could rely on electricity produced by photovoltaic solar cells to power the process that produces the fuel, said the Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor who developed the new material.

"If you can only have energy when the sun is shining, you're in deep trouble. And that's why, in my opinion, photovoltaics haven't penetrated the market," Daniel Nocera, an MIT professor of energy, said in an interview at his Cambridge, Massachusetts, office. "If I could provide a storage mechanism, then I make energy 24/7 and then we can start talking about solar." Solar has been growing as a power source in the United States -- last year the nation's solar capacity rose 45 percent to 750 megawatts. But it is still a tiny power source, producing enough energy to meet the needs of about 600,000 typical homes, and only while the sun is shining, according to data from the Solar Energy Industries Association.

Most U.S. homes with solar panels feed electricity into the power grid during the day, but have to draw back from the grid at night. Nocera said his development would allow homeowners to bank solar energy as hydrogen and oxygen, which a fuel cell could use to produce electricity when the sun was not shining. "I can turn sunlight into a chemical fuel, now I can use photovoltaics at night," said Nocera, who explained the discovery in a paper written with Matthew Kanan published on Thursday in the journal Science.

More MIT develops way to bank solar energy at home | Reuters

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Calif. goin' solar...

Two Large Solar Plants Planned in California
August 14, 2008 - Companies will build two solar power plants in California that together will put out more than 12 times as much electricity as the largest such plant today, the latest indication that solar energy is starting to achieve significant scale.

The plants will cover 12.5 square miles of central California with solar panels, and in the middle of a sunny day will generate about 800 megawatts of power, roughly equal to the size of a large coal-burning power plant or a small nuclear plant. A megawatt is enough power to run a large Wal-Mart store. The power will be sold to Pacific Gas & Electric, which is under a state mandate to get 20 percent of its electricity from renewable sources by 2010. The utility said that it expected the new plants, which will use photovoltaic technology to turn sunlight directly into electricity, to be competitive with other renewable energy sources, including wind turbines and solar thermal plants, which use the sun’s heat to boil water.

“These market-leading projects we have in California are something that can be extrapolated around the world,” Jennifer Zerwer, a spokeswoman for the utility, said. “It’s a milestone.” Though the California installations will generate 800 megawatts at times when the sun is shining brightly, they will operate for fewer hours of the year than a coal or nuclear plant would and so will produce a third or less as much total electricity. OptiSolar, a company that has just begun making a type of solar panel with a thin film of active material, will install 550 megawatts in San Luis Obispo County. The SunPower Corporation, which uses silicon-crystal technology, will build about 250 megawatts at a different location in the same county.

The scale is a leap forward. “If you’re going to make a difference, you’ve got to do it big,” said Randy Goldstein, the chief executive of OptiSolar. The scale of the two plants will “bring a new paradigm to bear” for the industry, he said. At 800 megawatts total, the new plants will greatly exceed the scale of previous solar installations. The largest photovoltaic installation in the United States, 14 megawatts, is at Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada, using SunPower panels.

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Granny says, "Oh just great - now we all gonna freeze to death...

Solar wind weakens as sun dials down its furnace
24 Sept.`08 WASHINGTON — The sun has dialed back its furnace to the lowest levels seen in the space age, new measurements from a space probe show.

But don't worry — it's too small a difference to change life on Earth, scientists said Tuesday. In fact, it means satellites can stay in orbit a little longer. The solar wind — a stream of charged particles ejected from the sun's upper atmosphere at 1 million miles per hour — is significantly weaker, cooler and less dense than it has been in 50 years, according to new data from the NASA-European solar probe Ulysses. And for the first time in about a century, the sun went for two months this summer without sunspots, said NASA solar physicist David Hathaway. That record was broken Monday when a cluster of eight sunspots surfaced. Sunspots are temporary regions of high magnetic activity that from Earth appear to be black splotches. The cause for the sun's slight weakening seems to be a change in its magnetic flux, said Dave McComas of the Southwest Research Institute. Why it's happening is a mystery, but it has fluctuated like this in the past.

Weaker solar winds mean less drag on satellites so they can stay in orbit a bit longer. While that's good for satellites, it also means more space junk. Normally the sun goes through an 11-year cycle of more, then fewer, sunspots and a similar cycle when it comes to solar wind strength. But scientists said Tuesday the sun is in "a very prolonged minimum." Typically a solar minimum lasts about a year, but this low point has gone on since the summer of 2006. It is "like turning down the heat on a stove," said McComas, a scientist who used the Ulysses solar probe to document a significantly weaker solar wind. The 17-year-old space probe, which circles the sun from a distance of about 337 million miles, has been studying the environment above and below the poles of the sun. It is just months away from shutting down because of freezing fuel.

Recently, the solar wind has been about 14% cooler and 17% less dense, according to a paper by McComas in the journal Geophysical Research Letters. For the past 15 years or so, the sun's overall output seems to be lower than normal, even when it was at the maximum for its cycle about eight years ago, McComas said. It may be part of a centurylong trend, said Boston University space physicist Nancy Crooker. Some sources historically have connected sunspots to weather, such as the Old Farmer's Almanac. But solar scientists say there is no evidence to make any connection between solar activity and weather or long-term climate change.

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[waltky]

Solar earmark in financial bailout...

Congress sets stage for solar boom
October 3, 2008, After months of failed attempts in Congress to extend crucial renewable energy tax credits, the end-game came with lightning speed Friday afternoon: The House of Representatives passed the green incentives attached to the financial bailout package approved by the Senate Wednesday night and President Bush promptly signed the legislation into law.

There were goodies for wind, geothermal and alternative fuels, but the big winner by far was the solar industry. “It feels like we should be popping the champagne,” said a Silicon Valley solar exec Green Wombat met for lunch minutes after Bush put pen to paper. That it took the biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression to save billions of dollars of renewable projects in the pipeline for the sake of political expediency does not bode well for a national alternative energy policy. But the bottom line is that the legislation passed Friday sets the stage for a potential solar boom.

* The 30% solar investment tax credit has been extended to 2016, giving solar startups, utilities and financiers the certainty they need for the years’ long slog it takes to get large-scale power plants and other projects online. The extension is particularly important to those Big Solar projects that need to arrange project financing in the next year or so.

* The $2,000 tax credit limit for residential solar systems has been lifted, meaning that homeowners can get a 30% tax credit on the solar panels they install after Dec. 31. That will save a bundle - especially for those who live in states with generous state rebates - and goose demand for solar panel makers and installers like SunPower (SPWRA) and First Solar (FSLR). (If you buy a $24,000 3-kilowatt solar array in California - big enough to power the average home - you can claim a $7,200 federal tax credit. Add in the state solar rebate and the cost of the system is cut in half.)

* Utilities like PG&E (PCG), Southern California Edison (EIX) and FPL (FPL) can now themselves claim the 30% investment tax credit for large-scale solar power projects. That should encourage those well-capitalized utilities to build their own solar power plants rather than just sign power purchase agreements with startups like Ausra and BrightSource Energy.

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China’s solar giant makes U.S. move
October 2, 2008, In another sign that the financial crisis is not slowing the solar industry, Suntech, the giant Chinese solar module maker, made a big move into the United States market on Thursday.

The company announced a joint venure with green energy financier MMA Renewable Ventures to build solar power plants and said it would acquire California-based solar installer EI Solutions. Founded in 2001, Suntech (STP) recently overtook its Japanese and German rivals to become the world’s largest solar cell producer. The company has focused on the lucrative European market and only opened a U.S. outpost, in San Francisco, last year. The joint venture with MMA Renewable Ventures (MMA) - called Gemini Solar - will build photovoltaic power plants bigger than 10 megawatts.

Most solar panels are produced for commercial and residential rooftops, but in recent months utilities have been signing deals for massive megawatt photovoltaic power plants. Silicon Valley’s SunPower (SPWRA) is building a 250-megawatt PV power station for PG&E (PCG) while Bay Area startup OptiSolar inked a contract with the San Francisco-based utility for a 550-megawatt thin-film solar power plant. First Solar (FSLR), a Tempe, Ariz.-based thin-film company, has contracts with Southern California Edision (EIX) and Sempre to build smaller-scale solar power plants. Suntech’s purchase of EI Solutions gives it entree into the growing market for commercial rooftop solar systems. EI has installed large solar arrays for Google, Disney, Sony and other corporations.

“Suntech views the long-term prospects for the U.S. solar market as excellent and growing,” said Suntech CEO Zhengrong Shi in a statement. Other overseas investors seem to share that sentiment, credit crunch or not. On Wednesday, Canadian, Australian and British investors lead a $60.6 million round of funding for Silicon Valley solar power plant builder Ausra. “So far the equity market for renewable energy has not been affected by the financial crisis,” Ausra CEO Bob Fishman told Green Wombat. The solar industry got more good news Wednesday night when the U.S. Senate passed a bailout bill that included extensions of crucial renewable energy investment and production tax credits that were set to expire at the end of the year.

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