Category: Solar PV

Giant batteries to store green energy

According to the Sunday Times, Britain could soon be relying on battery power under plans to create a network of electrical storage facilities around the national grid.

Greg Clark, the business secretary, is expected to announce plans this week for giant rechargeable battery facilities to be installed near wind and solar farms to store the energy generated when demand is low. It can then be released when demand rises.

Households will also be encouraged to switch to battery power — for example, installing batteries alongside solar panels.

Source: Sunday Times 23 July 2017

Some countries reach the “golden goal” of grid parity for solar electricity

According to Bloomberg several countries that have high electricity prices have already reached the “golden goal” of grid parity. This means putting solar modules on the roof to replace electricity purchased from the grid is a good investment for consumers. This includes Germany, Denmark, Portugal, Spain and Australia. Brazil is also above the 6% level, but consumers may require higher returns on investment in a developing economy.

Japan, France, Greece and Turkey are expected to be there by 2015, and by 2020 even the US average price will high enough to justify investment, even without the 30 percent investment tax credit subsidy.

An interactive version of this chart can be found on the Bloomberg site.

My comment on the UK situation: The UK having relatively lower electricity costs than other countries is likely to be similar to the US, but there are wide regional variations in the cost of electricity from the grid and as it is a very competitive market variations depending on usage so some consumers might reach the golden goal earlier than others. In addition, the UK government is also being fairly rigorous in legislating for carbon emission reductions that could also have an impact upon the time when grid parity is reached.

Localisation is also another interesting factor. Location householders could club together to get good deals on Solar PV installation as well as adopt collective bargaining techniques to buy electricity from the grid at a lower price in the same way as a number of communities are clubbing together to buy cheaper oil. The development of Community Energy Companies is also yet another factor.

 

Breakthrough research for super-efficient solar cells at Cambridge University

New solar cells could increase the maximum efficiency of solar panels by over 25%, according to scientists from the University of Cambridge. Scientists from the Cavendish Laboratory, the University’s Department of Physics, have developed a novel type of solar cell which could harvest energy from the sun much more efficiently than traditional designs.

Solar panels work by absorbing energy from particles of light, called photons, which then generate electrons to create electricity.  Traditional solar cells are only capable of capturing part of the light from the sun and much of the energy of the absorbed light, particularly of the blue photons, is lost as heat.  This inability to extract the full energy of all of the different colours of light at once means that traditional solar cells are incapable of converting more than 34% of the available sunlight into electrical power.

The Cambridge team, led by Professor Neil Greenham and Professor Sir Richard  Friend, has developed a hybrid cell which absorbs red light and harnesses the extra energy of blue light to boost the electrical current. Typically, a solar cell generates a single electron for each photon captured.  However, by adding pentacene, an organic semiconductor, the solar cells can generate two electrons for every photon from the blue light spectrum.  This could enable the cells to capture 44% of the incoming solar energy.

Bruno Ehrler, the lead author on the paper, said:

“Organic and hybrid solar cells have an advantage over current silicon-based technology because they can be produced in large quantities at low cost by roll-to-roll printing. However, much of the cost of a solar power plant is in the land, labour, and installation hardware. As a result, even if organic solar panels are less expensive, we need to improve their efficiency to make them competitive. Otherwise, it’d be like buying a cheap painting, only to find out you need an expensive frame.”

Full article

 

Managing grid-connected PV (photovoltaic) Power

Recent research from Strategic Business Insights (SBI) has highlighted that a long-term challenge to the widespread adoption of grid-connected PV (photovoltaic) power is managing the instability that can be introduced into the grid because of the intermittent and variable nature of PV power generation. Every type of solar installation loses power output rapidly when a cloud passes overhead. Cloud cover diminishes a major power source, disrupting power to potentially thousands of customers. Dramatic and immediate shifts in the nature of the power flowing throughout the grid can disrupt distribution across even larger areas because of how interconnected the system is—consider that the Northeastern Blackout of 2003 was traced back to instability caused by a power plant in Ohio.

SBI considers that large-scale grid-tied energy storage is the most direct solution to managing the fluctuations in power output from PV systems. Read more