Steinbeis Solar Research Centre

01/05/2017

Plasma Enhanced Chemical V***r Deposition Process Generalized Flow

20/04/2017

SOLAR ARCHIVE OF THE DAY

(a) Space silicon cell design developed in the early 1960s, which became a standard design for more than a decade

(b) shallow junction “violet” cell

(c) chemically textured nonreflecting “black” cell.

19/04/2017

India achieved a record low solar tariff of INR 3.29 (US¢ 5.1)/kWh in the Rewa tender in February. That record was surpassed last week in an auction conducted by National Thermal Power Corporation (NTPC) for a 250 MW project in Kadappa, Andhra Pradesh, where Engie’s Solairedirect submitted the winning bid of INR 3.15 (US¢ 4.9)/kWh. The project will be built in a solar park, developed by the state government. Ostro, Canadian Solar, Greenko, Azure Power, Adani and Mahindra were some of the unsuccessful bidders.

Given that the overall Rewa tender structure was seen as uniquely beneficial to the developers, it is somewhat perplexing to find that tariffs have fallen even further so soon;

Slowdown in new tenders is putting pressure on developers, who are anxious to deploy capital and scale up quickly to monetize previous investments;

With module prices expected to keep falling through 2017, we are likely to see progressively new lows being achieved throughout the year;

Overall risk profile for Rewa and Kadappa projects is somewhat similar although it can be argued that the Rewa tender is more beneficial to project developers. It incorporates many unique provisions such as state government guarantee, deemed generation benefit and extended construction period of 18+12 months (additional reduction in module costs). It is therefore difficult to explain why Kadappa tariff has come even lower than the Rewa tariffs particularly as solar park charges are relatively higher in Kadappa.

One logical explanation for a new low is that Kadappa was the last of the 3,000 MW solar PV projects tendered by NTPC, the best offtaker in the Indian solar market. We had recently highlighted that pace of new utility scale solar tender announcements and project allocations has slowed down considerably to just 4.2 GW and 6 GW respectively, down 70% and 33% between FY 2015-16 and FY 2016-17. This slowdown is putting severe pressure on the 30-40 active developers in the market. The developer community is hungry for more projects to meet their internal targets and to scale up to monetize previous investments.

Tariffs for NTPC projects have declined by about 32% in the last eighteen months since its first auction in Andhra Pradesh in November 2015 for the 500 MW project won by SunEdison. This sharp decline is largely due to steep fall in module costs (33% in the respective period) and intense competition in the sector. We expect the trend to continue in the upcoming 750 MW auction by Solar Energy Corporation of India (SECI) in Bhadla solar park in Rajasthan.

SOURCE:::::BRIDGE TO INDIA

18/04/2017

In order to study the actual impact of climate change and equip the state to tackle the vagaries of nature better, a dedicated Climate Change Laboratory will soon be set up in Bengaluru. The Environmental Management and Policy Research Institute (EMPRI), located near JP Nagar, will be housing the centre under the National Mission on Strategic Knowledge for Climate Change with help from the department of science and technology. EMPRI said the lab will be set up in two to three months.

18/04/2017

SOURCE::ORF

18/04/2017

1913,A VIEW OF SHUMAN BOYS SOLAR COLLECTOR SYSTEM,MAEDI ,EGYPT

18/04/2017

A group of Hispanic students living in California is designing a camping tent that can use solar energy to meet the electricity needs of the homeless.

"Our camping house is made with special materials, where we're going to have solar panels, ... (and) LED lights, so that the person can see inside when it's dark," Kenia Shi, a high school student, was quoted by Efe news agency as saying.

These students are also going to have a way to clean the house with ultraviolet lights, which kill bacteria.

The installation of miniaturised solar technology in a mobile tent is the project being pursued by 12 Latino students at the San Fernando Magnet school in Los Angeles County, for which they received a $10,000 grant from the Lemelson InveTeam organisation at the MIT School of Engineering.

"When we were introduced to the programme and they told us that we had the chance to make an invention that could change something in our community, we thought that making a ... (solar) tent was best," Shi said.

The daughter of immigrants from El Salvador, Shi intends to study mechanical engineering at the University of California San Diego.

Statistics from 2016 compiled by the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority show that in Los Angeles County there are 43,000 people who live in shelters or in tents on the streets.

The annual tally, which does not includes figures from Pasadena, Glendale or Long Beach, found that the homeless population is 39 per cent African American, 27 per cent Latino and 26 per cent white.

"It's very nice to be able to say that you're helping these people who often the government and the public ... almost ignore," said Araceli Chavez, the daughter of Mexican immigrants.

Fifteen US schools won the engineering grants from Massachusetts Institute of Technology to develop things such as "tents with solar energy" that the students will display at the EurekaFest fair on June 15-17 on the MIT campus.

The students' solution is to install a small solar panel and a light with an energy storage element, so that the accumulated electricity can be transferred to other appliances, among other innovations.

SOURCE::ET /IANS

17/04/2017

The world already has an installed base of about 300 GW, led by USA, China and Germany. But it is appropriate that India, most of it endowed with more than 300 days of sunshine, takes a leadership role in solar power. Solar, wind and other forms of renewable energy are major components of meeting the goals of the Paris Agreement on Climate Change.

Two recent events related to India’s energy security are worth noting. The first was the joint announcement by the Prime Ministers of India and Australia that the latter would soon start exporting uranium to India. This would need legislative approval in Australia, but PM Malcolm Turnbull is confident of getting that bipartisan support from his Parliament. It would be the first time that Australia would be exporting uranium to a country that has not signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).

India refuses to sign the NPT on principle since it is discriminatory and exempts the big five of the United Nations Security Council from signing. Because of this stance, India suffered nuclear apartheid for almost three decades before the Indo-US civilian nuclear power deal led countries from the Nuclear Suppliers Group to export nuclear fuel to India.

Thus Australia, which has forty percent of the world’s uranium, signed a nuclear cooperation agreement two years ago with India, facilitating the supply of uranium. India gets only three per cent of its electricity from nuclear power, although it is trying to raise it to five if not ten per cent. Nuclear power is a clean substitute for fossil fuels, which harm the environment.
Nuclear power plants, of course, have their own challenges.

They need 20 square kilometres of land, far away from densely populated human habitation, near a large body of coolant water, and they need to address risks of accidents, proliferation and reprocessing the spent fuel. India has 20 plants out of about 450 worldwide. The world gets 11 per cent of its electricity from nuclear power, with countries like France and Japan getting more than 60 per cent of their domestic needs. Even if India manages to massively increase its share of nuclear powered electricity (after overcoming the economic, social and political challenges), the global supply of uranium is simply not enough. The world will run out of uranium in less than 100 years, and any increase in uranium usage from current levels decreases the time horizon of the supply even more. Unless India or the world develops thorium-based nuclear power, or finds a way of cheap and safe reprocessing of spent fuel from current reactors, uranium based power is soon running into a dead end.

This leads us to the other major recent event in India’s energy landscape. A recent auction to bid out the setting up of a 250 MW solar power plant in Andhra Pradesh, the winning bid was a record low of Rs.3.15 per unit (kilo watt hour), won by a French company. This beat the previous record low bid of Rs.3.30 attained in a February auction in Madhya Pradesh for a 750 MW solar power plant. In the last two years, the successful bids in solar power auctions have come down steadily beating the cost of coal-based thermal power, even without any subsidy. The initial capital cost of installing solar power has also come down from around Rs.20 crore per MW a few years ago, to around Rs.5.5 crore now. The cost of solar panels is continuously declining.

READ MORE:::

http://www.freepressjournal.in/analysis/ajit-ranade-new-bids-show-promise-of-solar-power-in-india/1053214

SOURCE::::FREE PRESS JOURNAL

THE world already has an installed base of about 300 GW, led by USA, China and Germany. But it is appropriate that India, most of it endowed with more than 300

17/04/2017

In a breakthrough, scientists have developed a new system that can harvest litres of water from the air everyday using just ambient sunlight, even in dry or desert climates.

The solar-powered harvester, which can work in conditions as low as 20 per cent humidity, was constructed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the US.

"This is a major breakthrough in the long-standing challenge of harvesting water from the air at low humidity," said Omar Yaghi, from the University of California, Berkeley.

"There is no other way to do that right now, except by using extra energy. Your electric dehumidifier at home 'produces' very expensive water," said Yaghi, also a faculty scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in the US.

The prototype, under conditions of 20-30 per cent humidity, was able to pull 2.8 litres of water from the air over a 12-hour period, using one kilogramme of a metal-organic framework (M*F) - a special material produced at UC Berkeley.

Rooftop tests at MIT confirmed that the device works in real-world conditions, researchers said.

"One vision for the future is to have water off-grid, where you have a device at home running on ambient solar for delivering water that satisfies the needs of a household," said Yaghi.

"To me, that will be made possible because of this experiment. I call it personalised water," he said.

The new system consisted of dust-sized M*F crystals compressed between a solar absorber and a condenser plate, placed inside a chamber open to the air.

As ambient air diffuses through the porous M*F, water molecules preferentially attach to the interior surfaces.

Sunlight entering through a window heats up the M*F and drives the bound water toward the condenser, which is at the temperature of the outside air. The vapour condenses as liquid water and drips into a collector.

"This work offers a new way to harvest water from air that does not require high relative humidity conditions and is much more energy efficient than other existing technologies," Evelyn Wang, a mechanical engineer at MIT.

This proof of concept harvester leaves much room for improvement, Yaghi said. The current M*F can absorb only 20 per cent of its weight in water, but other M*F materials could possibly absorb 40 per cent or more.

The material can also be tweaked to be more effective at higher or lower humidity levels.

"To have water running all the time, you could design a system that absorbs the humidity during the night and evolves it during the day," Yaghi said.

"We wanted to demonstrate that if you are cut off somewhere in the desert, you could survive because of this device. he said.

COURTESY::: ET ENERGY
JOURNAL SCIENCE

17/04/2017

SOLAR ARCHIVE OF THE DAY::::

1978,Department of Energy project uses 120,000 individual cells to produce 25 peak kilowatts of electrical power to drive an irrigation pumping system. The system was turned on in early 1978. (DOE photo courtesy of Norman Avery, Solar Energy Research Institute.) (Bottom) This Solarex array provides power for internal lights, fog horn, and gas and weather data transmitting equipment in this gas monitoring platform in the Gulf of Mexico.

13/04/2017

Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) recaptured the record for highest efficiency in solar hydrogen production via a photoelectrochemical (PEC) water-splitting process.

The new solar-to-hydrogen (STH) efficiency record is 16.2 percent, topping a reported14 percent efficiency in 2015 by an international team made up of researchers from Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin, TU Ilmenau, Fraunhofer ISE and the California Institute of Technology. A paper in Nature Energy titled Direct Solar-to-hydrogen Conversion via Inverted Metamorphic Multijunction Semiconductor Architectures outlines how NREL’s new record was achieved. The authors are James Young, Myles Steiner, Ryan France, John Turner, and Todd Deutsch, all from NREL, and Henning Döscher of Philipps-Universität Marburg in Germany. Döscher has an affiliation with NREL.

The record-setting PEC cell represents a significant change from the concept device Turner developed at NREL in the 1990s.

Both the old and new PEC processes employ stacks of light-absorbing tandem semiconductors that are immersed in an acid/water solution (electrolyte) where the water-splitting reaction occurs to form hydrogen and oxygen gases. But unlike the original device made of gallium indium phosphide (GaInP2) grown on top of gallium arsenide (GaAs), the new PEC cell is grown upside-down, from top to bottom, resulting in a so-called inverted metamorphic multijunction (IMM) device.

This IMM advancement allowed the NREL researchers to substitute indium gallium arsenide (InGaAs) for the conventional GaAs layers, improving the device efficiency considerably. A second key distinguishing feature of the new advancement was depositing a very thin aluminum indium phosphide (AlInP) “window layer” on top of the device, followed by a second thin layer of GaInP2. These extra layers served both to eliminate defects at the surface that otherwise reduce efficiency and to partially protect the critical underlying layers from the corrosive electrolyte solution that degrades the semiconductor material and limits the lifespan of the PEC cell.

Turner’s initial breakthrough created an interesting new way to efficiently split water using sunlight as the only energy input to make renewable hydrogen. Other methods that use sunlight entail additional loss-generating steps. For example: Electricity generated by commercial solar cells can be sent through power conversion systems to an electrolyzer to decompose water into hydrogen and oxygen at an approximate STH efficiency of 12 percent. Turner’s direct method set a long-unmatched STH efficiency record of 12.4 percent, which has been surpassed by NREL’s new PEC cell.

Before the PEC technology can be commercially viable, the cost of hydrogen production needs to come down to meet DOE’s target of less than $2 per kilogram of hydrogen. Continued improvements in cell efficiency and lifetime are needed to meet this target. Further enhanced efficiency would increase the hydrogen production rate per unit area, which decreases hydrogen cost by reducing balance-of-system expenditures. In conjunction with efficiency improvements, durability of the current cell configuration needs to be significantly extended beyond its several hours of operational life to dramatically bring down costs. NREL researchers are actively pursuing methods of increasing the lifespan of the PEC device in addition to further efficiency gains.

While an alternative configuration where the device isn’t submerged in acidic electrolyte and instead is wired to an external electrolyzer would solve the durability challenge, a techno-economic analysis commissioned by DOE has shown that submerged devices have the potential to produce hydrogen at a lower cost.

The latest research was funded by the Energy Department's Fuel Cell Technologies Office in the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy.

SOURCE::::NATIONAL RENEWABLE ENERGY LABORATORY

13/04/2017

SOLAR ARCHIVE TODAY::::

The highest-power solar cell array designed in the late 1970's for operation in geosynchronous orbit is that for the Tracking and Data Relay Satellite System (T.D.R.S.S.), illustrated below. Both wings of the array carry 31062 solar cells of 11.4% efficiency at 28°C.