Whatever Happened to Solar Power?

People like us are doing it ourselves and are therefore beneath the radar of the statisticians in the Dep't of Energy?

Oooh, ooooh, researchers give big numbers, statisticians confirm that those numbers are in fact big, media jumps in confirming that big numbers are in fact good along with making up a few other 'facts' and mentioning some crackpot scheme regarding running cars on water. That just leaves the poor engineers and scientists to fill the great gaping chasm covering practical and efficient collection of the solar energy and conversion into a efficient, clean end product.

Yah. We will be sure to let the media know when we have actually achieved it, but it ain't yet. This isn't a new infomercial exercise machine, shampoo or toothbrush, these things take time.

"Over the course of a day, the amount of energy in sunlight striking the continental United States is more than X times the amount of the nation's daily electricity consumption."

This must be one of the dumbest, most-quoted solar stats there is. I'm for solar (& solar research, etc), but hearing people use this kind of statistics makes me question their grasp of what matters to actually making progress with a given technology or energy source. We might as well say that the mass of the Earth represents a potential energy source, if only we could tie a rope to it and hoist it up in the air.

I would be more impressed if the stat was with respect to the area of all of the roof tops (or, better yet, commercial roof tops) in a region (which you could more-easily argue is a readily-available and untapped source of energy), but the "energy falling on the earth" meme is out there and won't go away.

Let's make it real, not pie-in-the-sky!

Thank you, the voice of reason....

And not just in the conventional way of thinking "Solar panels converting light to electricity"

It's about energy conversion cycles, and their out-coming efficiency:

You may indeed harvest some electrical current by sunlight, store in in a suitable facility, then release it to, say, heat your bath or dishwasher water, or, alternatively, directly use sunlight to store hot water, as widely done in Israel since the early nineteen-sixties, or have closed-cycle public lighting, say, above highways or in bus-stations, where each individual unit is serviceable, and capable of harvesting light during the day, and releasing the stored energy through light during night-time, as recently attempted here.

The point to all this is "The shortest the energy conversion chain is, the less harvested energy is wasted" and "The more autonomous and closed-cycle each unit is, the less dependant the system is, on centralised national infrastructure and more easily serviceable and wide-spread it can become"

This may be put above with somewhat odd and quirky phrases, but the point has come across, I hope.

I don't think anyone is going to buy this one. If we were to utilize all the energy that is falling on the U.S. that would mean that we would loose the energy that is being used to convert the CO2 into oxygen by all the plants. Also we would loose the plants that are feeding a large part of the world. So we could loose oxygen and food while producing electric. What do I see wrong with this picture? Talk about global warming... Think of the people complaining about no air and food compared to the warming trend we are suffering from now. Ric In Cincinnati

Simple solution - just capture all the sunlight that falls on the moon, and beam it back to earth via microwave.

OK - not really a simple solution.

Lets not bring up those old projects again shall we, not unless significant advances in common sense and efficiency have been made.

For anyone who doesn't know, the information is available on the web.

Common sense advances incrementally, if at all.

When solar is more economically viable, people will buy it. There is extensive experimentation with mirror, trough and power tower concentrated solar. The problem is mainly that the sun only shines an average 4 hours a day, and heat storage is expensive and corrosive.

There are many experimental facilities like Sandia Labs, universities and functional facilities: http://pesn.com/2005/08/11/9600147_Edison_Stirling_largest_solar/.

There are many more you can find via google. Sadly none of these solar utilities can compete economically with oil, natural gas, ethanol or even coal. Anything better will have to be within the context of invention. I work with R&D in concentrated solar. Believe me the incentive is great and anybody that can demonstrate a viable design can get plenty of money. Nevertheless, so far we have failed. We need another Archimedes.

We luxuriate ourselves with electricity to the point of obcenity and then vote against drilling at Anwar or off the coast. A refinery has not been built for thirty years. Nuclear reactors, actually the cleanest fuel, even longer. To get off the grid, America must exploit its natural resources, build nuclear reactors, conserve its use of power or invent technology, beyond the Stirling, that will compete successfully with the combustion engine.

You are so right and look how old the Stirling motor is, I might even see its 200th birthday before I go west!!!

Request For Proposal Issued for the Solar Energy Grid Integration Systems program (SEGIS).

12/14/2007

Sandia National Laboratories, in conjunction with the United States Department of Energy's Solar Energy Technology Program (SETP), has issued a Request For Proposal (RFP) on November 28, 2007 for the Solar Energy Grid Integration Systems program (SEGIS).

This RFP provides up to $6.25 million for the development of advanced inverters, controllers, and other balance-of-system components for photovoltaic (PV) distributed power applications. The goal of the SETP is to increase the value of PV as large numbers of systems are incorporated into the utility distribution system.

The deadline for the RFP is January 21, 2008. The RFP can be downloaded at:

http://www1.eere.energy.gov/solar/solar_america/open_upcoming_fund_opps.html

That's nice, but it expired over two years ago.