• 
  
• Share on Tumblr
• Email

The family of three decided to build a home which would suit their active lifestyle and allow them to travel without having to compromise on quality of life. Their castle house has beautifully crafted living and working areas, a kitchen and all the amenities and storage spaces needed for comfortable living.

Related: Truck Transformed Into Amazing Green Mobile Home

When parked, the house transforms into a fun structure that allows the family to experience the outdoors. A sleeping loft raises from above the truck and creates a space for relaxing. The turrets function as bathrooms-the left one houses a composting toilet, and a shower and a small washing machine are in the second. Solar panels on the roof are used to heat water while tanks below the truck serve as rainwater storage.

+ Living Big in a Tiny House

Via Make: and Living Big in a Tiny House

0

 print

email thisemail

facebook this
facebook this

Pro-solar groups see hard times ahead in the sunshine state, at least for the kind of solar my friends are talking about — solar panels on homes and business rooftops.   

Their worry stems from a vote taken in late November by the Florida Public Service Commission to end a solar rebate program after 2015. 

Losing the rebate program, itself, isn’t the real problem. The rebate isn’t as important as it once was, given the dramatic drop in solar costs, according to Mike Antheil, director of advocacy, Florida Solar Energy Industries Association.

More alarming is what solar advocates fear may follow; they question the motivation for the vote and see it as an opening salvo to bring down distributed solar.

The commission said the rebate program was just too expensive and too few benefited from it.

“We in the solar industry feel pretty confident that is not the real reason,” said Mike Antheil, director of advocacy, Florida Solar Energy Industries Association. “We think it boils down to the simplest answer is usually the right one. The simplest answer is that the people who sell us our electricity are understandably motivated to be sure we don’t produce our own electricity.”

Antheil and other solar advocates see the commission siding with utilities and against distributed generation. It could also be described as the battle between local energy and central generation. Utilities have a financial incentive to build central generation — solar or otherwise — since they can earn a return on the investment. They do not earn a return on distributed solar panels consumers put on their roofs. In fact, the panels rob the utility of electricity sales.

If the utilities dominate solar, Florida is unlikely to develop the kind of democratic grid emerging elsewhere, one where consumers own and control their energy. More likely, solar will come in the form of central plants built by utilities.

Florida regulators aren’t sure the democratic grid is the most cost-effective way to go; the commission chairman indicated he prefers the more conventional approach where utilities socialize costs among their customers. He describe the two sides of the market as supply side (utility solar) or demand side (customer-owned solar).

“I think there is a need for solar. I’m not sure — I’m not convinced that the need for solar is a demand-side need. Maybe a supply-side need. I mean, maybe the supply-side need may be a better way of handling that need. When you have it on the supply side, you don’t have to have $30,000 in your pocket to put it on your roof,” said Art Graham, PSC chairman, according to a transcript of the November 25 meeting.

Fair enough, but are the only two choices a $30,000 bill to the homeowner for solar panels or utility market control? Policies in other states would indicate otherwise. Power purchase agreements, innovative financing and leasing all have emerged as options to make solar affordable to the homeowner or small business.

Further, is it a good idea to place the burden for solar costs on the utility ratepayer when a private market exists that wants to take up the banner?

“We are trying to shift the burden away from the ratepayers,” said FlaSEIA’s Antheil. “As a ratepayer, I have to pay for the new nuclear facility, the new coal and natural facility. I have to pay for industrial scale solar, if they choose to do that. But the solar market wants to shift that investment burden away. That’s why an incentive for a demand-side program, a residential program is so beneficial.”

Even an incentive of just five percent of the total cost of the installed system, would spur the private market to come to the table with the other 95 percent, he said. “That’s a deal for the ratepayer.”

What else could help reduce solar costs for the consumer? Better financing options and property tax exemptions for homeowners and commercial properties with solar, he said. Antheil also suggested that the state look more carefully at the true value of solar beyond just energy production, such as its ability to improve grid stability and decrease line loss.

Most of all, he said, the state needs to keep intact its rules that allow net metering — which gives the home or business the ability to gain credit for selling solar power back to the grid.

And therein lies the biggest worry among solar advocates in Florida.

“I think there is a clear threat and danger to net metering,” said Stephen Smith, executive director of the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy (SACE). “You see them laying the ground work for this.”

He fears the state will try to impose a standby charge or adjust the rate to weaken net metering, the cornerstone of the distributed generation market in Florida.

Others take a less gloomy view of events in the sunshine state. Justin Hoysradt, Vote Solar’s regional manager Florida, says that he is “cautiously optimistic.” He pointed out that the commission has announced that it will hold an undocketed workshop (date yet to be set) to discuss future solar policy.  “The workshop is a signal that the commission recognizes that solar is an important part of Florida’s portfolio,” he said.

Solar advocates are working to galvanize support in preparation. SACE released a poll Friday showing strong bipartisan backing for solar in Florida. By almost a five to one margin respondents said they were more likely to vote for a legislator who expands the availability of solar. The poll of 600 registered voters in Jacksonville, Miami, Orlando, Pensacola and Tampa, also found that over two thirds of those surveyed support the state’s current net metering law; specifically 67 percent of Republicans, 77 percent of Independents and 73 percent of Democrats.

Smith said that activists plan to use the public backing to launch a strong campaign to protect net metering, first by elevating public awareness, next by seeking legislative support and finally pursuing a ballot measure in 2016, if needed.

Meanwhile, the state may be a little red in the face (and not from sunburn). The PSC actions have captured the attention of the national media. MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow gave Florida a talking to on her show. “In the sunshine state they have decided they are against the sun,” Maddow said.

Hyperbole? Maybe. We’ll see in the coming weeks as the PSC releases its written decision and proceeds with its solar workshop.

Lead image: Solar Farm in Central Florida via Shutterstock

The record efficiency was achieved in outdoor tests in Sydney, before being independently confirmed by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) at their outdoor test facility in the United States.

The work was funded by the Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA) and supported by the Australia-US Institute for Advanced Photovoltaics (AUSIAPV).

«This is the highest efficiency ever reported for sunlight conversion into electricity,» UNSW Scientia Professor and Director of the Advanced Centre for Advanced Photovoltaics (ACAP) Professor Martin Green said.

«We used commercial solar cells, but in a new way, so these efficiency improvements are readily accessible to the solar industry,» added Dr Mark Keevers, the UNSW solar scientist who managed the project.

The 40% efficiency milestone is the latest in a long line of achievements by UNSW solar researchers spanning four decades. These include the first photovoltaic system to convert sunlight to electricity with over 20% efficiency in 1989, with the new result doubling this performance.

«The new results are based on the use of focused sunlight, and are particularly relevant to photovoltaic power towers being developed in Australia,» Professor Green said.

Power towers are being developed by Australian company, RayGen Resources, which provided design and technical support for the high efficiency prototype. Another partner in the research was Spectrolab, a US-based company that provided some of the cells used in the project.

A key part of the prototype’s design is the use of a custom optical bandpass filter to capture sunlight that is normally wasted by commercial solar cells on towers and convert it to electricity at a higher efficiency than the solar cells themselves ever could.

Such filters reflect particular wavelengths of light while transmitting others.

ARENA CEO Ivor Frischknecht said the achievement is another world first for Australian research and development and further demonstrates the value of investing in Australia’s renewable energy ingenuity.

«We hope to see this home grown innovation take the next steps from prototyping to pilot scale demonstrations. Ultimately, more efficient commercial solar plants will make renewable energy cheaper, increasing its competitiveness.»

The 40% efficiency achievement is outlined in a paper expected to be published soon by the Progress in Photovoltaics journal. It will also be presented at the Australian PV Institute’s Asia-Pacific Solar Research Conference, which begins at UNSW Monday, December 8.

That’s Illan Kramer’s (ECE) hope. Kramer and colleagues have just invented a new way to spray solar cells onto flexible surfaces using miniscule light-sensitive materials known as colloidal quantum dots (CQDs) — a major step toward making spray-on solar cells easy and cheap to manufacture.

«My dream is that one day you’ll have two technicians with Ghostbusters backpacks come to your house and spray your roof,» said Kramer, a post-doctoral fellow with The Edward S. Rogers Sr. Department of Electrical Computer Engineering at the University of Toronto and IBM Canada’s Research and Development Centre.

Solar-sensitive CQDs printed onto a flexible film could be used to coat all kinds of weirdly shaped surfaces, from patio furniture to an airplane’s wing. A surface the size of your car’s roof wrapped with CQD-coated film would produce enough energy to power three 100-Watt light bulbs — or 24 compact fluorescents.

He calls his system sprayLD, a play on the manufacturing process called ALD, short for atomic layer deposition, in which materials are laid down on a surface one atom-thickness at a time.

Until now, it was only possible to incorporate light-sensitive CQDs onto surfaces through batch processing — an inefficient, slow and expensive assembly-line approach to chemical coating. SprayLD blasts a liquid containing CQDs directly onto flexible surfaces, such as film or plastic, like printing a newspaper by applying ink onto a roll of paper. This roll-to-roll coating method makes incorporating solar cells into existing manufacturing processes much simpler. In two recent papers in the journals Advanced Materials and Applied Physics Letters, Kramer showed that the sprayLD method can be used on flexible materials without any major loss in solar-cell efficiency.

Kramer built his sprayLD device using parts that are readily available and rather affordable — he sourced a spray nozzle used in steel mills to cool steel with a fine mist of water, and a few regular air brushes from an art store.

«This is something you can build in a Junkyard Wars fashion, which is basically how we did it,» said Kramer. «We think of this as a no-compromise solution for shifting from batch processing to roll-to-roll.»

«As quantum dot solar technology advances rapidly in performance, it’s important to determine how to scale them and make this new class of solar technologies manufacturable,» said Professor Ted Sargent (ECE), vice dean, research in the Faculty of Applied Science Engineering at University of Toronto and Kramer’s supervisor. «We were thrilled when this attractively manufacturable spray-coating process also led to superior performance devices showing improved control and purity.«

In a third paper in the journal ACS Nano, Kramer and his colleagues used IBM’s BlueGeneQ supercomputer to model how and why the sprayed CQDs perform just as well as — and in some cases better than — their batch-processed counterparts. This work was supported by the IBM Canada Research and Development Centre, and by King Abdullah University of Science and Technology.

SHANGHAI, CHINA —(eSolarEnergyNews)—  Hanwha SolarOne, a top-10 global photovoltaic manufacturer of high-quality, cost-competitive solar modules, today announced it has been awarded a module supply contract to provide Hong Solar Co., Ltd. a total of 20 MW of Hanwha SolarOne’s high quality E-star modules. Shipments began in November and are on schedule to be completed by December 2014 to the utility-scale project located in Baotou, Inner Mongolia.

«As a tier 1 solar manufacturer, Hanwha SolarOne continues to provide customers like Hong Solar, highly efficient, dependable modules,» said Mr. Jay SEO, Chief Financial Officer of Hanwha SolarOne. «We are pleased that our recent concentration on branding and marketing in China is paying off as our sales momentum grows in the country. We hope 2015 will be a defining year for the company, especially in China as we look to further gain market share,» concluded Mr. Seo.

About Hanwha SolarOne                

Hanwha SolarOne Co., Ltd. (NASDAQ: HSOL) is one of the top 10 photovoltaic module manufacturers in the world, providing cost-competitive, high quality PV modules. It is a flagship company of Hanwha Group, one of the largest business enterprises in South Korea. Hanwha SolarOne serves the utility, commercial, government and residential markets through a growing network of third-party distributors, OEM manufacturers and system integrators. The company maintains a strong presence worldwide, with a global business network spanning Europe, North America, Asia, South America, Africa and the Middle East. As a responsible company committed to sustainability, Hanwha SolarOne is an active member of the PV Cycle take-back and recycling program. For more information, please visit: www.hanwha-solarone.com.

A sampling of the most recent quarterly results finds six of the top solar companies — Trina, Yingli Green, Canadian Solar, JA Solar, Jinko Solar, and Renesola — amassing nearly $3.365 billion in collective revenues. They shipped some 4.4 GW of product as well. All but Yingli and Renesola ended up with profitable quarters, in terms of net income, with Canadian emerging as the star performer for the quarter in terms of sales and earnings.

But the sum of their RD spending for the period — $49.2 million — represented an underwhelming 1.46 percent of those revenues. Only the RD expenditures by Yingli (3.09 percent) and Renesola (3.57 percent) even exceeded the 3 percent of revenues threshold, while Trina (0.89 percent), Jinko (0.9 percent) and Canadian Solar (0.35 percent) fell below 1 percent. Not exactly what one would call an RD arms race.

U.S. stalwarts First Solar and SunPower’s RD spends weren’t much larger last quarter. Although First Solar led the sector in its total research and development expenditures with just under $37.6 million, that amount still represented only 3.78 percent of its $889.3 million in quarterly revenues. SunPower’s $17.29 million in RD spending penciled out to about 2.6 percent of its $662.7 million in Q3 revenues.

Contrast these numbers with the latest figures from the aforementioned Intel and Applied Materials. Intel brought in $14.6 billion in revenue during its last quarter and spent $2.84 billion on RD (or 19.5 percent of revenues), while AMAT amassed $2.26 billion in sales and had an RD outlay of $360 million (or 15.9 percent of revenues).

Looked at another way, Applied — which still plays in the PV manufacturing equipment arena and counts many of the top companies above as customers — spent over seven times more on RD than the “Big 6” Chinese companies combined last quarter.

Intel and AMAT latest figures echo the semiconductor and adjacent high-technology sector mantra that a company must spend somewhere in the low to high teens of its revenues on RD, percentage-wise, to remain innovative and competitive in a rapidly evolving marketplace. Even when a high-tech company slides into the red and suffers net losses, the strong RD spending percentage tends to remain consistent — although a string of unprofitable quarters will certainly force some reductions in the innovation budget. 

The only example of a solar company that comes close to matching the high-tech level of RD expenditure is Enphase. The PV microinverter and energy management systems aces spent 12.2 percent of their Q3 revenues on technological innovation activities. (Disclosure: I have done some work for Enphase on behalf of my employer, Impress Labs.)

It may be unfair to compare the levels of solar RD spending by the top solar manufacturers with those of Intel, AMAT, and other true tech titans. The vast amounts of capital and technological acumen needed to develop and produce current and next-generation nanoscale semiconductors at volume dwarf those necessary for high-efficiency n-type solar cells or tandem-junction thin film panels — at least the capital part. You won’t find any $100 million process tools or $10 billion factories in the solar realm.

There are a couple other caveats to the comparisons made here. If one stripped out the downstream parts of the financial results of vertically integrated but still relatively tech savvy solar firms such as First Solar and SunPower and calculated the percentage of revenues spent on RD — a much more upstream-related line item — I suspect the numbers would rise closer to something resembling the more traditional techies. Also, companies like Trina and Yingli collaborate on some of their RD with research institutes, equipment companies and other partners, thus diffusing the total amount spent on a particular cell or module technology innovation. But I doubt that even if all of that work came in under their own budget that their RD percentages would come close to the tech industry benchmark.

Nonetheless, the next time a solar industry exec claims his or her company deserves to be called a “high-tech leader,” remind the speaker of the RD spending metric and call bullshit. Solar, for the most part, is not a high-tech business.

This article is an expanded version of a post that originally appeared at SolarCurator.com. Used with permission.

Lead image via Applied Materials

BELMONT, CA —(eSolarEnergyNews)— SunEdison,  a leading global solar technology manufacturer and provider of solar energy services, today announced they have executed power purchase agreements with 16 separate public housing authorities across Massachusetts, totaling 39.5 megawatts in peak capacity.

«SunEdison’s work with public housing authorities in Massachusetts clearly demonstrates that the economic benefits of solar are for everyone,» said Steve Raeder, managing director of sales, SunEdison North America. «We’re proud to provide long term utility savings to low income housing across the commonwealth.»

«These housing authorities, and other members of the PowerOptions energy buying consortium, can hedge against the rising cost of electricity by adopting solar power,» said Cynthia Arcate, PowerOptions president and chief executive officer.

Over the next 20 years, SunEdison’s solar systems will save these housing authorities an estimated $60 million in avoided electricity costs, and will provide a collective environmental benefit equivalent to reducing CO2 emissions by 1 million tons, or taking 200,000 cars off the road. Net metering credits will be generated by more than 10 solar systems installed at various locations across Massachusetts, and will be sold via 20 year power purchase agreements to housing authorities including:  New Bedford, Brockton, Somerville, Barnstable, Fairhaven, Fall River, Gardner, Leominster, Northampton, Plymouth, Somerset, and Winchendon. Net metering credits allow customers to realize the financial benefits of solar energy even when the system is not located at the customer’s site.

SunEdison and its financing partners, including TerraForm Power (NASDAQ: TERP), a SunEdison Company, will be the owner-operators of the systems. Once operational, many of the solar systems will be managed by the SunEdison Renewable Operation Center (ROC), which provides global 24/7 asset management, monitoring and reporting services. Data collected from the ROC is used to continuously improve the company’s products, project designs and service offerings.

With the pump signal converters of the PSW series it is easy, quick and cost-effective to tackle the conversion to high-efficiency pumps. The pump signal converters PSW Basic, PSW Premium and PSW Universal convert the speed control signal of the controller into an input signal suitable for an energy-saving high-efficiency pump. Thus, when replacing the pump, speed control can be enabled without replacing the controller.