Alcoa, the giant aluminum company, is testing a new technology, based on aircraft wing design, that it believes will lower the cost of solar energy.

Currently, the mirrored troughs used to concentrate sunlight in solar thermal power plants, use glass mirrors that are formed in the shape of a parabola and then attached to a support structure made of aluminum or steel. Alcoa is replacing the glass in the parabolic troughs with reflective aluminum and integrating this mirror into the supporting framework as a single structure.

“If you go out and look behind large parabolic troughs, you’ll find an elaborate truss structure,” said Rick Winter, a technology executive with Alcoa. “From our understanding of aerospace structures, we said if we can modify the wing box design used in aircraft and integrate a parabolic reflector, it would give us a light and stiff structure that would fundamentally affect the cost equation.”

Alcoa estimates that their design, which is currently being tested at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Colorado, will cut the cost of a solar thermal field by 20 percent.

A different approach to lowering the cost of mirrored troughs is being taken by SkyFuel Inc.
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China has signed an agreement with the California company, eSolar, to build a 2,000 megawatt solar thermal power plant in the Yulin Energy Park in the Mongolian desert in northern China.

Four months ago, an Arizona company, First Solar, secured a contract to build an equally large photovoltaic power plant just 80 kilometres south of the new location. Before these announcements, the largest solar electricity projects were a 550 megawatt plant to be built by First Solar in California and a 500 megawatt solar thermal plant being developed for the US Army in the Mojave Desert.

In addition to the planned solar power plants, wind farms with a total capacity of about 6,000 megawatts are planned for Inner Mongolia.

The new project will also include a biomass power plant to generate electricity when the sun is not shining. The biomass plant will use a local shub, the sand willow, which has been planted in the region to fight desertification. The solar and biomass plants will share turbines and other infrastructure, reducing the project’s cost and allowing around-the-clock electricity production.

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Entech Solar, a Texas company with solar projects in more than twenty countries, has has completed a preliminary design review and prototype of its next-generation concentrating solar panel, the ThermaVolt II, which combines concentrating photovoltaic and thermal technologies. The company says its product delivers four to five times the amount of energy of traditional photovoltaic systems and costs less to produce.

The ThermaVolt II uses proprietary arched Fresnel lenses to  concentrate sunlight about 20 times onto the solar cells, saving about 95% of the relatively expensive silicon cell material.

Normally, this would cause the PV arrays to can get extremely hot. This energy is usually wasted but the ThermaVolt system uses the heat to deliver power and heating from the same unit.

The panels are designed to be picked up and installed by workers in the same fashion as traditional flat-plate PV panels and are made to standard flat-plate dimensions which are easily compatible with existing trackers in the marketplace.

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A dozen major companies have signed a memorandum of understanding to proceed with planning the construction of the huge Desertec solar power project.

The Desertec project would involve the construction of thousands of solar power plants in North Africa and the Middle East to supply 15 percent of Europe’s electricity by 2050. The anticipated cost of the project is $us555 billion.

Participants include German engineering company Siemens, German insurer Munich Re, Deutsche Bank, German utilities RWE and EON, Spain’s power company Abengoa, Swiss electricity grid builder ABB, Algerian firm Cevital, European bank HSH Nordbank, engineering company M+W Zander, and solar firms Schott Solar and Solar Millennium.

The signing of the Desertec agreement has prompted calls for a similar project for Australia. The University of Adelaide’s Professor Derek Abbott described Australia as the “perfect” country for a similar operation, saying its dry plains and abundant sun could potentially solve the world’s energy needs.

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In late 2007, Google said that it would invest in companies and do research of its own to produce affordable renewable energy - at a price less than burning coal. Bill Weihl, the Google engineer in charge of the project, now says that the odds of success have gone up considerably since the project started.

The company has made investments in advanced geothermal and wind, but engineers inside Google are focused mostly on solar thermal, using mirrors to fucus the sun’s energy on a substance that produces steam to turn a turbine.

Bill Weihl said that "We are looking at ways of cheaply getting to much higher temperatures and also making the heliostats, the fields of mirrors that have to track the sun, reflect the sun, keep it focused on the target we are trying to heat up — make those much, much cheaper. And I think we’ve made some really interesting progress in the last six to nine months."

New Mexico’s Governor, Bill Richardson, has now announced that Google-backed eSolar will partner with utility giant NRG Energy to build a 92-megawatt solar thermal power plant incorporating Google’s technology near the Texas border. The plant will go online in 2011.
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Scientists at the CSIRO’s solar cooling research project have developed a method of using solar thermal collectors, such as are used in solar hot water systems, to generate cooling for building air-conditioning.

Dr Stephen White, the project leader, says that “The solar cooling technology we are developing directly uses the natural heat from the sun to power a thermally-driven cooling process. While using heat to cool sounds like a strange concept, the technology we are developing is able use that heat in conjunction with an absorbent material – or desiccant – to dehumidify and cool air. This new type of desiccant cooling promises to be simpler and more cost effective than absorption chillers.”

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SkyFuel Inc, a company based in New Mexico, has developed a product which it claims will dramatically lower the cost of solar thermal concentrators.

While most parabolic troughs are made out of glass, SkyFuel’s are made from the company’s proprietary ReflecTech film material. The company claims it can bring down the cost of a solar system by 25 percent. It is expected to announce that the ReflecTech troughs are available for purchase at an event in Colorado next week.

According to SkyFuel’s vice president of business development, Christopher Huntington, the company has no plans to build or own any solar power plants itself but intends to focus on developing products and systems which will enable power plant builders to reduce costs. “We’re like Intel, with Intel inside powering the technology,” he said.

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Researchers at the Worcester Polytechnic Institute are investigating the possibility of using pavements as a source of energy.

Pavements, particularly asphalt, absorb and store a lot of heat. Making use of this heat could be as simple as incorporating water pipes into roads and carparks - potentially making a huge expanse of inexpensive collectors for heat and electricity generation. And pavements are typically resurfaced every ten to twelve years, so installation need not cause great disruption.

The director of the research team, Rajib Mallik, believes that the key to successfully turning asphalt into an effective energy generator will developing a highly efficient heat exchanger that soaks up the maximum amount of the heat absorbed by the asphalt.

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Power is generated by hot air rising in a tall tower. A solar tower is planned for a site near Mildura, New South Wales.

How It Works:

Sunlight heats an enormous greenhouse at the base of the tower. The hot air rises driving turbines.

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The heat from the sun is used to heat water.

How it works:

Sunlight heats water through glass panels. The water is stored in a tank for use as needed.

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