solar thermal power
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The Climate Post: Is Americans' climate ignorance a tragedy or an opportunity?
Half of Americans polled by researchers at Yale University are woefully ill-informed about climate change, including the 43 percent that believe, "If we stopped punching holes in the ozone layer with rockets, it would reduce global warming." Plus, China dominates an important clean tech export and new climate change impacts would be perfect for a remake of Day After Tomorrow.
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Obama administration approves first big solar projects to be built on federal land
The Obama administration just leased government land in the California desert for two huge solar power plants, and more solar leases are on the way.
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Want a car that gets good grades? Buy a hybrid
The federal government plans to grade cars based on their fuel efficiency. That C for the Ford A-150 pickup wont make everyone happy.
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A chat with Sen. Bernie Sanders on his new 10 million solar roofs bill
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.)On On Thursday, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) introduced a bill aimed at getting 10 million new solar rooftop systems and 200,000 new solar hot water heating systems installed in the U.S. in the next 10 years. Cleverly titled the “10 Million Solar Roofs & 10 Million Gallons of Solar Hot Water Act” […]
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Lamar Alexander loves the earth too much to support solar and wind
Alexander unveiled his nuclear plan in July.One of the few Congressional Republicans who talks about the need to address climate change, Sen. Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, made an interesting argument against wind and solar energy this week. He’s concerned about the amount of land required to produce energy from wind and solar, writing in the […]
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Tales from Spain: baseload renewable energy means hope in the fight against global warming
Hola, amigos y amigas. I write to you from Spain. I’m here courtesy of the Catalan government, who brought me in to explain the California solar market to local solar companies. Why does Spain care about California? Spanish solar companies are going through a really difficult time right now. Briefly, the story goes like this. […]
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French government interested in solar because it uses less water than nukes
A year or so ago, I spoke at a solar conference in France — a country that produces 78 percent of its electricity with nukes. A couple of folks told me that the government’s interest in solar stemmed from the fact that during the previous summer’s heat wave, river levels dropped to the point that […]
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Solar PV market doubled to 6 Gigawatts in 2008
After growing 19 percent in 2006 and 62 percent in 2007, world solar photovoltaic (PV) market installations exploded by 110 percent last year to a staggering 5.95 GW, according to Solarbuzz’s Annual Report, Marketbuzz 2009: Europe accounted for 82% of world demand in 2008. Spain’s 285% growth pushed Germany into second place in the market […]
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Sheer number of solar advancements suggests that cheap solar electricity is coming soon
Concentrating solar power is a well-known approach to lowering the cost of solar electricity. You focus sunlight from a large area onto a small one, the same way a magnifying glass can set a piece of newspaper on fire, using one small, high-quality solar cell and a concentrator for a lower total cost than hundreds of slightly cheaper cells. (Or you can use the concentrated heat to drive a heat engine, but not in the example we are about to discuss.)
Morgan Solar has a smart variation on this under development. They start with a clever acrylic concentrator that uses pure optical guiding to concentrate solar energy about 50 times, around the same results as a Fresnel lens, but without the need for curves or a non-zero focus. This already moderately concentrated solar is then concentrated further by a much smaller glass concentrator that also needs no air gap. Because neither concentrator requires an air gap, a tiny solar cell is attached directly to the glass.
So you have an eight-inch acrylic concentrator, a glass concentrator the size of an American nickel, and a solar cell the size of a baby's thumbnail.