The German Solar Industry Association (BSW) has announced that German solar power producers have increased electricity output this year by 60 percent over 2010 to 18 billion kWh. This is more than three percent of total power output volumes.

The solar sector has already produced enough electricity to power approximately 5.1 million households in Germany.

Gehrlicher Solar AG

BSW’s managing director Carsten Koernig stated that “solar energy has become an indispensable ingredient of a successful energy strategy shift”. The solar sector has already produced enough electricity to power approximately 5.1 million households. This accounts for about one-eighth of all households in Germany.

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I posted just now on a significant solar project at Palau International Airport, but it was just one of many featured in Cleantechnica’s latest weekly roundup of big solar news. From 200MW in Rajastan to 60MW projects in France and Germany, the future of solar is looking decidedly global if this week’s list is anything to go by. Given all the doom-and-gloom over solar that was spouted in the last few months of 2011, it’s good to see that capacity keeps building and interest keeps building. No wonder Warren Buffet is buying up large solar farms and Google continues its solar surge.

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As indicated in a study Josh wrote on just a couple weeks ago, the lifespan of a solar power system is far longer than the 20 years most analysts use to calculate solar power costs. Last November, Susan featured one that was going strong at 30 years. A Facebook fan notes that solar panels at the Technical University of Berlin have been in operation for 31 years. Similarly, Kyocera, one of the oldest solar panel manufacturers in the world, recently posted on the fact that a number of its early installations continue to generate electricity reliably nearly 30 years after installation.
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A solar hot water collector that makes electricity, too

The company today announced it raised $14 million in series C funding to commercialize a product that will draw electricity from solar hot water collectors. It will also make small chips able to convert heat from car exhaust pipes and industrial machines into electricity.

GMZ Energy, which was spun out of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Boston College in 2008, has created an improved material for converting the energy in heat into electric power. The process works in reverse so an electric current will produce heat.

Thermoelectric materials have been used for years in a few applications, such as heated seats in cars and portable coolers. Now a number of companies are trying to make them less expensive and more efficient at the heat-to-electric power conversion.

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Google Ends 2011 With a $94 Million Investment in Solar Power

Google’s Renewable Energy Portfolion: $915m

Google has announced yet one more investment in clean energy (just following Warren Buffett’s two big solar power acquisitions). This time, they are investing $94 million into 4 different solar photovoltaic (PV) projects being built by Recurrent Energynear Sacramento, California. The combined PV projects have a capacity of 88 megawatts and will provide their electricity straight to the grid, unlike Google’s previous investments in rooftop solar PV. They should generate enough electricity to power about 13,000 US homes.

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Despite dropping its internal solar technology development, Google continues to put money into solar power.

Assistant treasurer Axel Martinez said today that Google will invest $94 million into four commercial solar photovoltaic projects alongside private equity firm KKR. Google is investing equity in SunTap Energy, an entity created by KKR for solar investing.

The projects themselves are operated by Recurrent Energy, a company which specializes in commercial and utility solar photovoltaic projects. With a generating capacity of 88 megawatts, they will produce about 160 megawatt-hours per year, or enough to power 13,000 homes.

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Scientists designing the next generation of solar cells are trying to do away with waste heat.

Two research groups this week reported advances in a technique to capture a portion of the sunlight’s energy that’s normally lost as heat. The advances are aiming toward a breakthrough in how much light can be converted to electricity on a solar cell.

In a paper published in Science, researchers at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) reported developing tiny crystals a few nanometers in size, called quantum dots, that are able to capture high-energy photons that today’s solar cells don’t.

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