Off of England’s southern coast, the Isle of Wight is developing the largest sustainability project in the country. By 2020, “Eco Island” will become a net exporter of energy, and residents will see their electricity bills drop by 50%. The island will become a precedent for renewable energy and sustainability practices, and an example of Prime Minister David Cameron’s “Big Society” concept for the UK.
The World Bank approved $297 million in loans to Morocco to support construction and operation of Morocco’s 500-megawatt (MW) Ouarzazate Concentrated Solar Power (CSP) plant, one of several large scale solar power projects in various stages of planning or development across the solar energy rich Middle East-North Africa region.
Upon completion, the Ouarzazate parabolic trough CSP plant would be one of the largest CSP plants in the world. A group of seven international lenders has committed $1.435 billion dollars to build and develop the project. Ouarzazate is seen as a key milestone for Morocco’s national Solar Power Plan, which was launched in 2009 with the goal of deploying 2000 MW of solar power generation capacity by 2020.
Radio waves are a type of electromagnetic energy, and when they’re picked up by traditional metallic antennas, the electrons that are generated can be converted into an electrical current. Given that optical waves are also a type of electromagnetic energy, a team of scientists from Tel Aviv University wondered if these could also be converted into electricity, via an antenna. It turns out that they can – if the antenna is very, very short. These “nanoantennas” could replace the silicon semiconductors in special solar panels, which could harvest more energy from a wider spectrum of sunlight than is currently possible.
A former Nazi bunker located in the Wilhelmsburg district of Hamburg, Germany is about to get full-scale makeover. The building, which sorta looks like a giant LEGO, is set to become Europe’s largest renewable energy power plant.
When it’s all said and done, the power plant will supply 3,000 homes with heating and 1,000 of those with electricity, cutting 6,600 tons of CO2 per year.
Come 2012, this nine story structure (called a Flaktürme in German) will boast a 110 kWh rooftop photovoltaic system and a south-facing 0.6 GWh solar-thermal unit. And the building’s interior is being reserved for even further renewable expansion. It will include both a 10.5 GWh woodchip combined heat and power plant and a 3.7 GWh biomethane plant powered by a nearby industrial plant, for example. Waste heat will also be stored. That sounds like a lot but this building could house around 80 single family homes. It is that big.
I just returned from the Solar Power International (SPI) show, an annual event for the solar industry, and there were a few things I kept hearing over and over.
One was: “It’s simple: People can live better with solar.” The second was: “The price of electricity will rise over the next decade.”
Over the last 40 years, Americans have been fortunate to have largely consistent electric rates. But as utility providers need to replace aging systems and fuel costs rise, experts predict that homeowners will soon need to pay more for electricity.
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