Probably the most efficient way of harnessing solar power is by using Concentrated Solar Power plants, or CSPs. Their design, however, is based on large mirrors (heliostats) placed in rows around a central tower, onto which they reflect the sun’s energy.
The People’s Republic of China has increased its target for installed solar power by 50%. It now aims to have 15GW of installed solar generating capacity, by 2015, Reuters reports.
The move comes just months after China doubled its solar goal from 5 GW to 10 GW earlier this year, following the partial meltdown of the Fukishama nuclear plant in Japan.
I don’t understand why researchers are not trying harder to crack better energy storage solutions. Instead, all the focus seems to be on finding new clean sources of energy. That’s important, of course, but if we could vastly improve energy storage we could presumably make do with the energy sources we already have? And intermittent renewables such as wind and solar would be so much more attractive.
BrightSource Energy is a leading solar thermal energy company. In California, it’s in the process of planning and building some of the largest solar thermal power plants in the world. (For more on its technology, see the last paragraph of this post. For more background, check out our BrightSource Energy page.)
Yesterday, the company announced that it is adding “its SolarPLUS thermal energy storage capability to three of its power purchase agreements with Southern California Edison (SCE).” It now has two solar thermal power plants scheduled to be finished and delivering energy in 2015, and three, with storage, scheduled to deliver electricity in 2016 and 2017. (And, BrightSource — with partners NRG Energy, Google, and Bechtel — are building a 126-megawatt plant for Southern California Edison at the Ivanpah solar project in southeast California).
Apple, ranked the least green of the big tech companies earlier this year, is moving quietly to repair its reputation by switching its vast east coast data centre from coal to solar power.
Local officials in North Carolina say the company is preparing to build a solar farm adjacent to its $1bn data centre in Maiden.
The facility could help Apple recover from a Greenpeace report earlier this year which said its cloud-computing operations – run from centres such as the one in North Carolina – were heavily reliant on dirty energy such as coal.
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.
by Martin LaMonica
Facebook’s state-of-the-art data center houses awesome amounts of computing power, but the biggest technical challenge has been the air handlers.
The company said today that its Prineville, Ore., data center received LEED gold certification from the U.S. Green Building Council. The power usage effectiveness (PUE) rating varies between 1.06 and 1.1, making it a data center that consumes about half what a building simply built to code would use.
When Spanish researcher Nacho Zamora first stumbled upon an image of “Solarsail,” an energy-generating art installation in Switzerland, he knew he had found something different from the other public artworks he had been studying — and something important.
Since that discovery, Zamora has been carefully cataloging solar-powered artworks around the world and interviewing their creators for his Solar Artworks Project, an online compendium of public art that is aesthetically striking, environmentally sustainable, and raises awareness about crucial renewable technologies.
A Dutch artist is aiming to create an artificial leaf in the Sahara Desert that can grow a layer of ice on its underside.
‘Sunglacier’, as the project has been dubbed, will feature a 200m2 surface covered in photovoltaic solar cells, which will power cooling condensers on the underside of the elm leaf-shaped structure to soak up humidity from the desert air and turn it into ice.
Ap Verheggen, the artist behind the project, hopes it will encourage people to believe that the impossible is possible when it comes to dealing with climate change.
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