Futurist Foresight - Applied Technotopia
This graph dramatically illustrates the rapidly decreasing price of solar power.
Solar power’s massive price drop, in one graph.
(via utnereader)
A magnificent Birdseye view of this solar power array in Seville, Spain.
Hoe het veld met zonnepanelen van de Gemasolar Power Plant nabij Sevilla er van boven uit ziet. Heel vet!
(via cjwho:)
A brilliant and innovative solar powered device charger!
Window Socket - Kyuho Song & Boa Oh
So this is an absolutley brilliant idea! Just attach the plug on to a window and it will harness solar energy. A small converter will convert it into electricity which can be freely used as a plug when you are in the car, on a plane or outside.
Love this design and I really think it has a great potential.You look at stuff like this and you know it’s designed by a designer not an engineer. Because it’s almost always impractical. You can never generate enough energy to power anything with such a tiny solar panel.
Plus. 1000mAh. That’s not even enough to charge your iPhone.
The first computer ever made was bigger than a small house. Now you have one that not only fits in your pocket, but also does countless other things with even more efficiency. There are plenty of practical designs out there that could be improved upon and improved upon over and over, so who says these types of things can’t work?
IBMs solar collector advances solar power by harnessing the equivalent of 2,000 suns.
A team of IBM researchers is working on a solar concentrating dish that will be able to collect 80% of incoming sunlight and convert it to useful energy. The High Concentration Photovoltaic Thermal system will be able to concentrate the power of 2,000 suns while delivering fresh water and cool air wherever it is built. As an added bonus, IBM states that the system would be just one third the cost third of current comparable technologies.
Based on information by Greenpeace International and the European Electricity Association, IBM claims that it would require only two percent of the Sahara’s total area to supply the world’s energy needs. The HCPVT system is designed around a huge parabolic dish covered in mirror facets. The dish is supported and controlled by a tracking system that moves along with the sun. Sun rays reflect off of the mirror into receivers containing triple junction photovoltaic chips, each able to convert 200-250 watts over eight hours. Combined hundred of the chips provide 25 kilowatts of electricity.The entire dish is cooled with liquids that are 10 times more effective than passive air methods, keeping the HCPVT safe to operate at a concentration of 2,000 times on average, and up to 5,000 times the power of the sun. The direct cooling technique is inspired by the branched blood supply system of the human body and has already been used to cool high performance computers like the Aquasar. The system will also be able to create fresh water by passing 90 degree Celsius liquid through a distillation system that vaporizes and desalinates up to 40 liters each day while still generating electricity. It will also be able to amazingly offer air conditioning by a thermal drive absorption chiller that converts heat through silica gel.
Replacing expensive steel and glass with concrete and pressurized foils, the HCPVT is less costly than many other similar installations. Its high tech coolers and molds can be manufactured in Switzerland, and construction provided by individual companies on-site. Through their design, IBM believes they can maintain a cost of less than 10cents per kilowatt hour.
(via emergentfutures)
Carbon nanotubes may help advance solar panels.
FYI: What’s The Darkest Material On Earth?
This material absorbs 99.970 percent of light, making it an ideal coating for solar panels.
The idea of dark materials might sound familiar to you if you read fantasy trilogies or like casually memorizing lines from Paradise Lost. Unfortunately, this material isn’t used to create more worlds—but it might help save this one. Vertically aligned carbon nanotubes (VACNT), the darkest material known to man, was developed by researchers at Rennselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) in 2007. With the ability to absorb 99.970 percent of light, VACNT has significant implications in solar energy research. For instance, it can be used to improve the efficiency of solar panels.
Rennselaer’s researchers aren’t the only ones attempting to produce ultra-dark materials. They’ve been in a quasi-competition with NASA, which developed a material also made of carbon nanotubes and created using the same process. But at only 99.5 percent absorption, it is not quite as dark as Rennselaer’s VACNT.
Why a race for dark materials at all? Isn’t regular black paint dark enough to absorb all the colors of light? Conventional black paint and graphite absorb most visible light but reflects a significant amount due to dielectric interface—a moderate reflection of 5 to 10 percent in the air. Researchers found that they could create a super black object by developing long, low-density nanostructures with deep pores, ordered in arrays. In the static electron micrograph, the material looks almost like a forest.
While scientists have not yet reached the goal of achieving near-zero reflection, RPI’s dark material—and future, better versions of it—can be used for solar energy conversion and pyroelectric detectors. Since the material absorbs light, it could also be used in cooling applications. No wonder there’s a race to perfect it—in a warming world, it could be pretty darn useful.
(via neuronsandneutrons)
Solar Power: Crowdfunded 3D Printed Solar Cells - You can’t see a better glimpse into the future than this.
Printing your own solar cells! Two inventors funded by Kickstarter, developed a backyard solar cells pocket printer.
An impressive array.
cnce:
“Les Mees” solar park in France spreads across 15 ha, joining several nearby plants for a total array producing around 100 MW (Photos by Boris Horvat/AFP/Getty Images) via beconinriot
Transparent solar panels could replace your windows, great!
Transparent solar panels could replace your windows.
German startup company Heliatek are testing their flexible, transparent solar panels which could one day be built into houses to act as power-generating windows.
The panels are only able to convert around 8% of available energy into electricity, compared with around 12-17% for traditional solar panels, but the company claims that they are able to make up for that by providing better performance in low light and high heat to provide almost the same energy production overall.
The technology works by depositing a layer of organic molecules on polyester films, in a similar way to how OLED displays are produced.
The company recently started making a small amount of panels on a “proof of concept” production line, and say that within four to five years the cost should come down to around 40 to 50 cents per watt, which will make them competitively priced compared to conventional solar panels. The new technology would also work out cheaper to install in new houses, as opposed to having to install windows as well as conventional solar panels on the roof.
(via 8bitfuture)
This story just keeps on cropping up. Once commercialized this could change the dynamic and influence of solar power.
New flexible solar cells are thinner than spider silk.
Austrian scientists have developed flexible, stretchable solar cells on thin plastic foil substrates, able to generate a record 10 watts per gram. The cells have a 4.2% power conversion efficiency, which puts it ahead of this flexible solar system I covered earlier this week. Typical solar panels have around 12-17% efficiency.
The above image shows the cells being wrapped around a human hair only 70 microns wide. The cells are based on a commercially available substrate of PET film, with the total device measuring 1.9 microns thick - around a quarter of the thickness of traditional solar cells.
(via 8bitfuture)
Tech next Feats?
Maybe Nanotech, On-Demand Kidneys, Robot Sex, Cheap Solar, In-Vitro Meat, Synthetic Genetics, Prosthetics, Autonomous Cars, Machines for pure Water,…
From PBS Newshour:
Optimists at Silicon Valley think tank Singularity University are pushing the frontiers of human progress through innovation and emerging technologies, looking to greater longevity and better health. As part of his series on Making $ense of financial news, correspondent Paul Solman explores a future of “exponential growth.”[via]
(via futurescope)
