CleanTechnica

It is not the world record for ALL solar cells, but for solar cells using certain cheap and highly available materials, IBM has just set a new world record.

The world record is for solar cells composed of copper, tin, zinc, sulfur, selenium, or similar materials. The new record is about 40% better than the previous best for solar cells using such materials. The efficiency rate of IBM’s new technology is 9.6%. The previous best was 6.7%.

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Step over Siemens, Airvoice Group and Satluj Jal Vidyut Nigam are now planning what they say would be the “largest green energy project in the world” in India.

Airvoice Group is an Indian mobile phone and commodity export firm, and it seems to see where the money is going to be in the future — in clean energy. It recently formed a joint venture with public body Satluj Jal Vidyut Nigam in order to invest $50 billion in a major clean energy project (perhaps the world’s largest) over the next 10 years. It wants to build 13 GW worth of wind and solar power capacity in a rural area of Karnataka in southwest India.

The majority of the planned capacity would be from solar photovoltaics — 10 GW. And the remaining 3 GW would be from wind farms.

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German engineering giant Siemens is looking to throw some money at solar and wind power in India now. It is going to invest $346 million in India’s renewable energy sector over the next three years.

Peter Löscher, Siemens’ chief executive, said the firm will increase its Indian workforce by about 50 per cent to 25,000 people and about a third of the investment will be for development of wind turbine technology. It is putting some into solar technology development there as well.

India is a major growth market, in general, and renewable energy is no exception.

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A new study shows that requiring utility companies to get 25% of their power from renewable energy sources such as solar and wind (by 2025) would result in more jobs.

“A strong renewable electricity standard is crucial to create a stable investment environment and grow this highly promising sector,” says Don Furman, senior vice president for development, transmission, and policy at wind energy company Iberdrola Renewables. “Without a strong RES, the US wind industry will see no net job growth, and will likely lose jobs to overseas competitors.”

Furman’s points here are nothing new. Obama said the same thing very strongly in his State of the Union address and, everyday, I read articles on this matter and on the “clean energy race“.

Nonetheless, this new study puts some numbers into the issue and helps to back up Furman and Obama’s claims. This study found that “the industry would create 274,000 more jobs under a 25 percent renewable power standard than it would create without a mandate.” (emphasis mine)

This is much more than what would be created from the proposed mandate put forth by the House of Representatives as part of a comprehensive climate and energy bill that is now being worked on in the Senate.

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Obama said just the other day that “the nation that leads the clean energy economy will be the nation that leads the global economy,” and I got into a little discussion about the rivalry between Obama and the President of China, Hu Jintao, on this topic.

I thought I would leave that issue for awhile to cover other stories, but then this landed at my feet and I couldn’t resist. China’s upcoming Big Clean Energy plans are HUGE and are likely to dwarf what are currently the largest wind power and solar power projects in the world.

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That takes my breath away. In one of the biggest renewable energy deals in the history of the world, a Korean consortium led by Samsung* has agreed to build 2,500 megawatts of wind and solar power capacity in the Canadian province of Ontario.

Samsung C&T and the Ontario government signed the deal on Thursday, January 21^st. The agreement will bring thousands of jobs and clean energy for more than half a million homes to Ontario.

Building off of this new deal, Korean trade officials plan to make Ontario their base of operations for all of North American.

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Just on the heels of Apple’s Smart Home Energy Management System, Apple has gone and filed for a patent to reinvent their ubiquitous iPod line using solar cell technology.

Transparent, or semi-transparent, solar panels would partially cover the device. If one or more of the solar cells are obstructed from light, other panels on the device will kick in to ensure a constant source of power. The device also have a standard battery in times of complete darkness. Read the rest of this entry »

This is one I haven’t seen floating around yet. Personal carbon credits.

A new website helps you to cash-in on reducing your carbon emissions through home solar panels, wind turbines, more energy efficiency, etc. And it is up and running.

You reduce your home energy usage, report it to them, and get money back on PayPal.

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India has been a bit of a wild card on climate change and clean tech issues. Like China (but not to the same extent), India made the Copenhagen climate negotiations more of a challenge, reluctant to commit to internationally binding targets and international transparency. One day they weren’t willing, then they might be, then they weren’t again. Then, they finally committed to cutting their carbon intensity 20-25% by 2020.

But without a stong, legally-binding, widely-accepted agreement, we are all left wondering what they (and others) will actually do.

Now, we are actually seeing India steam forward. Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, following Copenhagen, said, “There is no escaping the truth that the nations of the world have to move to a low-greenhouse-gas-emissions and energy-efficient-development path.” He said that India “must not lag behind” in low-carbon technologies. Jairam Ramesh, Indian environment minister, followed this up by saying that India would go ahead with its carbon intensity reduction plans (above) even despite the lack of a strong agreement. “We’ve got to do what we’ve got to do,” he said.

And just this week, India announced it is launching its “National Solar Mission” which includes creating enough solar power that it could power about 20 million US houses.

It has more going on this month, too.
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The 3,000 members of the Jemez Pueblo tribe in New Mexico are looking to build the first utility-scale solar power plant on tribal land. They are also looking to make some money on it.

It is no secret that Native American tribes are more likely to be poverty-stricken and they generally have more than twice the unemployment rate of the United States. Former Jemez Pueblo governor James Roger Magdalena says, “We don’t have any revenue coming in except for a little convenience store.”

It is estimated this solar power plant could generate $25 million over the next quarter century and help create a sustainable revenue for his tribe.

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