Following up on a great guest post by Chris Varrone on wind intermittency and why it’s not a big deal, apparently the International Energy Agency (IEA) now has a new book out, Harnessing Variable Renewables: a Guide to the Balancing Challenge, that tells us the same thing that Chris was explaining.
Well, I don’t think it will come as much surprise, but following up on a CleanTechnica post from last month on the merits of small-scale solar compared to large-scale solar, I thought I’d share parts of a new piece by Solar Energy Industries Association President & CEO Rhone Resch on why we need both (with a little commentary of my own)
China’s wind power industry is expected to grow to mammoth proportions and already leads the world (in total installed capacity, not per GDP or per capita wind power capacity). In line with its growth projections, installed wind power has grown significantly in 2011 so far and is outpacing the growth of other competing energy sources in China.
Solar records are broken left and right. We can’t cover them all, of course, but try to cover the big ones. Recently, researchers ar Empa, the Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology, set a pretty big one. They increased the solar cell efficiency record of flexible solar cells made of copper indium gallium (di)selenide (aka CIGS) from 17.6% to 18.7%, a pretty significant increase.
GE, which you would think sponsors us given the large number of articles we’ve written about it this week (it doesn’t), recently announced that it is buying one of the top contenders in its Ecomagination Challenge. FMC-Tech, a company based in Ireland that provides real-time power line monitoring to help with quicker commercialization of power grid technology, is the company about to get bought out by GE.
Light rail is a great clean transit solution that could help many cities improve their quality of life. It is growing in popularity across the U.S., but is still probably unknown and unseen by many. And I’m sure there are millions upon millions of people who would be hard-pressed to come up with an answer as to how light rail transportation (LRT) is different from commuter rail or streetcars/trams.
As we all know, Germany has decided to phase out nuclear power. Now, it has set a specific time frame for that. Germany will shut all of its nuclear reactors down by 2022. The agreement was made this morning by the various parties in Chancellor Angela Merkel’s coalition government.
I shared a video on Google’s Helsinki, Finland data center that is cooled 100% with sea water last week. To follow up, here’s a series of short videos from Google on data center efficiency best practices that Google unveiled last week. Interesting stuff. Check them out…
“Solar power may be cheaper than electricity generated by fossil fuels and nuclear reactors within three to five years because of innovations, said Mark M. Little, the global research director for General Electric Co. (GE),” Bloomberg reports.
Weekly roundup of other great stories we didn’t cover.
