Media incorrectly report Google is abandoning renewables. In fact, the company is increasing clean energy investments. Buried at the bottom of an innocuous “spring cleaning” post on Google’s blog yesterday, the internet giant made a very important announcement: it will stop funding its Renewable Energy Cheaper than Coal (RE<C) initiative. … [continued]
Concentrating solar thermal power has promised big additions to renewable energy production with the additional benefit of energy storage. But with significant water consumption in desert locations, is the energy storage benefit of concentrating solar enough to compete with the dramatically falling cost of solar PV?
Concentrating solar has promised big additions to renewable energy production with the additional benefit of energy storage – saving sun power for nighttime – but there’s a catch. Most of the new power plants are big water users despite being planned for desert locations.
The same concentrating solar power systems used for massive utility-scale solar arrays can now be installed practically anywhere – or at least, anywhere that it’s possible to ship a standard steel container. A company called NANOGEN has developed the concentrating technology into modular components, which the company claims can be … [continued]
Sunny South Africa wouldn’t be a bad place to put a big solar park, and the government there knows it. The South African government is interested in building a 5-gigawatt solar park on land in its Northern Cape and has hired Texas-based Fluor Corporation to make a plan for how to … [continued]
[social_buttons] You are probably familiar with concentrating solar power (CSP), but a new type of CSP plant, a molten salt CSP plant, has just gotten rolling and you may not yet know why that is important.
A consortium of some of the most renowned energy companies in the world would construct the world’s largest concentrating solar power plant near Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. The plant would have a capacity of 100 MW. [social_buttons] France’s oil company Total, one of the six ‘super major’ oil companies in … [continued]
[social_buttons] The International Energy Agency (IEA) presented two new solar energy analyses in Valencia, Spain this week, a Solar Photovoltaic Energy Technology Roadmap and a Concentrating Solar Power Technology Roadmap. The key finding from these is that 20-25% of global electricity production could be from solar energy by 2050. In … [continued]
[social_buttons] Despite the economic recession, the solar industry grew significantly in 2009. The solar industry added 17,000 jobs to the US economy in 2009. Installed solar capacity grew by approximately 37%. And we saw a serious drop in the cost of solar. (more info and graphs below) 46,000 jobs are … [continued]
Pittsburgh-based Alcoa and the U.S. National Renewable Energy Laboratory have partnered up to take us another step closer to low cost solar power. The lab is hosting a test run of Alcoa’s new concentrating solar power technology, which was designed to be competitive in the U.S. energy market partly due … [continued]
