Nasheed installs solar panels on President’s Office

The government has begun installing solar panels on the rooftops of public buildings in Male’, under the Japanese government-sponsored ‘Project for Clean Energy Promotion in Male’.

This morning President Mohamed Nasheed clambered onto the roof of the President’s office to bolt down and wire up a panel, 20 kilowatts worth of which have already been installed all over the building.

The project’s 395 kilowatts of panels will ultimately cut down the fossil fuel usage of installed buildings and ultimately energy bills by 30 percent, under the State Electric Company (STELCO)’s new feed-in tariff.

Speaking during the ceremony to launch the project, Nasheed said a transition away from fossil fuels would increase the energy efficiency of the Maldives by 20-30 percent by the end of 2013.

Nasheed has previously installed 48 solar panels on the roof of his residence, Muleeage, provided gratis by LG Electronics Califorian company Sungevity. Those panels generate 11.5 kilowatts of peak output, enough to power almost 200 standard 60 watt light bulbs, and will save the country US$300,000 over the life of the system.

Minivan News understands that the government is currently revising the draft feed-in tariff – which is currently operative – to make it attractive to companies willing to invest the upfront costs of powering remote islands with solar electricity.

The government has endorsed solar as the best renewable option for reaching its goal of becoming carbon neutral by 2020, a goal that has broadened from one of environmental concern to an economic imperative.

Last year the Maldives spent 16 percent of its GDP on fossil fuels, making the country extremely vulnerable to even the tiniest oil price fluctuations and adding an economic imperative to renewable energy adoption.

Data collected by the President’s Energy Advisor, former mining engineer Mike Mason, shows that it presently costs between 28-29 cents to produce a kilowatt hour in the Maldives at best, and 77 cents per kilowatt hour at worst.

“Anything beyond 28-29 cents for a big island and 32-33 cents for a small island is just money being burned,” Mason said during the recent Slow Life Symposium held at the upmarket Soneva Fushi resort.

The cost of providing solar electricity straight from the panel was far below the cost of using diesel on any island, including Male’, Mason explained.

Mason collected data on energy usage from the island of Maalhos in Baa Atoll, and found that by pointing the solar panel in the same direction all day, “you can meet midday demand easily. But between 6-11 am in the morning, and after 2pm in the afternoon, you still need to meet the cooling load of fridges and air-conditioners.”

Mason had two suggestions – the first was to use (more expensive) tracking solar panels that would follow the sun and extend the daytime period in which demand could be met using solar. This would also generate the maximum yield from each panel, mitigating another problem – space.

“The challenge will be getting tracking to work in a hot, humid, salty environment,” he acknowledged, particularly if the panels were mounted in shallow lagoons.

The cost of providing electricity from solar in conjunction with current commercially available battery technology was not much different from existing diesel arrangements on many islands, Mason observed. “You lose 20 percent of the electricity putting it in and taking it back out, and it is expensive to fix. It’s not good enough.”

However on Maalhos, Mason noted, 28 percent of the electricity demand was for cooling.

“I had a think about storage. We could use really cold water refrigerated during the day, and use that to drive air-conditioning and fridges at night. This applies as much to resorts as it does home islands.”

This innovation would drop the cost to the level of the country’s most efficient diesel generators, Mason explained. For those powerplants currently running at 77 cents a kilowatt, “this is an opportunity to print money – and there aren’t many of those available to the government.”

Solar-power boost for 45 more Punggol blocks

MORE Housing Board blocks in Punggol are going green with solar power by the middle of next year.

Seven HDB blocks have already been fitted with rooftop solar panels to generate electricity, and 45 more blocks will be similarly fitted.

This test-bed project, announced by HDB yesterday, is in line with the Government's plan to make living in Singapore more environmentally friendly and sustainable.

The solar-panel systems used by these estates will - for the first time in Singapore and South-east Asia - be on a lease basis from their developer.

This means that HDB and the Pasir Ris-Punggol Town Council will lease the systems and not have to pay the high cost upfront of installing them, which is estimated to be $11 million for this project.

The town council will not have to worry about system maintenance, too. Home-grown solar manufacturer Sunseap Enterprises will take on those responsibilities.

The firm has been awarded the tender for the project for 20 years and the town council will pay Sunseap monthly power - generation fees.

The electricity generated will be used to power electrical services in common areas, such as lift operations, corridor and staircase lighting, and water pumps.

HDB said that Punggol residents do not have to worry that the higher cost of solar power - about 30 per cent more than prevailing electricity rates - will be passed on to them.

This is because the town council has signed an agreement with Sunseap to enjoy a discount on the costs of electricity generated by solar power, which makes them similar to prevailing electricity rates.

For this project, HDB will cover 30 per cent of the initial start-up costs, which amounts to about $3.28 million.

Mrs Cheong Koon Hean, chief executive of HDB, said the project will help Singapore reduce carbon emissions in the long term and contribute to the country's research on solar-power generation.

She added that HDB is looking into expanding the project to another 70 blocks in Punggol.

Intel's Solar Chipset Can Run Forever

The fact that portable electronics are getting to the point where battery life is simply not a concern is absolutely wonderful. We're not quite there yet, but we're so, so close. Intel is working on a new processor architecture that can run itself using nothing but light: no plugs, no batteries, just solar power.

Intel's ultrabooks will soon be sporting a new chipset called Haswell. The Haswell CPU will have a 22 nanometer 3D architecture, the upshot of which is that it'll consume twenty times less power than current chips. Yes, that's twenty times less. That picture up there is showing a Haswell CPU humming along, powered exclusively by that itty bitty solar panel. Park the thing under the sun (or a lightbulb) and it'll happily crunch numbers for you until the sun explodes.

This is just the CPU, mind you, not the motherboard and hard drive and screen and whatnot. But with the addition of a battery (of reasonable size, I assume), Intel promises 24 solid hours per charge, with a whopping 10 days of "connected standby," which includes Internet streaming and other good stuff. Even if you cut those absolute best-case estimates in half (which is how it seems to work), that's still an entire working day's worth of worry-free power.

So when will this miracle come to pass? The word is that Haswell will be ready to go by 2013, which is just barely over a year away. Not soon enough, but at least we have a whole bunch of time to continue to bemoan how inefficient our current generation of laptops is. Yay!

DOE Offers $91M Loan Guarantee for Cogentrix’s Concentrating PV Solar

Here’s good news for proponents of a solar tech that some thought would never be widely used: The U.S. Department of Energy said Tuesday it’s offering a conditional commitment for a $90.6 million loan guarantee to build a solar power plant in Colorado that will use a hybrid of mirrors and solar cells.

The loan guarantee will help fund the 30 MW Alamosa Solar Generating Project being built by Cogentrix, which plans to use concentrating photovoltaic (CPV) panels from Amonix, a company backed by venture capitalists like Kleiner Perkins. Cogentrix announced a deal to sell electricity from the project to power company Xcel Energy last August.

Alamosa is the largest, proposed CPV project in the world, and that tells you something about how difficult it has been to promote the use of CPV in power plant development. Many of the utility-scale solar power projects under development these days are more than 100 MW and use conventional solar panels or solar thermal technologies, which rely on mirrors to concentrate the light to heat fluid for producing steam, which then drives turbines to generate electricity. Through its loan guarantee program, the DOE has helped to finance power projects using emerging technologies that have a hard time attracting private investments.

CPV technology is supposed to generate electricity for less than the other more commonly use solar technologies. By concentrating light, a CPV system uses far less solar cells and that is supposed to cut cost. But the price of solar cells for conventional solar panels has dropped more than half in recent years thanks mainly to generous government incentives, primarily in Europe, that boost solar panel installations. Solar panels can go on rooftops while CPV, with its solar panels that are several times larger than conventional ones as well as bulky trackers, are mostly destined for installation on the ground.

The largest CPV project built in the U.S. last year was a 1 MW project by CPV technology developer SolFocus at a community college in California. Last month, Amonix bested that record when it announced a 2 MW project it co-developed and completed with Granite Construction and University of Arizona at the university campus last month. The electricity goes to the local utility, Tucson Electric Power.

Amonix was actually founded in 1989 and carried out some small projects in the U.S. and Europe before lining up money to build a commercial-size factory and headquarters in California in 2008. It also benefited from the federal stimulus funding and received $5.8 million in manufacturing tax credit to help build a factory north of Las Vegas. The company, which got a new CEO, Brian Robertson, in November 2009 and then raised a B round of $129.4 million led by Kleiner Perkins last year, is set to do a ribbon cutting at the new factory on May 17.

Amonix’s technology uses Fresnel lenses to concentrate the sunlight 500 times onto triple-junction solar cells. Each system, with 53-kilowatt (AC) of generation capacity, is made up of 7 giant modules mounted on a dual-axis tracker. Each module measures 10-ft. by 49-ft and contains 36 sets of lenses and receivers; each receiver contains 30 solar cells. Carla Pihowich, vice president of marketing at Amonix, told me last year that the company was using cells with 39 percent efficiency, which leads to 31 percent efficiency for each module and 25 percent efficiency overall for each system.

Completing the Alamosa project also will be a milestone for Cogentrix, which is owned by Goldman Sachs and owns mostly fossil fuel power plants in the U.S. and hydroelectric power plants in Turkey. Cogentrix’s current solar power plant holding consists of a 43 MW solar thermal project built in the 1980s.

Goldman has been criticized for hogging public land in the western U.S. without having submitted firm plans to develop them for solar. A public records review by the Associated Press last fall showed that Goldman’s energy development company had made more development claims for the Bureau of Land Management land in the southwestern U.S. than any other company. BLM’s land leasing system is first-come, first-served and makes it possible for developers to apply and hold onto land.