Veterans Memorial Park and Solar LED Street Lights

TOWN OF NIAGARA – The roadways in Veterans Memorial Park, 7000 Lockport Road, are brighter this holiday season, after the installation this month of 25 solar-powered LED streetlights by the New York Power Authority and the Town of Niagara.

The new lights are powered by energy generated by the sun during the day and then transmitted as much-needed light during the night at the previously unlighted park.

Town Supervisor Steven C. Richards said the lighting was paid for with money from the Power Authority’s Renewable Energy Plan, established in 2008 to help create a pathway to commercialization of renewable energy technology as it emerges.

LED streetlights use light-emitting diodes, which have helped to revolutionize many lighting applications and made it possible to build dramatically thinner television sets. LEDs now provide light for remote controls, light-up clocks and watches, tell when appliances are turned on, and are ideal for miniature lighting of holiday displays.

They often come in tiny packages, but they produce a large amount of light.

Their useful lifetime is thousands of hours longer than that of standard incandescent bulbs.

Source: http://www.buffalonews.com

Code changed to ease permitting of PV Systems

Mayor Billy Kenoi has signed a bill easing restrictions for residential installations of photovoltaic systems.

The change means that an architect or structural engineer’s seal is no longer needed on building plans for systems on homes. The seal is still required for commercial installations.

The change was made with the passing of Ordinance 12-149, which Kenoi signed on Nov. 8. The ordinance amends Chapter 9 of the Hawaii County Code.

“With this change in the electrical code, homeowners and installers can get photovoltaic systems on homes more quickly,” Kenoi said in a statement issued by his office. “Residential photovoltaic systems are an important part of reducing our island’s dependence on imported fuels and easing the burden of high electricity prices on our Hawai‘i Island families.”

Building and electrical permits are still required for both residential and non-residential photovoltaic installations, as is an electrical engineer’s stamp for electrical design drawings.

Warren Lee, director of the Department of Public Works, said the plans will still need to be reviewed by county staff. He said that process will be shortened if they incorporate any of a number of mounting systems the county has pre-approved.

Electrical and building applications may be completed and tracked online through the Papa Aukahi web portal at papaaukahi.hawaiicounty.gov. Public computers are also available within the Hilo and Kona Building Division offices to create and track online permit applications.

According to the mayor’s office, front-desk support for permit applications is available from 7:45 a.m. to 3:30 p.m., Monday through Friday, with the exception of Wednesday in Hilo and Thursday in Kona, when the desks close at noon.  All other public works divisions remain available weekdays until 4:30 p.m. for code questions, consultation, and to drop off or pick up plans and permits.

Parking underneath solar panel's roof

Renault is inaugurating a large installation of solar panels at six of its French plants, in a move designed to reduce energy costs and lower the factories’ CO2 emissions.

The French automaker, which first announced the project in early 2011, said the solar-power plan for its factories is the biggest of its kind in the world. The 400,000 square meters of panels are being installed at plants in Douai, Maubeuge, Flins, Batilly, Sandouville and Cleon in both delivery and shipping sites and employee parking areas.

Because the panels are designed to resist impact, including hail, they also help protect vehicles before delivery to the sales network, Renault said.

The carmaker developed the system with Gestamp Solar, a Spanish developer and operator of utility-scale photovoltaic plants, and French solar panel specialist Coruscant. Both companies serve as operational project managers for the solar panels.

Renault plans to equip international plants with similar panels. It has already set up nearly 100,000 square meters of solar panels at factories in Valladolid and Palencia, Spain, and is conducting feasibility studies in Slovenia, Morocco, Brazil, Colombia, Chile and Romania. Construction for 300,000 square meters of panels at a plant in Busan, South Korea, is scheduled for completion by year-end.

Solar Tower

Southern California is about to receive a source of clean, green power at a cost considered competitive with fossil fuels–without creating a giant water “footprint” in the desert, either. That’s the news from the Southern California Public Power Authority, which recently announced that it has signed a power purchase agreement with EnviroMission of Australia, who plans to build a giant solar farm in Arizona.

The 200 megawatt Solar Tower power station development  is expected to annually offset more than one million tons of the greenhouse gases typically produced by fossil fuel generators of the same scale.  What’s more, it will do so without using water to cool its mechanical systems–a key concern for utilizing the solar resources of the desert without impacting its scarce groundwater resources. (Both fossil fuel and renewable energy generators consume billions of gallons of potable water annually in generating electricity.)

Southern California Public Power Authority consists of eleven municipal utilities and one irrigation district, with members delivering electricity to approximately two million metered accounts over 7,000 square miles, serving a population of nearly five million. EnviroMission has gained coverage in its native Australia for its giant solar thermal designs, destined for both the Land Down Under and the U.S.

Effect of climate changes and solar industry

Climate change leads to more intense, longer storms, drought and heat, according to the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. And severe weather is costly to human lives and the economy, as Hurricane Sandy has recently reminded us when it hit the east coast of the United States. Unlike nuclear power plants that were shut down, and natural gas explosions in New York and New Jersey as a result of the superstorm, shutting off gas and electricity to millions, solar power is a relatively safe form of energy.

But this doesn’t mean the industry is exempt from climate-change-related risks.

Real Goods Solar issued a statement, “Surviving a Hurricane – Hurricane Sandy, Solar Panels and You,” to its solar customers as the storm descended on the northeastern US, assuring that its PV systems are “designed, engineered and installed to all applicable building codes and engineering standards for their location and environment.”

“You do not need to take any extra measures to secure your solar panels during severe weather,” it said. But, it added, grid-tied solar arrays won’t provide electricity if there’s a blackout.

And extreme weather can pose a risk to solar systems. In addition to the obvious dangers, like floods or tornados carrying away rooftops and their attached solar installations, hailstorms can break glass plates that cover PV modules, and extreme heat and cold can affect panel degradation.

Some installations fared quite well, which is testament to rigorous testing and certification. For example, two commercial solar systems installed in Pennsylvania were unscathed during Hurricane Sandy. Tecta Solar inspected the ET Solar PV systems and reported that both systems were producing at 100%.

“Climate change may drive the solar industry to test more to these new ratings,” says Dr. Paul Robusto, photovoltaic business development manager at Intertek. “Certain areas may see higher temperatures, more rain, rapidly changing temperatures, increased wind and snow levels, and larger hail sizes. The ratings being developed become more important in light of these changing weather patterns.”

He’s talking about new tests and standards being developed by the International PV Module Quality Assurance Task Force, an NREL program that is working to develop a rating system that meets the needs of all countries and customers so that PV manufacturers will need to complete only a single test.  The task force includes nine task groups, responsible for testing for humidity, temperature, and voltage, wind loading, UV and other conditions. Robusto sits on some of the task groups.

Intertek Regional Vice President for Renewable Energy Sunny Rai said, “We are working to establish a quality assurance rating program looking at the impact of modules being installed in an area where they are exposed to very high temperatures, or hot but dry like a desert or hot but very humid like Florida and places in southeast Asia, Malaysia, India,” Rai explains. “Standards are being developed to address different weather conditions or climate conditions as we see on a normal basis.”

Bubble tracking in PV systems

Concentrating solar photovoltaic (PV) systems cut system costs by reducing the area of PV cells for a specified electrical output, but the precise mechanical tracking systems needed to keep a concentrator aimed at the sun can raise the system cost, to little advantage. As a result, researchers are looking at nonmechanical ways to finely track the sun (coarse tracking could still be left to a lower-cost mechanical tracker).

A group at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (Lausanne, Switzerland) has developed an optofluidic waveguide coupling mechanism in which focused light heats liquid in a waveguide to form a bubble of vapor that scatters the incoming sunlight into the waveguide, which carries the light to a concentrating PV cell. The experimental efficiency of a system coupling laser light through an off-the-shelf axicon lens pair into a methanol-containing waveguide was greater than 40%. Two lasers were used: one emitting at 460 nm to represent the visible part of the solar spectrum, and an infrared (IR) laser diode to simulate the IR spectral portion. When focused on the IR-absorbing glass that helps form the waveguide, the light produces a bubble that varies between 160 and 300 μm in diameter for IR power between 40 and 100 mW. The bubble-tracking technique could reach at least 90% efficiency with better optics, say the researchers.