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Thứ Hai, 3 tháng 8, 2020

This is your SolarWakeup for August 3rd, 2020

Venture Ventures. GE Ventures is continuing to divest its portfolio, with the latest deal selling GE’s shares in 11 startups to 40 North Ventures. This story has two points of relevance for our industry. First, some of the companies are in clean energy including Enbala, Volta and Proterra. Second, 40 North Ventures is part of Standard Industries which owns GAF and GAF Energy. GAF Energy is the roof integrated solar product that spun out from GAF last year but has been internally built at GAF for a decade.

VP Portfolio. Every VP list coming from DC pundits has Senator Harris at the top of the list. Typically, from a strategic standpoint, a vice presidential nominee with legislative power would put forth new bills that bolster issues relevant to the campaign. Senator Harris is about to introduce environmental justice legislation. This isn’t the first time, 15 years ago as the San Francisco District Attorney, Harris pursued environmental crimes that disproportionately targeted poor communities. The bridge between climate change, income inequality and fossil fuel generators exists and Senator Harris, potentially as VP candidate, will be making that case nationally.

2 Out Of 50. Bribery charges in Ohio and Illinois largely hasn’t surprised most in solar advocacy, maybe the scale of it, but we’ve all seen how utilities maneuver the legislative limbo. The New York Times comes in with a well written documentation that makes the issue understandable by those outside of the industry. The NY Times asks for opposing views, which will be interesting to read if they come out. The real story that I hope get picked up is that this is happening in every State. Each instance may differ in degree but with the right investigative budget, the New York Times would find dozens of reportable cases. Even better, the New York Times should hire Energy and Policy Institute to do the investigation.

Arizona RPS Laughs. A regulatory body that seemed aligned to increase the RPS in Arizona ended up closing the proceedings rather abruptly when a difference of opinion of how to proceed became apparent. Twitter had some fun with this one but I’ll leave you with the coverage. Let’s see if the regulators have their staff coordinate and come back with good news.

It’s Kentucky. 50MW PPA signed in Kentucky, if Kentucky wants more of that in the future residents can call their senior senator and ask for the ITC to be included in the stimulus package.

Opinion

Spotify: SolarWakeup Live! And The Virtual Battery

Best, Yann

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Mastering the sand in the Arabian Desert with DustIQ and NOMADD’s cleaning robots See the first results of PV cleaning and DustIQ tests in real desert conditions.

We could prove that NOMADD’s cleaning robots do a great job in replacing manual cleaning, which is not only a physically demanding but also water-wasting way to clean the module surface. Beyond that, our DustIQ soiling sensors provided accurate measurements of the actual soiling ratio over the whole testing period, making them an essential tool…

The post Mastering the sand in the Arabian Desert with DustIQ and NOMADD’s cleaning robots <br><span style='color:#404040;font-weight:600;font-size:15px;'>See the first results of PV cleaning and DustIQ tests in real desert conditions. </span> appeared first on Solar Power World.

A residential vanadium flow battery

Flow battery manufacturers typically pursue utility scale storage projects but German start-up VoltStorage is targeting the household market.

From pv magazine USA.

Munich-based residential vanadium redox flow battery start-up VoltStorage has secured another $7 million from investors including the Bayern Kapital subsidiary of the development bank of Bavaria; family investment house Korys; the EU-backed EIT Innoenergy, New Jersey-based venture capital fund and seed investor SOSV and Zurich power company Energie 360.

The firm claims its flow battery system can complete more than 10,000 charge cycles without any effect on capacity and says its electrolyte is a recyclable, non-flammable vanadium solution. VoltStorage’s modular unit reportedly offers a continuous power rating of 1.5 kW and nominal energy of 6.2 kWh. The unit comes with a ten-year warranty.

More than 20 flow battery chemistries, including zinc-bromine, zinc-iron, zinc-cerium and magnesium-vanadium have been studied with vanadium redox the closest to wide commercialization. Vanadium, the dominant cost in the electrolyte, is a metal mined in Russia, China and South Africa although there are reserves in the U.S. and Canada. It is used predominantly as a steel additive. Flow battery manufacturers include Washington-based UET, Montana’s Vizn, California-based Primus, Japan’s Sumitomo, Anglo-Canadian Invinity Energy Systems – formed after the recent merger of California’s Avalon and U.K.-based redT – and Form Energy

Flow batteries circulate a liquid electrolyte through stacks of electrochemical cells and have long held the promise of 10-hour duration, tens of thousands of cycles, minimal degradation and no limitation on depth of discharge. That performance promise has lured venture capital investment and R&D but, thus far, the support has yielded few competitive commercial flow batteries.

Vanadium flow battery manufacturers have aimed for mass-commercialization of their longer-duration systems for 20 years but have never been able to reach volumes of scale. The steep fall in the price of lithium ion batteries has not helped market penetration for rival technologies. Bermuda-based asset manager Lazard has calculated, however, the levelized cost of storing electricity in some redox flow projects now overlaps that of lithium-ion batteries. Lazard said sales of vanadium flow batteries have grown from double digits to just over 200 MWh of installed storage capacity. That figure is still meager, though, alongside the volume of lithium ion storage deployed.

Cadmium-free CIGS solar cell with 18% efficiency

South Korean scientists manufactured the cell with the chemical bath deposition method, using different thiourea concentrations. For the buffer layer, they used zinc instead of cadmium sulfide. The cell is flexible and is available in seven different colors.

Researchers from South Korea’s Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI) have developed a colored copper indium gallium selenide (CIGS) solar cell with an 18% conversion efficiency.

The new cell is purportedly more environmentally friendly, as its buffer layer is made of zinc instead of toxic cadmium sulfide (CdS), which is commonly used.

They manufactured the cell with the chemical bath deposition method (CBD), using different thiourea (TU) concentrations, the researchers said. CBD is a technique to produce films of solid inorganic, non-metallic materials on substrates by immersing the substrate in a precursor aqueous solution. Thiourea (TU) is a compound used in thin-film solar cells to achieve high-quality films in the film-deposition process.

“The solar cells showed a substantial increment in the performance after light soaking treatment,” the scientists said. “The performance increment was found to be in proportion to the TU mole concentration used in zinc layer deposition.”

They analyzed the results of the deposition process through X-ray photoemission spectroscopy (XPS) – the most widely used surface analysis technique to identify the elements that are present in a material. They found that a hollow band region was formed at the interface between the CIGS and CDB-zinc layers, which resulted in the suppression of electron-hole recombination and enhanced the cell efficiency.

The cell is available in seven different colors and can be coated on a flexible substrate or a glass substrate. “This means that they could be bent or folded, expanding applications as a next-generation eco-friendly energy source,” they explained.

They describe the cell in “Ultrafast wavelength-dependent carrier dynamics related to metastable defects in Cu(In,Ga)Se₂ solar cells with chemically deposited Zn(O,S) buffer layer,” which was recently published in Nano Energy.

Is Mexican utility CFE entering the solar business?

Mexico’s Federal Electricity Commission (CFE) is seeking approval to develop 350 MW of solar in the state of Baja California. The arrays will be built on the same site as the 820 MW Cerro Prieto geothermal project. However, it remains unclear whether the PV installations mark the company’s formal entry into the solar business.

Mexico’s Federal Electricity Commission (CFE) and its CEO, Manuel Bartlett, have been widely seen as tough opponents of renewable energy development for years.

“A whole campaign is being made that clean energy is the cheapest and it is a lie,” Bartlett said in March 2019, when he announced plans to review contracts awarded in three renewable energy auctions held by the Mexican government since the introduction of energy reforms in 2015. “The supporters of clean energy should not be worried, as we too are not against it – we are in favor of multiplying clean energy.”

However, just a few weeks earlier, Bartlett had announced that the CFE would not resume renewable energy auctions. “Why should we buy power, if we can produce it?” asked Bartlett. “CFE does not require third-party support. We are doing well, we have strengthened ourselves in the first 100 days of the new administration. The president has given us resources, he has encouraged us and we are very happy … CFE will continue to grow.”

Despite CFE’s plans to increase power production capacity through co-generation, the utility has filed an authorization request to build its own solar projects in the state of Baja California – the Cerro Prieto II and III projects. According to a document that was recently published by Mexico’s Secretariat of Environment and Natural Resources (Semarnat), the two plants have a combined of 350 MW. They will be built near Mexicali, the state capital.

The 150 MW and 200 MW installations will be deployed on the same site as the Cerro Prieto geothermal project, which is owned by the CFE. Thus far, the utility has so far not responded to pv magazine‘s request for more information on the projects and the company’s future solar ambitions.

In mid-2018, CFE revealed plans to introduce new “Amparo” legal provisions against net metering rules for distributed generation. However, it was later forced to scrap them, after the request triggered protests from Mexican entities in the renewable energy sector, including the Asolmex and Anes solar associations.

A step forward for single-crystal perovskites

Scientists in the United States have developed a lithography-based process for the fabrication of single-crystal perovskites. Thin films made using this process have been integrated into a range of devices, including solar cells, and have demonstrated better stability performance than their more commonly researched polycrystalline counterparts.

Even as perovskite solar cells move toward commercial production, the class of materials offers many more possibilities that remain confined to academia for now. Single-crystal perovskites are one example of this.

For the polycrystalline perovskites that have made it further down the path to commercialization, the potential for simple low-cost production processes is one of the main attractions. Single-crystal perovskites offer potential advantages over these, in terms of both performance and stability, but are more challenging to fabricate and so have not seen the same level of commercial interest.

A group of scientists led by University of California San Diego (UCSD) investigated this, and has developed a process based on lithography and other processes already used elsewhere in manufacturing, to produce a single-crystal perovskite film.

“Our method is the first that can precisely control the growth and fabrication of single-crystal devices with high efficiency,” says Yusheng Lei, a graduate student in nano-engineering at UCSD. “The method doesn’t require fancy equipment or techniques – the whole process is based on traditional semiconductor fabrication, further indicating its compatibility with existing industrial procedures.”

They describe the process in “A fabrication process for flexible single-crystal perovskite devices,” which was recently published in Nature. The group was able to fabricate continuous monocrystalline thin films up to a size of around 5.5cm x 5.5cm, with precise control over the thickness from around 0.6 to 100 micrometers.

Different tests

The group produced graded flexible thin films with varying mixtures of lead and tin, and when integrated into solar cells, they achieved an overall efficiency of around 10.3%. The group further noted that these could be improved with strategic layer designs and passivation.

The flexible perovskite thin-films were also subjected to mechanical stress and various light intensities, temperatures, and humidity levels. In these tests, they demonstrated strong performance in comparison to polycrystalline perovskite materials.

“Single-crystal devices show a slower decay than polycrystalline devices with the same measurement conditions and encapsulation in 1,000-h continuous illumination stability tests under 1-sun intensity by tracking the maximum power point,” the scientists said. Evidence also suggests that the grain boundaries between crystals are major contributors to their degradation.

The group has stated that its research serves as proof that single-crystal perovskite devices can be made using industry-standard processes and materials. It plans to continue work on this process with a view to eventually reaching commercial scale.

“Further simplifying the fabrication process and improving the transfer yield are urgent issues we’re working on,” says Sheng Xu, a professor in UCSD’s Department of Nanoengineering. “Alternatively, if we can replace the pattern mask with functional carrier transport layers to avoid the transfer step, the whole fabrication yield can be largely improved.”

Why Solar Feed-in Tariffs Won’t Vanish Any Time Soon — Or Ever

Solar feed-in tariffs are what you get paid when your rooftop solar power system sends energy into the grid. Their value will decrease in the future. This is inevitable. As more solar capacity is built it will drive down the price of daytime electricity. But solar feed-in tariffs won’t disappear any time soon and will […]

The post Why Solar Feed-in Tariffs Won’t Vanish Any Time Soon — Or Ever appeared first on Solar Quotes Blog.