Científicos checos ayudan a traer de vuelta la producción de paneles solares a Europa Radio Praga, 21/11/2022 Científicos checos ayudan a traer de vuelta la producción de paneles solares a Europa
Paneles solares en el techo del Nuevo Escenario del Teatro Nacional de Praga|Foto: Česká televize, ČT24
China fabrica casi todos los paneles solares que se usan en la actualidad. Científicos de la Academia de Ciencias Checa participan en un proyecto europeo para diseñar paneles de máxima eficiencia y cero emisiones en su producción que reviertan la situación.
La tendencia de la última década ha hecho que en la Unión Europea se fabrique únicamente un 1% de los paneles solares que se usan en todo el mundo, mientras que China produce el 97%. Un proyecto piloto europeo va a comenzar la producción de un nuevo diseño que promete un importante avance en el sector.
Martin Ledinský, foto: ČT24 Martin Ledinský, foto: ČT24
Martin Ledinský, científico del Instituto de Física de la Academia de Ciencias checa, que participa en el proyecto, explicó a la Radio Checa la característica principal de estos nuevos paneles.
“El panel solar que vamos a producir es completamente negro y no tiene absolutamente nada en su cara frontal porque no tiene contactos. Pero claro que necesitamos dos contactos, si no, no daría nada de energía. Por eso, tenemos los dos contactos en la cara de atrás, que es donde tenemos las típicas líneas de los contactos metálicos, el positivo y el negativo”.
Foto ilustrativa: Maria Godfrida, Pixabay, Pixabay License Foto ilustrativa: Maria Godfrida, Pixabay, Pixabay License
Esa característica que le da un nuevo aspecto a los paneles solares es precisamente la que consigue que den más energía.
“Esos contactos dan sombra, si ponemos los dos contactos detrás, no tenemos nada de sombra y una máxima eficiencia. Otra de las ventajas es que el panel es también negro por detrás, por lo que si recibe la luz por ese lado, seguirá dando electricidad al sistema. O sea, que se pueden usar por las dos caras”.
Foto ilustrativa: Los Muertos Crew, Pexels, CC0 Foto ilustrativa: Los Muertos Crew, Pexels, CC0
Un panel fotovoltaico de los habituales hoy día tiene una eficiencia de un 20% aproximadamente. Con los nuevos paneles de este proyecto se consigue hasta casi un 30% en condiciones de laboratorio y casi un 27% en la práctica.
Dentro del equipo europeo, los físicos checos se están dedicando en particular a la medición de la altura y el grosor de los contactos, que a primera vista, y solo a primera vista, son rectos. Ledinský explicó el avance que han logrado en Praga.
“Originalmente, la medición duraba unas 30 horas. Hoy estamos en unos diez segundos. Es un sistema casi aplicable a las propias líneas de producción de paneles solares, lo que es nuestra tarea en el proyecto Pilatus”.
En territorio europeo y con financiación de la UE surgirán en los próximos tres años tres plantas para la producción de estos nuevos paneles con cero emisiones, contó Martin Ledinský.
“El silicio monocristalino tiene que ser fundido, lo que es muy exigente desde el punto de vista energético. Por ello usamos una central hidroeléctrica de Noruega que tiene, a fin de cuentas, cero emisiones de dióxido de carbono”.
Todo con el fin de reiniciar la producción de paneles solares en Europa y avanzar hacia una independencia energética que, como este año se está demostrando, es de una importancia crítica.
GE installs world's first spiral-welded wind turbine tower Loz Blain February 26, 2023
The facilities to manufacture large-diameter pipes on-site at wind farms can be set up and ready to go within about a month, says Keystone - Keystone Tower Systems
Denver's Keystone Tower Systems says it can cut the cost of wind energy with tech borrowed from pipemaking. It uses spiral welding techniques to roll sheet steel into huge turbine towers on-site, stronger, faster and cheaper than current techniques.
The strongest winds tend to be higher up, but as this 2022 study shows, higher-mounted turbines catching stronger wind doesn't necessarily equate to the lowest cost of energy. Indeed, once you factor in the costs of stronger foundations and taller, sturdier towers, anything above about 120 m (394 ft) tends to result in more expensive electricity – and in a market as price-sensitive as energy, that's bad news.
Somewhere around half the Levelized Cost of Energy (LCoE) in an average commercial wind energy installation comes directly from the cost of the wind turbines themselves, according to the NREL. Of that, nearly half of the money's in the nacelle at the top, and the remainder is split between the rotors, which contribute around 13.7% to the LCoE, and the tower itself, at around 10.3%.
But as towers get bigger, their share of the upfront CAPEX (capital expenditure) increases disproportionately. A 110-m (361-ft) tower might account for 20% of a project's CAPEX, while a 150-m (492-ft) tower becomes 29% of the cost. And that's not to mention the additional logistical issues involved in dealing with massive machinery like this.
Keystone says it's got a tower-making solution that brings the price of large towers down so low that it "make[s] wind energy the lowest cost power source available, not just in the open plains, but throughout the world."
The idea is simple enough; instead of creating a number of cylindrical "cans," trucking them to the turbine site and welding them together to create the final tower structure, Keystone proposes rapidly building small manufacturing facilities on-site, then trucking in coils of steel in bulk, or even flat sheets, which can be welded together to form longer strips. These coils or strips are fed into angled bending machines that bend them into a spiral shape, which is welded together along the join line continuously as the steel is turned. Much of the process is automated, as you can see in the video below.
Keystone Spiral Welding
The result, says Keystone, is full-length towers, or shorter sections if that's logistically easier, churned out 10 times faster than a standard factory can do them, using up to 80% less manpower. There may be savings as well in the foundations used for spiral-welded towers. The factory can be ready to go within about a month, and building on-site means that you can make the kind of large-diameter sections that simply couldn't fit under bridges if you were to make them in a factory and ship them.
This transport restriction, according to Reuters, currently keeps maximum diameter down to 4.3 m (14 ft) – limiting tower height to around 80 m (262 ft). Keystone's technology can scale to produce towers over 7 m (23 ft) in diameter, for towers up to and beyond 180 m (590 ft) high. So onshore wind farms can run taller towers, with longer blades, driving bigger turbines and producing more energy.
Spiral welding is a well-established technology when it comes to making pipelines, so the process of creating and quality-inspecting these long tube sections is already proven. Keystone says it also results in "better fatigue and buckling performance," enabling towers of a given height to be made using less steel. And since the manufacturing plant is essentially mobile, it's easy enough to pop one temporarily next to a dock and shoot out dozens of sections or entire towers for offshore installations.
Keystone has set up its own manufacturing facility in Texas, but the real benefits will start coming when the pipes are rolled on-site at a wind farm Keystone Tower Systems
While the mobile factory unit is a key part of Keystone's play, it's also set up its own manufacturing facility in Texas, and from this factory it produced the tower for its first live installation, working with General Electric Renewable Energy.
This first product is an 89-m (292-ft) spiral-welded tower for GE's 2.8-127 turbine. Certified for a 40-year lifetime, the tower is designed to be a simple replacement for GE's standard towers. It'll presumably provide a good commercial-scale case study from which to proceed.
Certainly, Keystone is a small operation at the moment, surviving largely on US government grants. In this kind of manufacturing, you need economies of scale to kick in before you can start promising big savings to customers. But the tower is clearly a significant part of the cost of a finished wind turbine, as well as a restricting factor in the size vs power equation, so Keystone's spiral welding technique could yet become a strong lever with which to move renewable energy costs.
Silver mirror triples efficiency of perovskite solar cells Michael Irving, February 19, 2023
An artist's impression of a perovskite (cyan) solar cell with a new layer of material underneath (gray), which boosts efficiency by creating reflections of electron-hole pairs (red and blue) Chloe Zhang
Perovskites are one of the most promising new materials for solar cell technology. Now engineers at the University of Rochester have developed a new way to more than triple the material’s efficiency by adding a layer of reflective silver underneath it.
For the better part of a century, silicon has been the go-to material for making solar cells, thanks to its abundance and efficiency in converting light to an electrical current. But in just the last decade, a new contender has rapidly risen through the ranks – perovskite, which is much cheaper and has already caught up to silicon in efficiency.
Now a new study has boosted perovskite’s efficiency by three and a half times, without even tweaking the material itself. Instead, the team found that adding a layer of a different material underneath it changed the interactions of the electrons in the perovskite, reducing an energy-sapping process.
Perovskites and other photovoltaic materials generate electricity by allowing sunlight to excite electrons in the material, causing them to jump out of their atoms, ready to be guided to generate an electrical current. But sometimes, electrons fall back into the “holes” they left behind, reducing the overall current and as such the efficiency of the material. This is what’s known as electron recombination.
The researchers found they were able to drastically reduce electron recombination in perovskite by placing it on a substrate made up of either silver alone, or alternating layers of silver and aluminum oxide. The team says that doing so creates a kind of mirror that produces reversed images of the electron-hole pairs, which lessens the likelihood of electrons recombining with the holes. In tests, the engineers showed that adding these layers boosted the efficiency of light conversion by 3.5 times.
“A piece of metal can do just as much work as complex chemical engineering in a wet lab,” said Chunlei Guo, lead author of the study. “As new perovskites emerge, we can then use our physics-based method to further enhance their performance.”
Turkey. The solar power plant in Konya is to be the largest in Europe polishnews, March 4, 2023
Main photo source: EPA/ERDEM SAHIN
The largest solar power plant in Europe is being built in southern Turkey. It will be the size of 2,600 football fields, and the energy generated there is intended to satisfy households of two million people.
The Karapinar Solar Power Plant (SPP) is being built in Konya, in the south Turkey. Its construction began in 2020.
A huge power plant in Turkey
The power plant in Konya is to be the largest solar power plant in Europe and one of the largest in the world. It covers 20 million square meters, which is the equivalent of 2,600 football fields.
As we can read on the investment website, 3.5 million panels are to produce a total of 1,350 megawatts (MW) of energy, which is to meet the needs of households inhabited by two million people.
Huge solar power plant in Konya, Turkey
Construction works are scheduled to be completed in August 2023. The commissioning of the plant at full capacity is expected to increase the share of solar energy in Turkey in total domestic production by 20%.
According to the announcements, after the construction is completed, about 100 people will be employed at the power plant.
Mitad artículo, mitad propaganda, pero se ve muy interesante.
Game-changing battery lets Lightning riders play all day with gas bikes Loz Blain, March 14, 2023
Lightning LS-218: an electric designed to outperform gas bikes
Lightning's wild LS-218 superbike and Strike sportsbike are among the first EVs to get Enevate's super-high density, ultra-fast charging, next-gen silicon-anode batteries – which charge almost as fast as your buddies can fuel up their dinosaur burners.
These stand to be the first electric motorcycles you can genuinely go out and ride hard all day alongside gas bikes without making anyone wait for you – provided the right charging infrastructure's available.
Lightning and Enevate have been testing a prototype Strike bike around California – well, when they've had a break in the extreme weather – that runs a whopping 24-kWh battery pack full of Enevate cells. These are significantly higher density than Lightning's standard battery cells, and thus the 24-kWh pack takes up the same space as the standard 20-kWh pack. But it delivers an impressive range boost.
"We're getting 150 to 170 miles (241 to 274 km) of range at 70 miles an hour (113 km/h) along highway 5," Lightning Founder and CEO Richard Hatfield tells us over a phone call. "And we're charging from 0-80% in about 10 minutes, or at nearly a 5C rate, on a level 3 CCS charger. That's probably the most common level 3 charger at this point, other than Tesla, and I know even Tesla is offering CCS options on some of its chargers."
An 80% charge will get you somewhere around 135 miles (217 km) of riding, so you're looking at a motorcycle that charges at about 810 miles per hour (1,303 km/h). Realistically, most gasoline-burning sportbikes start getting thirsty somewhere around 120 miles (200 km), and 10 minutes is far from a big ask at a fuel stop – especially given the ergonomics involved. This is really the first high-performance electric we know of that won't have your petrolhead buddies tapping their watches at you.
Coping with these charge rates required some beefing-up of the bikes' electrical systems. "So we've got 120 kW of electricity going in, for about 10 minutes straight, says Hatfield. "It's almost impossible to duplicate that on the discharge side; it's 300 amps and 400 volts for 10 minutes continuously, there's just no place you could really do that on the throttle. So it made us re-think all the interconnects, the cabling and the charge connectors, even the contactors. And inside the fairings, we have to move air to cool the components to sustain that level of charging."
We looked into Enevate's next-gen battery tech back in 2020, so check out our previous piece for a deeper dive. But essentially, through using a pure silicon anode, with specific electrolytes and cell design innovations, this Orange County operation is now delivering batteries that can charge up to 10 times faster than current lithium-ion cells. Indeed, the batteries in these Lightning bikes could potentially charge twice as fast, if they could deal with the heat.
What's more, they're much more energy-dense, both by volume and by weight, than today's top contenders. According to BatteryDesign.net, a Tesla 4680-type cell from a late 2022 Model Y stores around 650 Wh/liter and 244 Wh/kg. Enevate claims "over 850 Wh/liter and 340 Wh/kg," – that's about 30% more energy for a given volume and nearly 40% more for a given weight.
"It's a game-changer," says Hatfield. "For me, it's really exciting. The energy density is great, as well as the charge rate, and it really changes the practical equation for electric riders. What Enevate has done that others haven't, is their battery chemistry geniuses found a way to increase the cycle life and manage the expansion that occurs when silicon-anode batteries are charged very quickly. The lifecycle still isn't quite as high as some other batteries, but it's far longer than the life of most motorcycles. Very few get ridden that many miles."
Lightning LS-218 - an elemental experience Loz Blain/New Atlas
These are indeed special batteries. And unsurprisingly, they'll come at a boutique price. Hatfield confirms they'll be an optional extra that build-slot reservation holders can specify – a 24-kWh pack for the Strike and a 28-kWh pack for the LS-218 – and they'll add about US$8,000 to the price of the bikes. That'll push the standard $19,988 Strike Carbon Edition from superbike territory into premium territory, and the standard $38,888 LS-218 even further into the dream-machine range.
But that's just the price of early adoption. "It's a new technology," says Hatfield. "But there's nothing inherent in the technology to prevent it from becoming competitive with the other cells that are available. Volumes are up on a lot of the other cell chemistries, though, so Enevate will have to see similar volumes to be able to get its prices down. I know they're in a lot of conversations with auto OEMs – I think it's probably around two to three years before this gets to a similar price as other batteries."
Either way, those numbers are peanuts compared to performance cars, and I still rate the LS-218 as one of the most face-meltingly extreme experiences legally available to civilians. "I'm anxious to have you ride one of the new bikes," says Hatfield, "I think we've made a lot of progress; we keep finding ways to make them better."
Still operating out of the Corbin facility in California, Lightning has already sold as many standard Strikes as it can build for 2023, so it's only selling Carbon Editions for the time being.
"Production is picking up pace, we're working our way through the order books," says Hatfield. "And at the same time, coming up with a couple of updated models."
The company is also still keen to compete. "We've got our high-performance aero bike, and we're going out to see if we can bump the land speed record up in May," says Hatfield. "We're excited to do that, and the lessons we learn doing land speed racing help us with aerodynamics and efficiency for the street bikes. The salt flats are a great university for pushing the limits and learning more.
"And we're also going to take some opportunities to go out and compete on the track here as well," he continues. "Moto America's Super Hooligan events are allowing electrics to compete directly. That's a good chance to go and challenge ourselves and the competition. We're planning on hitting some events later this year. I know Energica competed at the Daytona event, I think they took fifth place – and I think some privateers from the Zero factory competed in a Super Hooligan event too. So I think it could be a good, competitive event!"
Check out the Enevate battery-loaded prototype in the video below. Lighting Fast Charging don't wait
