Commercializing Energy From The Sun
DOE Funds Cheap-Solar Research
By Richard Martin, 4-11-08
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Aiming to jump-start the U.S. solar-power industry, the Dept. of Energy will put up $13.7 million in the next three years to support university-led projects to bring less expensive solar technology to market.
Hit in recent months by falling stock prices and the cost of commercializing sophisticated photovoltaic technology, the solar industry needs to find ways to hasten the development of cheap, wide-spread arrays. Under its “Solar America” initiative, the Bush Administration has set a target of bringing the cost of solar energy down to levels competitive with conventional electricity production by 2015.
“Harnessing the natural and abundant power of the sun and more cost-effectively converting it into energy has enormous potential to help reduce greenhouse gas emissions and provide greater stability in electricity costs,” DOE Assistant Secretary for Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy Alexander Karsner.
The research projects selected by the DOE include a Georgia Tech program for “Next- Generation High-Efficiency Commercial Silicon Solar Cells,” and an effort by Arizona State scientists to streamline the process of inspecting and verifying photovoltaic cells.
All together, the projects could reduce the cost of electricity produced by photovoltaic systems from the current levels, 18-23 cents per kilowatt hour to 5-10 per Kw/hour.
In other energy news:
-- Energy production uses, and currently wastes, prodigious amounts of water. Now the U.S. Senate has passed a bill sponsored by Ken Salazar of Colorado “that could allow for the recovery of usable water from sources contaminated by oil and gas drilling operations,” according to the Greeley Tribune. The “More Water, More Energy, Less Waste Act of 2007” would require the Department of Interior to evaluate the possibility of recovering and treating so-called “produced water,” which has been contaminated when brought to the surface during oil and gas drilling or coal-bed methane extraction, and using it for irrigation or other purposes.
-- Possibly ending a long wrangle on how to distribute the windfall from federal mineral leasing rights, the Colorado senate passed a bill that would simplify the current system and establish permanent funds for local communities affected by the drilling boom and for higher education in the state. “Both of those funds could fill with more than $600 million over the next decade,” reports Politics West, “and even more if the state receives extra revenue from the leasing of Roan Plateau, near Rifle.”
-- The big ‘M’ on the mountainside above the Colorado School of Mines, in Golden, has been illuminated for a century. For its centennial, members of CSM’s Blue Key International Honor Society will swap out the 1,653 incandescent light bulbs that make up the M, replacing them with energy-efficient light-emitting diodes, called LEDs. The LEDs will use about one-sixth the energy as the current bulbs, student Steven Meyerhoff told The Rocky Mountain News.
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Comments
As a comparison, let me just give one number from another program which in my view is a waste of federal funds--the Conservation Reserve Program that has already paid farmers $36 billion not to farm highly erosion prone lands--lands that legally they should not be able to farm anyway if existing environmental laws were really enforced. No matter what you think about the CRP, it is an example of the large amount of money we could spend on something that we viewed as important.
If we spent a similar amount ($36 Billion) insulating all homes in America, or spent a billion on solar energy research, etc. we might, just might, save the nation from the massive disruption we are heading for from the twice threats of global warming and fossil fuel depletion and subsequent rise in energy costs.