October 01, 2008

From hilly, rural terrain in Oregon to high-rise apartments in New York City to suburban neighborhoods and office parks that could be almost anywhere, pilot projects to field test smart meters are under way.

These smart meters are busily collecting data that will influence the decisions made for the operations of millions of similar units to be installed everywhere over the next few years, not to mention the multi-billion-dollar investments required to make it all work.

March 6, 2008

Imagine if homeowners could print out plastic sheets of solar cells on inexpensive printers. Imagine further that the solar sheets could be plastered over the roofs of houses and generate electricity – acting in a sense like mini-power stations for the houses. Such a technology would be an enormous boon to American’s growing environmental movement.

And that is the aim of Somenath Mitra, a professor of Chemistry and Environmental Sciences, who is experimenting with a solar cell derived from polymers that could one day power not only houses but cars, laptops and other consumer computers. Mitra’s solar research was featured in the June 2007 issue of the Journal of Materials Chemistry, published by the Royal Society of Chemistry,

The company says that its coater can produce up to 1 gigawatt of solar cells each year, potentially cutting manufacturing costs by two orders of magnitude.

June 18, 2008

Nanosolar said Wednesday it has created the industry's largest solar production tool: a thin-film coater that has the capacity to produce up to 1 gigawatt of solar cells annually.

That compares with 10 to 30 megawatts of annual production capacity for most solar production tools, CEO Martin Roscheisen wrote on the company's blog.

The tool, which uses the Nanosolar's nanoparticle ink, costs $1.65 million and - at the speed at which it's currently running, 100 feet per minute -- produces cells for a hundred times less than a high-vacuum process, he wrote.

March 21, 2008

Electricity reliability may not be top-of-mind with consumers but it is with technology wonks. Albany, N.Y. is now testing the use of the latest iteration of grid technologies that can carry 10 times the electrons of conventional copper wires.

The so-called high-temperature superconducting cable must actually be super-cooled. That will virtually eliminate the resistance to electricity flow, thereby greatly increasing the efficiency of the wire. The second-generation technology is one solution to the challenging task of providing sufficient electric power to densely populated areas. Burying cable and acquiring rights-of-way is prohibitively expensive, often representing three-quarters the cost of such projects. With their greater capacity, however, superconducting cables hold lots of promise.

December 10, 2007

When CenterPoint Energy invested in energy efficiency, it chose a technology with a standard communication feature to allow its meters to talk with any programmable household device. CenterPoint is working with the Zigbee Alliance and other stakeholders to create the standard for wireless communication between utility companies and common household features.

Energy efficiency is becoming big business. In fact, some state regulators and their respective utilities are working together to empower customers to get them to become more energy aware. Demand response is among the leading methods -- a technology that allows utilities to signal customers to adjust their energy use during the peak energy time periods. The technologies to do so, however, vary from vendor to vendor.