The US government has announced that the US solar industry is more than 60 per cent of the way to achieving cost-competitive utility-scale solar photovoltaic (PV) electricity, an achievement it credits partly to support from the Energy Department’s SunShot Initiative.
SunShot was set up in 2011 to re-establish US leadership in the solar marketplace by partnering with industry, universities, local communities and the Department’s National Laboratories to aggressively drive down the cost of generation.
To achieve this goal, says the DoE, SunShot aimed for a price of $0.06 per kilowatt-hour (KWh) – a target that would make solar-generated power fully cost-competitive with traditional energy sources by the end of the decade.
Put simply, an optical cavity is an arrangement of mirrors that allows beams of light to circulate in closed paths. These cavities help us build things like lasers and optical fibers used for communications.
Now, an international research team pushed the concept further by developing an optical "nanocavity" that boosts the amount of light that ultrathin semiconductors absorb. The advancement could lead to, among other things, more powerful photovoltaic cells and faster video cameras; it also could be useful for splitting water using energy from light, which could aid in the development of hydrogen fuel.
The national renewable support schemes in the EU are on the verge of a major overhaul. National governments will soon not be allowed anymore to limit renewables subsidies to domestic producers: they will have to treat all EU-based producers alike. This at any rate is the very likely outcome of a court case now before the EU Court of Justice, says Peter Niermeijer, Secretary-General of RECS International, an organisation that promotes pan-European trade in renewable energy, in an interview with Energy Post. According to Niermeijer, the court decision, expected in a matter of months, will have far-reaching political consequences: it will force an end to the fragmentation of national energy policies in the EU and give a big push to the integration of the EU energy market. It will also radically undermine existing support schemes, including the laws which form the basis of the German Energiewende.
People are getting more and more excited about green automobiles, so it was kind of surprising to see such a neutral reaction to the Fuel Cell Car by Riversimple. While this project has a very interesting slant from other cars that we have seen in this niche, it was met with a very lukewarm reception and things have not really heated up on in yet. However, the Riversimple Fuel Cell Car continues on and will hopefully be available for release in the next few years.
