The top three solar installers that repeatedly can demonstrate that they have the capability to install solar for as little as $1 per watt (non-hardware costs) for small-scale photovoltaic (PV) systems on American homes and businesses will be declared winners of the SunShot Prize.

In order to be eligible for the prize, the solar installers will have to install 5,000 solar systems with average “soft-costs” of not more than $1 per watt, and then another 1,000 to prove that their business is sustainable. The first team to complete this task will receive $7 million, second place will receive $2 million, and third place will receive $1 million.

The prize is a smart way to bringing down the installation costs of solar panels and if successful would be transformational to the U.S. market.

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Energy storage systems can take advantage of these price changes. Storing energy when demand is low and discharging the same energy when prices go up could result in a nice profit.

How is the energy stored? Let`s take a look at hydroelectricity. The potential energy in water at the height of the water storage is converted into kinetic energy (motion) when the gates open and release it downhill.

Hydroelectric storage is the same process only the other way around: Cheap off-peak electricity is bought from the power grid to pump water uphill. In other words, the electricity is stored as potential energy for later use.

This is not only profitable, but is also associated with two key benefits to the electric power system:

1. Load-shifting lowers the effective peak demand.
2. More power plants can act as base-load resources due to higher energy demand overnight.

Let`s use geothermal power plants to illustrate the second point.  There can be significant efficiency losses and costs associated with reduced output or temporary shutdown of base-load plants.

Unlike many other sustainable energy resources such as solar and wind, geothermal is outstanding when it comes to delivering a steady output of energy. This is why geothermal is a base-load energy resources.

Source: U.S. Energy Information Administration

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Promising Results

From July 1^st 2011 to June 30^th 2012, a three-person family was put in the house, and their energy usage was recorded and analyzed throughout the year. This is what they found:

According to their own numbers, power consumption was reduced by as much as 88% from 4830 kWh (average power consumption for a typical household in Japan) to 584 kWh annually.

The reduction of carbon dioxide emissions was greater. In fact, the net carbon footprint was slightly negative (-137kg) over the course of a year. As a comparison, a typical Japanese household will generate about 4 770 tons of CO2 equivalents.

The Smart Energy Home

So how did they do it? What exactly is a smart energy home? The success of the Japanese home in this study was mainly caused by these few factors:

Solar Panels

A 5.08 kW solar panel system was incorporated in the home. Sunny days meant a constant stream of clean electricity generated from solar energy.

Lithium Ion Batteries

At days when the solar panels outputted an excess amount of electricity, more than what the family was able to consume, the surplus was stored in 3.5 kWh lithium ion batteries for later use.

Natural Gas Fuel Cell

There will be days when there is neither enough sun to generate electricity with the photovoltaic system or energy left in the batteries. This is when the natural gas fuel cell comes in. It allows for a quick and reliable way to meet energy demand.

Home Energy Management System (HEMS)

The home energy management system ties the solar panel system, the batteries, and the natural gas fuel cell together and makes sure that everything runs smooth and energy efficiency is good.

Not Finished Yet

The first year of the Smart Energy Home project is finished, but will keep going for at least through 2014. The team will in the coming months focus on incorporating electric cars, pure solar heating and better balancing of the battery system. The homes is scheduled to go on the market in 2015.

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Prior to April 2010 there were no free solar installations in the UK, in fact there were very few paid solar photovoltaic installations. Two years later there were some 300,000 domestic solar systems installed on people’s homes.

There are no official figures that show how many of these installs are paid and which are free. Reza Shaybani, chairman of the British Photovoltaic Association recently estimated there to be around 30,000 systems installed for free under the rent a roof schemes. Installer A Shade Greener, one of the largest free installers has given a higher estimate of around 50,000. Given the number of companies who have offered free systems during this period and considering the claims of the number of installs from their websites I would say the number was closer to 50,000.

Lenders and roof leases

To date there only seems to be one case where there has been a problem; this is the case of the Welton’s, published some time ago in the Guardian. This same story has been regurgitated ad infinitum with no new examples of anyone not being able to get a mortgage due to having a “solar lease”.

The issue stems from the fact that when these leases were introduced the mortgage lenders were unsure of how they would affect the mortgage process. The solar industry was consulted and a set of guidelines were introduced that both the lenders and installers would be happy with.

Have there been any mortgages or re-mortgages issued under the rent-a-roof scheme?

The term rent-a-roof is a bit of a misnomer, as you are not technically renting out your roof. There is a lease agreement in place that covers the airspace above the homeowner’s roof. This is in place to ensure that the panels are never obscured and that the installer has access if maintenance and repairs need to be carried out.

After consulting with one of the larger installers they confirmed that they are aware of dozens of homes that have been sold with their free solar panels in place. Under the agreement the homeowner does not have to inform the installer that they are selling the house or re-mortgaging so these figures may be much higher.

So what are the mortgage lenders views of these types of schemes?

It seems that most if not all the major high street lenders are providing mortgages and re-mortgages on homes that have free solar panels. Some of the lenders include:

• Barclays
• Bank of Scotland
• Halifax
• HSBC
• LloydsTSB
• Natwest
• Nationwide
• RBS

You can see the full list of free solar friendly mortgage lenders, which contains a list of about 30 Banks and Building Societies at the time of writing.

Is free solar still a good idea?

Some 300,000 homes are now fitted with solar and now contribute a combined capacity of 846MW, enough to replace a nuclear power station. Free solar has allowed those that cannot afford to or do not want to invest the opportunity to lower their bills. Installing a solar PV system reduces the average electricity bill by 37%.

With the cost of solar photovoltaic systems having more than halved over the past 2 years, solar PV is a good investment with possible returns of almost a thousand pounds in the first year alone. There are also a number of self-funding schemes available that reduce your initial investment costs.

Installing solar reduces your bill; it reduces the amount of pollution and our reliance on imported power. The more solar capacity we have in the UK the cheaper our energy costs are going to be as a country and the less we are going to have to subsidies nuclear.

Written by Allan Burns, creator of Free Solar Panels UK a resource on renewable technologies and energy saving for the home.

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The issue is that whilst electricity or gas consumption is a huge problem on a national scale, an unfortunately large number of households do not feel much incentive to improve on their personal energy efficiency because their electricity bill, for example, represents only a small fraction of their overall monthly expenditure. This is where the government needs to step in, to make sure that everyone takes a few small steps to make a much bigger difference across the country. What are some of the techniques they can use to cause this change?

Modern technology is very exciting – gadget magazines fly off the shelves of newsagents, and everyone is desperately seeking the latest phone or laptop. However, apart from the obvious financial cost of buying these items, there is an increasing environmental impact too. More powerful processors require more energy to run – long gone are the days when a cell phone could be charged just once a week, with most requiring a daily boost. This means that it is becoming increasingly important for the government to control just how much energy these products are using, otherwise producers are liable to follow the demand of consumers, increasing power consumption to make sure they’ve got the most cutting-edge products, regardless of the environmental damage. Carefully implemented controls can reduce this damage, as well as helping our finances.

The source of most of the world’s energy is the home, and in particular heating and cooling it at different times of year. Building codes can be introduced to force the property itself to be well insulated against the loss of hot or cold air. A very significant impact can be had in this area – in the U.S., for example, 70% of the electricity supply, and 36% of the natural gas supply are used by households, and nearly 90% of the increased electricity use from the 1980s to the present day was from households using more electricity. This means that the shift in electricity use is away from businesses and into homes, tying in with improved standards of living as we all leave the heating or air conditioning switched on for longer and longer. Investments in this area quickly pay themselves off – loft insulation costs only $200-$300, and will pay itself off within less than two years in energy bill savings.

Changing consumer behavior is a grass-roots approach, and rather than changing the products, if people can be made to change their behavior, demand for energy efficient products will rise and manufacturers will meet this demand if they’re trying to maximize their profits.

A common example of this is dishwashers, fridges, and washing machines – in the U.K., they have large stickers displayed prominently on them displaying their energy efficiency. Since this pushes demand away from inefficient items as people are made more aware, manufacturers are driven by the market into improving their products, saving energy. Dishwashers made in 2012, are up to 30% more efficient than dishwashers made in 1995, largely thanks to these measures encouraging technological improvements.

If consumers’ minds can’t be changed, a little cash can often help! In many cases, such as solar panels, or energy efficient boilers, even though they can offer an excellent return as an investment item, they are not at the fore of people’s minds. Governments can introduce schemes which provide extra income for those picking environmentally-friendly products – such as the 30% federal grant available across the U.S. For solar panels, or the world-renowned Feed in Tariff scheme in Germany, offering returns of 8% or more.

A careful combination of all of these measures can benefit everyone, and is a good long run approach, particularly when combined with renewable energy generation. However, great care needs to be taken in the way mandatory rules and regulations are put into place. The latest technological products have to be researched, developed and built, which takes years – if the government suddenly steps in and changes the requirements for certain products, then this could have a disastrous economic effect.

Similar rules must apply to building regulation – the construction of a large block of flats must have energy efficiency measures included as part of the design from the start of the project, and so significant changes to rules need to be phrased carefully to prevent major projects being pushed into financial difficulty. The time taken, however, is well worth it.

Article written by James Hawkins, who works for a renewable energy and home improvement company providing a boiler prices comparison in the UK.

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What do you think are the most promising technologies to store utility-scale energy at this time?

It is a function of what technology we are using to generate the energy in the first place. For instance, if we get heavy into solar thermal energy, we need to utilize entirely different storage methods.  This energy is heat – not electricity as it is in for instance wind turbines or PV-cells.

We can store heat energy a lot less expensive than electrical energy.  You simply heat up a substance to a couple thousand degrees and you use that heat energy, as you need it. Molten salt heated by solar energy is a good example of this.

So if we were heavy into concentrated solar power (CSP), that would be a direction we want to go in, as opposed to if the world was covered in PV-cells.

The vast majority of energy storage right now is pumped hydro. In other words, taking water from a certain elevation and pumping it up to a higher elevation, and extracting the energy from the water coming back down whenever you need it.

Pumped hydro is obviously not portable and you can only use it at certain topographies. If you don’t have a natural change of elevation it would be horrifically expensive.

Similarly, I’m not a huge believer in compressed air (CAES). There are two implementations of this technology on the planet today and I think there is a reason for that. The choice of caverns is very specific for the rate at which you need to charge and discharge. You pay a huge penalty in terms of thermodynamic efficiency if you have the wrong cavern for what you’re doing. The world does need more implementation and testing of this technology, but I’m not sure if it will be a good long-term solution.

What about batteries? People say that zinc-air might be suitable for storing energy on the grid. Is this true?

Batteries are ridiculously expensive at the moment, but that is not going to remain the case forever.  Breakthroughs in zinc-air battery technology might get the prices down to competitive levels in the near future. You will be able to deploy batteries on grid-scale if you lower the price and this promises to do just that.

This technology has been through 5000-6000 cycles of charges and discharges in the laboratory, and has fantastic characteristics in everything that is related to grid scale. For instance, you don’t really care how big or heavy it is if it where to be implemented on the grid, as you certainly would for electrical transportation.

Electric transportation is another wild card in all of this. We have 230 million cars and trucks on the roads in the United States. If we replace a significant number of those to be driven by electricity, and tie them into the electrical grid system, the equation changes completely.

I am a believer in zinc-air. We have had air-batteries trotted out every couple of years since I was a little kid, so I’m skeptical as anybody should be, but I believe and trust the people developing this technology.

What do you think about hydrogen as an energy carrier? Do you see hydrogen as a part of our energy storage system in the future?

The beauty about hydrogen is that it is portable. However, the delivery infrastructure itself has not been developed. There are 3.5 billions square miles in the continental United States. In addition to this, electrolysis of hydrogen itself is fairly inefficient. By the time you split the water and pull it through a fuel cell, you actually consume 3-4 times more energy, as you would through some other means, for instance charging and discharging a battery. “People keep talking about hydrogen, but I have no idea why. I really don’t see it.”

The cost of batteries is going to come down to the point that you can put 50 kWh in an automobile at a reasonable price, which gives you a couple of hundred mile range. I don’t see why people want to drive more than 300 miles a day. I don’t think we are more than 10-12 years from that, so why should we invest trillions of dollars in an entirely new fuel delivery infrastructure? I don’t see it.

There are other types of liquid fuels we are trying to develop. Everybody is talking about algae biofuels. There are breakthroughs that can come further down the line, but biofuels has a limited use in my estimation.

Having said that, I am a believer in synthetic fuels. There is a company called Doty Wind Fuels that has made enormous breakthroughs in this subject. You can take off-peak wind or any source for that matter, and generate hydrocarbons that are high quality diesel or high-octane gasoline. That’s basically taking wind energy that otherwise would not be used and storing it for times when needed.

How far are these methods from being implemented on the electrical grid to store energy?

There is no good answer for when utility scale energy storage will be implemented for the following two reasons:

First you have the technology issue. Although many of these technologies looks promising on paper and some perform well under testing, we could be decades away from being able to implement them on the electrical grid.

Then there are the economical and political issues. If we want utility scale energy storage in the United States we have to create a political and economical infrastructure that provide incentive. Who is going to pay for this? It’s hard to imagine one group taking the responsibility for something everyone will benefit from. At least in the United States that’s a very tricky question.

We are in an election year in the United States. We protract and drama our choosing of a president like no other country on earth. You can imagine the rhetoric that goes on in a subject as large as energy.

I am still dumbstruck when I hear people say that they don’t believe in basic science. In other words, that all of the work associated with many thousands of people that try to understand what is going on with our environment is wrong, that global climate change is a hoax, that there is nothing in the matter with continuing to pump all this stuff into our atmosphere and the oceans. The whole thing is completely astonishing to me.

I have a simple mind and I am a product of what I read and the people I speak to. Not only am I anxious to hold the belief, but also incapable of holding one, that counters the belief of thousands of climate scientists. It would be thinking like the earth is flat.

When do we need utility energy storage?

We do need storage eventually. In the United States we have less than 2% renewables on the grid, so the concept that we need storage to take that to 10 percent is completely fallacious.

We face many challenges when it comes to implementing large-scale renewable energy. What are these and how important is energy storage compared to them?

We get almost 50% of our electricity from coal. This is clearly unsustainable. Unfortunately there’s a ton of coal in the ground, but it’s killing us. We are gradually starting to understand this.

Last year, 13 200 Americans died directly as a result of coal pollution and there are all kinds of diseases cropping up all over the place associated with this. We are trying to mitigate this with “clean coal” among other things. We have run up against the wall when it comes to this.

Maybe we are not running out of oil, but we are certainly running out of easily accessed and inexpensive oil.

Nuclear is not an option. It’s extremely expensive and by the time you could possibly design, permit, build and deploy a nuclear reactor in the United States, which is 8-10 years, the costs would be even more ridiculous. In addition to the danger and the public outcry, the costs are going to go through the roof, while the costs of renewable energy are falling every day.

Then there’s electric transportation. We aren’t going to drive Hummer’s in 50 years. We do have a big problem to solve. We just crossed the one billion automobiles mark on the planet – a lot of combustion engines to replace, which I do believe will happen.

At the same time we need to build out the charging infrastructure. Most of the gasoline stations in the United States are prewired for 480 V three phase power. The process of getting there in terms of charging infrastructure is significant, but not insurmountable.

We are talking about the Smart Grid, and all these neat uses of information to increase the efficiency of our energy use, but we are a long way from that. Our grid is outdated and Thomas Edison would recognize most of it if he were to look at it.

The costs of technologies such as solar, wind, biomass and geothermal are coming in line. “We are heading in the right direction. Energy storage is an important component, as all of these things are.”

The problem is that it is happening so slowly, especially in the United States. My question is how much damage are we going to do in the process? Are we really willing to sit around, while A) China leads the world and B) We simply do so much damage to our ecosystems that it’s irreparable.

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A recent poll reveals that the people of Japan are starting to rethink nuclear energy: Almost 70% wants to stop or reduce the use of nuclear energy.  What are the chances of an accident like this happening again? Is harnessing nuclear energy really worth the risks?

No Guarantees for Safety

The Fukushima Daiichi accident is the largest nuclear disaster since Chernobyl that took place in Soviet almost three decades ago, resulting in over 4000 civilian casualties according to the World Health Organization (WHO). A Russian publication, Chernobyl: Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment, claims that the aftermath of the nuclear radiation is responsible for almost 1 million pre-mature deaths.

The extent to the nuclear accident in Japan is of course not as devastating as it was in Chernobyl. However, it does make one ponder about how safe nuclear power really is.

The nuclear reactors showed to be robust seismically; the safety systems did not work, as they should’ve when the 50 feet tsunami struck them. Although the technology behind the safety systems in the nuclear facilities has had radical improvements since Chernobyl, there are ultimately no guarantees and there never will. Nuclear processes are inherently unstable and the amounts of energy released in them, nuclear radiation and waste should not be taken lightly.

What About Thorium?

In the last decade, and especially after the nuclear accident in Japan, the interest in using thorium to power the fission processes in a nuclear reactors has grown tremendously.

Thorium possesses several noteworthy advantages:

• The reserves of thorium have been estimated to be four times as large as those of uranium.
• The waste generated compared to uranium is reduced by a factor of several hundreds.
• The energy density of thorium is astonishing. The average lifetime consumption of energy is equivalent to a ball of thorium, small enough to fit in your palm.
• Looking to the future, massive reserves of thorium can also be found on the moon. The natural element’s electro-magnetic signature makes it easy to locate on other plants from the Earth.

While the benefits mentioned above are very important, it is probably the fundamentally different safety system that is associated with thorium power plants that is the most impressive:

The father of conventional nuclear power plants that uses uranium as fuel, Alvin Weinberg, also lead the research of thorium powered nuclear plants, which possessed far less safety issues.

Uranium reactors use water as the basic coolant has some benefits, but also a lot of problems. The water needs to be at very high temperatures for electricity to be generated efficiently. This requires pressures that are 70-150 times the atmospheric pressure to prevent vaporization. There is no way getting around this. Accidents where there’s a pressure loss inside a reactor, resulting in rapid vaporization of water (steam), can be disastrous. If somehow the safety mechanisms designed to cool down the reactor fails, a meltdown happens and its surroundings are exposed to dangerous radioactivity.

A thorium-powered power plant does not have these problems because of a very simple reason: It is not based on water-cooling. Instead, it uses a molten salt mixture, which are remarkably chemically stable. This enables the facility to operate at much lower pressures than a uranium-powered reactor, thus eliminating the problems with water-cooled reactors mentioned above.

It is speculated that the development of uranium power plants were at least partially motivated by the fact that the same underlying technology is the foundation of nuclear weapons.

It is comforting to see that the interest has moved away from uranium reactors and towards Weinberg’s alternative designs, as well as other fundamentally different approaches to harnessing nuclear energy.

A thorium power plant would use a mechanism called a freeze plug, a piece of frozen salt that is kept frozen by cool gas. An emergency would trigger the cool gas to stop flowing; the freeze plug would melt, ensuring that the liquid fuel inside the reactor ends up in a drain tank where it can safely be dealt with.

This is a fundamentally different approach to safety than what is used in today’s uranium-fueled power plants, where we have to provide power for safety measures to commence. In comparison, with a liquid fluoride thorium reactor, it is the absence of power that triggers appropriate safety procedures, even without human intervention.

The Fukushima Daiichi Aftermath

Three workers where killed at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plants as a result of the earthquake and tsunami. There have been no fatalities from nuclear radiation. As a side note, it is strange to see how the media put emphasis on the event being a “nuclear” disaster.

On the other hand, the long-term problems associated with the nuclear radiation are not well known yet. Renowned physicist Michio Kaku estimates the cleanup to take somewhere between 50-100 years, and thinks the event will become the worst industrial accident in the history, topping Chernobyl at $200 billion.

The Tohoku earthquake and the following meltdowns at the Fukushima Daiichi reactors can teach us one important lesson: As long as we harness nuclear energy, we can never protect ourselves completely from nuclear accidents. That does not mean that safety can’t be improved and the risks involved can’t be reduced. Further developing thorium power plants is a step in the right direction.

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How does a solar updraft tower work?

Solar updraft towers are often confused with the towers that are used in solar thermal power stations. These use large solar mirrors called heliostats to focus the sun’s rays onto the tower. Water is heated to steam and drives around turbines that generate electricity.

There are in fact three different physical phenomena that contribute to the electricity that is generated from solar updraft towers: Kinetic energy in the wind, the green house and the chimney effect. Lets look at these in greater depth:

The sun’s radiation heats the 7 km diameter “green house” that surrounds the massive tower. The key is the difference in temperature from the base of the green house to the top of the tower.

We know that warm air rises up. This is what’s called the chimney effect. The movement of the air soon becomes wind, in other words, the potential energy that lies in the temperature difference, is converted into kinetic energy.

A gigantic suction will develop in the tower, and by strategically placing 32 large turbines at the base of the tower; some of the kinetic energy is converted to electricity, much like how wind turbines produce power (and why some call it a solar wind tower).

Enviromission initially tried to build the power plant in Australia, but due to no government incentives, moved the entire project to Arizona in the United States.

What are the benefits and issues with solar updraft towers?

The solar power tower has all the obvious benefits such as renewable and green, but what are the other ones? One of the major benefits of this power plant is that once it is built it costs nothing to run, other than maintenance and security.

The cost of the plant is calculated to be around $750 million and should be paid back within eleven years by selling the power that is being generated.

The power plant is due to begin delivery of power in the first quarter of 2015. We will be paying close attention to any future updates on this project.

For more details on this project, check out the interview below of Enviromission’s CEO Roger Davy:

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