How to Solar Charge an Electric Bicycle

This Week in Solar
Earnings season began, and Florida may have taken a big step toward a brighter solar future.
Travis Hoium
(TMFFlushDraw)
May 5, 2017 at 4:35PM

Earnings season started this week for the solar industry, and the first two reports, from First Solar (NASDAQ:FSLR) and Tesla (NASDAQ:TSLA), gave some interesting insights into where the industry is headed. First Solar, for one, seems to be very bullish, while Tesla doesn't quite know what it's doing in solar at the moment.

There were also some positive policy news items and some important data points from Asia's solar industry. Here are the highlights of the week.

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"Tesla (NASDAQ:TSLA) solar glass roof orders open this afternoon. I think it will be great. More in about 10 hours..." Elon Musk tweeted overnight.

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India has cancelled plans to build nearly 14 gigawatts of coal-fired power stations – about the same as the total amount in the UK – with the price for solar electricity “free falling” to levels once considered impossible.

Analyst Tim Buckley said the shift away from the dirtiest fossil fuel and towards solar in India would have “profound” implications on global energy markets.

According to his article on the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis’s website, 13.7GW of planned coal power projects have been cancelled so far this month – in a stark indication of the pace of change.

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Published on May 26, 2017

GoGOA1 presesnts Solar powered Electric bike.
We have successfully develop solar power bike for commercial production
With regenerative braking

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GoGoA1.com is a global Original Equipment Manufacturer & Supplier of Electric and Solar Power Vehicle components with a massive experience over a decade and headquartered in Kopar Khairne, Navi Mumbai India, GoGoA1.com has, R&D bases and delivery centres, as well as an own manufacturing facility in China (YongKang Shinde Electric Vehicle Company, Ltd).

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According to the EIA, renewable energy sources like wind, solar, and geothermal power accounted for 10.68 percent of total electricity generation in the first quarter of 2017. If you include electricity from conventional hydroelectric plants, renewables made up nearly a fifth of total electricity generation—as much as 19.35 percent.

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The renewable energy numbers for the first quarter of 2017 include about 4.786 TWh of residential and small-scale solar electricity, as well as 9.2 TWh of utility-grade solar electricity. In the previous year's first quarter, utility-grade solar generated only 6.67 TWh of electricity, meaning utility-grade solar electricity generation increased 38.5 percent year over year.

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REUTERS/Enrique De La Osa

LONDON (Reuters) - New global solar capacity will continue to grow this year, after lower costs drove it to record levels in 2016, and could surpass 80 gigawatts (GW), Europe's solar industry forecast on Tuesday.

Solar photovoltaic (PV) module prices have fallen 80 percent since 2009 as capacity has risen and technologies improved.

And a record 76.6 GW of new solar capacity was installed and connected to the grid last year, 50 percent up on 2015, solar power association SolarPower Europe said in a report.

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Current solar panels allow light to slip through the cracks because solar cells don’t have a layer of an alloy that is sensitive enough to infrared light to capture the particles. The hope is that this new alloy, designed at the University of Michigan, will change that and be able to offer an efficient, cost effective and durable way to harness that energy currently going to waste.

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Within China, distributed generation is growing at an extraordinary rate, driven in large part by farmers who use the panels to power agricultural equipment that might not be connected to the grid.

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According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), the country installed more than 34 gigawatts of solar capacity in 2016 - more than double the figure for the US and nearly half of the total added capacity worldwide that year.

Early figures for 2017 show China has added another eight gigawatts in the first quarter alone.

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Researchers at the US Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), the Swiss Center for Electronics and Microtechnology (CSEM), and the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) have created tandem solar cells with record efficiencies of converting sunlight into electricity under 1-sun illumination. Their paper appears in the new issue of Nature Energy.

In testing silicon-based multijunction solar cells, the researchers found that the highest dual-junction efficiency (32.8%) came from a tandem cell that stacked a layer of gallium arsenide (GaAs) developed by NREL atop a film of crystalline silicon developed by CSEM. An efficiency of 32.5% was achieved using a gallium indium phosphide (GaInP) top cell, which is a similar structure to the previous record efficiency of 29.8% announced in January 2016. A third cell, consisting of a GaInP/GaAs tandem cell stacked on a silicon bottom cell, reached a triple-junction efficiency of 35.9%—just 2% below the overall triple-junction record.

The existing photovoltaics market is dominated by modules made of single-junction silicon solar cells, with efficiencies between 17% and 24%.

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While silicon solar panels are already providing electricity for a lot of homes and buildings, it doesn't mean researchers have stopped looking for better and cheaper alternatives. Case in point, a team of Stanford scientists working to make a cheaper photovoltaic mineral called perovskite a viable option for people who want to shift to solar. Perovskites are as efficient as silicon solar cells when it comes to converting sunlight into energy, but they're fragile and can deteriorate easily when exposed to the elements. The team had to find a way to make them more durable -- and they've found inspiration in the compound eyes of insects.

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Their solution involves encapsulating perovskite microcells in a hexagon-shaped epoxy resin scaffold that measures 0.02 inches wide. They then put hundreds of those together like a honeycomb to mimic the compound eye of a fly. The study's co-lead author Nicholas Rolston says the scaffold wall protects the fragile minerals, especially since epoxy resin is "resilient to mechanical stresses."

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To find out if their creation works, they tested their design by exposing it to temperatures that reached 185 degrees F and 85 percent relative humidity for six weeks. They found that the insect eye-inspired panel survived those harsh conditions while still generating electricity "at relatively high rates of efficiency." Despite their success, the researchers believe they can still boost the cells' efficiency. They're now looking for ways to be able to direct more light reflected by the scaffold into the perovskite-flled center of each cell.

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Yonhap is largest news agency in South Korea . It is a semi-public company based in Seoul. It mainly provides the various South Korean media with dispatches, articles and photographs. Yonhap also has a television channel specializing in continuous news, and a company of statistics and financial information.

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KROMMENIE, Netherlands, Dec. 6 (Yonhap) -- Traffic is busy on a cycle lane on a rainy afternoon, as students ride their bikes home from school. As the road gets quiet, Stan Klerks, an engineer, kneels down to check the wear and tear on the road with his fingers as part of maintenance.

On the surface, there is nothing particular about this bicycle road in Krommenie, a town on the outskirts of Amsterdam. But a closer observation shows that it houses cutting-edge solar technology, a 70-meter-long custom-built solar module placed underneath a layer of 1-centimeter-thick hardened glass.

The lane, named the SolaRoad, is a test project launched in 2014 by the nonprofit Dutch science institute TNO, together with a consortium of energy and tech companies, and the provincial government of North Holland.

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Natural gas is getting edged out of power markets across the U.S. by two energy sources that, together, are proving to be an unbeatable mix: solar and batteries.

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