February 25, 2011
Mid-May in Raleigh, NC is the right time and place to learn about Solar, at America’s longest-running solar conference.
The American Solar Energy Society’s National Solar Conference, now in its 40th year, takes place from May 17-21. Besides a bulging exhibit hall full of solar manufacturers, installers, trainers, financiers and others, the conference will feature tracks on:
- Advancing renewable energy technologies, including:
- Innovative solar applications
- Solar thermal systems
- Biofuels and hydrogen
- Concentrating technologies
- Solar air conditioning and storage
- Crafting effective policy and advocacy, including:
- Making innovative policies work
- Policy and market trends
- State leadership
- Getting consumers and communities on board
- Transforming the built environment
- Solar resource variability
- Short-term resource forecasting
- Next generation of training and education
- Small wind gaining speed
…and much more.
It’s also the right time and place, if you’re not already a member of ASES, to join up and get all the benefits of membership in the nation’s premier solar organization.
You can find out more here about the National Solar Conference, May 17-21, at the Raleigh Convention Center, Raleigh NC.
To delve into detail about tracks on the conference schedule, you can go here.
And you can register for the full conference or any part of it right here.
See you in Raleigh!
February 24, 2011
Writing in energybiz this month, Ken Silverstein reports that the European Commission is confident of meeting its goal of obtaining 20% of its power from renewable sources by 2020. If this happens, the EU expects to save some 10 billion Euros (~$14 billion) per year.
The EU’s progress is being fueled by grants, loans and feed-in tariffs, and while the Commission recognizes management issues in need of improvement in many projects, the overall optimistic tone of the report is borne out by its 2010 statistics:
- renewable production increased by 8.3% over the previous year;
- coal production fell by 16.3%;
- renewables accounted for 18.4% of all energy production, almost twice the figure for coal.
A Predilection for Action
We’re sure that the corridors of power in European government bodies fill up, at least some of the time, with voices as contentious as those to be heard on Capitol Hill. But those government bodies ‘over there’, whatever their internal differences, seem to be doing something that so far has escaped our own: in the spheres of energy and climate action, they are getting on with it.
So far as we know, no leading European politician has identified climate change mitigation efforts as a post-Communist attempt by Government to exercise despotic control over its people. Nor has anyone in politics there echoed Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma in his apparent belief that “global warming is the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people”. And unlike our own House of Representatives, no other popularly elected chamber has started its current session by voting to make massive cuts in job-creating clean energy programs. (more…)
February 24, 2011
Suddenly solar seems to be as cheap as, or cheaper than, a lot of dirtier alternatives. That’s our reading of a handful of stories from around the nation lately.
You may remember us writing about the North Carolina study that showed that solar power would be cheaper than new nuclear construction. Six months on, it may now be nipping at the heels of natural gas in many parts of the country.
Large-scale…
The National Renewable Energy laboratory (NREL) of Golden, CO has teamed with solar company Amonix to develop a solar power concentrator that, according to its creators, can generate electricity at prices competitive with natural gas.
photo credit Dennis Schroeder
The NREL-Amonix partnership has resulted in the Amonix 7700 Concentrated Photovoltaic Solar Power Generator, which uses acrylic Fresnel lenses to magnify sunlight up to 500 times and concentrate it onto 7560 high-efficiency multijunction PV cells. (more…)
