Nissan is using solar energy to power its biggest manufacturing site in Europe.
The solar farm of 19,000 photovoltaic (PV) panels (4.75MW) has been developed by European Energy Photovoltaics at Nissan’s Sunderland plant.
Colin Lawther, Nissan’s Senior Vice President for Manufacturing, Purchasing and Supply Chain Management in Europe, said: “Renewable energy is fundamental to Nissan’s vision for Intelligent Mobility. We have built over 50,000 Nissan LEAFs in Europe, and the industry-leading new 250km-range LEAF is now available. With 10 wind turbines already generating energy for our Sunderland plant, this new solar farm will further reduce the environmental impact of Nissan vehicles during their entire lifecycle.”
Nissan began integrating renewable energy sources in Sunderland in 2005 when the company installed its first wind turbines on site. These 10 wind turbines contribute 6.6MW power, with the 4.75MW solar farm bringing the total output of renewables to 11.35MW in Sunderland. This equates to seven percent of the plant’s electricity requirements, enough to build the equivalent of 31,374 vehicles.
Pursuing a goal of zero emission vehicles and zero fatalities on the road, Nissan’s Intelligent Mobility vision is designed to guide Nissan’s product and technology pipeline, anchoring critical company decisions around how cars are powered, how cars are driven, and how cars integrate into society.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk was on SolarCity’s conference call for its second quarter financial results today, which is unusual for the Chairman, but understandable considering the impending deal for Tesla to acquire the solar installer. During the call, Musk announced that SolarCity will unveil a “solar roof” as opposed to “solar modules on a roof”.
While Musk didn’t elaborate on the product itself, he made it clear that Tesla/SolarCity will go after the roof industry with its new products, rather than only installing solar modules on existing roofs.
Right after Lyndon Rive, SolarCity’s CEO, referred to the upcoming unveiling of 2 new products before the end of the year, around the time Tesla and SolarCity are expected to close the merger (Q4 2016), Musk jumped in and said:
“It’s a solar roof, as opposed to modules on a roof.”
Rive then confirmed that they are working on a roof integrated product and Musk added:
“I think this is really a fundamental part of achieving differentiated product strategy, where you have a beautiful roof. It’s not a thing on the roof. It is the roof.”
After recent comments, there were rumours that SolarCity would unveil a solar shingle kind of product (pictured above), but it’s not necessarily what Musk is talking about here, though a possibility.
The CEO explained that it will open up a new market for the company. Rive added that there are 5 million new roofs installed every year in the US and if your roof is about to need to be replaced, you don’t want to invest in solar panels to install on it since you are about to take it down, but if the solar panels are the roof and you need to redo it anyway, there’s no reason not to go with a power-generating roof. Musk sees a “huge” market for the roofs nearing their end of life.
Musk added that the new business plan will work alongside SolarCity’s current installations on existing roofs. It will not cannibalize the existing product.
Based on the comments from Musk and Rive’s announcement that two products will be unveiled by the end of the year, it looks like SolarCity is about to unveil 2 solar products, one for existing roofs and one integrated with the roof.
They plan to manufacture those modules at SolarCity upcoming 1 GW factory in Buffalo. Peter Rive, SolarCity’s CTO, said that the company now plans for the module assembly line to start producing in Q2 2017.
The Minister of Science and Technology, Dr. Ogbonnaya Onu, on Friday said that the Federal Government had taken steps to reduce power consumption by households, businesses and government by 85 per cent, The Punch reports.
He said that the idea behind cutting power consumption had to do with the need to diversify the Nigerian economy, “which relies on oil as the major source of foreign exchange earnings.” He said that in choosing Omatek as a partner in the project, the government took into consideration the need to empower indigenous technological companies and encourage the growth of science and technology in the country.
Meanwhile, the Group Managing Director of Omatek Ventures Plc, Mrs. Florence Seriki, explaining the readiness of Omatek to play a key role in the power provision for the country, said the 50KVA three-phase off-grid solar solution inaugurated earlier in its factory would provide a 24/7 power supply.
This, she said, would result in 85 per cent reduction in power consumption for factories, banks, telecoms firms, government and other organisations that require big solar power installations, while adding that its Lagos factory currently assembled locally the 12watts, 20 watts, 500 watts power solutions.
Researchers at the University of Illinois at Chicago have engineered a potentially game-changing solar cell that cheaply and efficiently converts atmospheric carbon dioxide directly into usable hydrocarbon fuel, using only sunlight for energy.
The finding is reported in the July 29 issue of Science and was funded by the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Energy. A provisional patent application has been filed.
Unlike conventional solar cells, which convert sunlight into electricity that must be stored in heavy batteries, the new device essentially does the work of plants, converting atmospheric carbon dioxide into fuel, solving two crucial problems at once. A solar farm of such "artificial leaves" could remove significant amounts of carbon from the atmosphere and produce energy-dense fuel efficiently.
"The new solar cell is not photovoltaic—it's photosynthetic," says Amin Salehi-Khojin, assistant professor of mechanical and industrial engineering at UIC and senior author on the study.
"Instead of producing energy in an unsustainable one-way route from fossil fuels to greenhouse gas, we can now reverse the process and recycle atmospheric carbon into fuel using sunlight," he said.
While plants produce fuel in the form of sugar, the artificial leaf delivers syngas, or synthesis gas, a mixture of hydrogen gas and carbon monoxide. Syngas can be burned directly, or converted into diesel or other hydrocarbon fuels.
The ability to turn CO2 into fuel at a cost comparable to a gallon of gasoline would render fossil fuels obsolete.
Chemical reactions that convert CO2 into burnable forms of carbon are called reduction reactions, the opposite of oxidation or combustion. Engineers have been exploring different catalysts to drive CO2 reduction, but so far such reactions have been inefficient and rely on expensive precious metals such as silver, Salehi-Khojin said.
"What we needed was a new family of chemicals with extraordinary properties," he said.
Salehi-Khojin and his coworkers focused on a family of nano-structured compounds called transition metal dichalcogenides—or TMDCs—as catalysts, pairing them with an unconventional ionic liquid as the electrolyte inside a two-compartment, three-electrode electrochemical cell.
The best of several catalysts they studied turned out to be nanoflake tungsten diselenide.
Amin Salehi-Khojin, UIC assistant professor of mechanical and industrial engineering (left), and postdoctoral researcher Mohammad Asadi with their breakthrough solar cell that converts atmospheric carbon dioxide directly into syngas. …more
"The new catalyst is more active; more able to break carbon dioxide's chemical bonds," said UIC postdoctoral researcher Mohammad Asadi, first author on the Science paper.
In fact, he said, the new catalyst is 1,000 times faster than noble-metal catalysts—and about 20 times cheaper.
Other researchers have used TMDC catalysts to produce hydrogen by other means, but not by reduction of CO2. The catalyst couldn't survive the reaction.
"The active sites of the catalyst get poisoned and oxidized," Salehi-Khojin said. The breakthrough, he said, was to use an ionic fluid called ethyl-methyl-imidazolium tetrafluoroborate, mixed 50-50 with water.
"The combination of water and the ionic liquid makes a co-catalyst that preserves the catalyst's active sites under the harsh reduction reaction conditions," Salehi-Khojin said.
The UIC artificial leaf consists of two silicon triple-junction photovoltaic cells of 18 square centimeters to harvest light; the tungsten diselenide and ionic liquid co-catalyst system on the cathode side; and cobalt oxide in potassium phosphate electrolyte on the anode side.
When light of 100 watts per square meter - about the average intensity reaching the Earth's surface - energizes the cell, hydrogen and carbon monoxide gas bubble up from the cathode, while free oxygen and hydrogen ions are produced at the anode.
"The hydrogen ions diffuse through a membrane to the cathode side, to participate in the carbon dioxide reduction reaction," said Asadi.
The technology should be adaptable not only to large-scale use, like solar farms, but also to small-scale applications, Salehi-Khojin said. In the future, he said, it may prove useful on Mars, whose atmosphere is mostly carbon dioxide, if the planet is also found to have water.
"This work has benefitted from the significant history of NSF support for basic research that feeds directly into valuable technologies and engineering achievements," said NSF program director Robert McCabe.
"The results nicely meld experimental and computational studies to obtain new insight into the unique electronic properties of transition metal dichalcogenides," McCabe said. "The research team has combined this mechanistic insight with some clever electrochemical engineering to make significant progress in one of the grand-challenge areas of catalysis as related to energy conversion and the environment."
Despite plentiful sunshine, solar panels getting cheaper by the year and demand for power skyrocketing; the newness of the technology, bureaucratic hurdles and investor fear of uncharted territory have however held back the rollout of solar plants across Africa, Reutersreports.
Solar is less than 1% of Africa’s power generation. Outside of South Africa and Algeria there are only a few utility-scale solar photovoltaic (PV) plants on the continent, the largest being a 20 MW plant in Ghana. “We are seeing the same trends everywhere in sub-Saharan Africa,” said Silvia Macri, analyst at IHS Markit. “There’s no experience with these projects, and not much clarity around the political framework.” Lenders want dependable cash flows, but in many countries weak legal frameworks, unclear land rights and poor transmission infrastructure make this hard to guarantee, Macri said.
However few projects have beaten the odds and others may require time to fulfill their potential. A different plant in Ghana was completed in April by Chinese company BXC, and a 10 MW plant in Uganda is almost built, led by firms in Paris and Dubai. Nigeria signed its first solar power purchase agreements in July for 14 large-scale plants after four years of negotiations. They are now meant to close financing within a year, and finish construction 18 months later. “To be honest, some might need more time,” said Yesufu Alonge, head of power procurement at Nigeria’s bulk trader.
French energy minister Ségolène Royal has inaugurated a manufacturing plant that will produce the so-called "Wattway" paving, made of solar PV. One of its pilot projects will be a 1 kilometer solar road, built in the same region as where the plant is located.
On 26 July French energy minister Ségolène Royal inaugurated a manufacturing unit for the Wattway photovoltaic panels in Tourouvre, Orne. Wattway is a French innovation and is the result of 5 years of research undertaken by Colas, a transport infrastructure company, and the French National Institute for Solar Energy (INES).
The joint patent for the product is based on crystalline silicon, and although it is very thin, Colas argues it is also “very sturdy, skid-resistant and designed to last,” with the durability to bear all types of vehicles, including trucks. Wattway panels can be applied directly to existing pavements, with the aim of generating green electricity while also allowing traffic to flow.
The new manufacturing facility is adjacent to Colas’ headquarters in the village of Tourouvre, in France’s northwestern department Orne. The new facility is expected to speed up the panel production time, as the Wattway panels had previously been manufactured at the INES laboratory.
Colas is already taking orders for panels ranging from 10 m2 to 50 m2, however, as of 2017, Wattway panels will be included in the Colas product line and the panel surface will increase.
One of the first applications of the Wattway panels will be a 1 kilometer road in the Onre region, the local council has announced.
France’s energy minister took the opportunity at the event to also announce the mobilization of €5 million in state funding to support the development of the Wattway photovoltaic panel. Royal herself is a great support of the innovative patent and has often spoken publicly of the variety of projects the Wattway can be applied to.
A Wattway panel, said Colas, can last “at least 10 years depending on the traffic, which speeds up wear. If the section is not covered by heavy traffic - a stadium parking lot for example - then Wattway panels can last roughly 20 years.”
Furthermore, “given the technical issues involved in the connection process, the panels need to be installed by an authorized technician,” added Colas, who also expressed that “within the next two to three years, it will be possible to install Wattway panels on private roads and driveways.”
Sokoto government has appealed to the Federal Government to deploy resources and expertise to the state in bid to develop wind-powered electricity and other alternative sources of energy,ThisDay reports.
Speaking when he hosted officials from the Federal Ministry of Science and Technology as well as the Centre for Energy Research and Training, Governor Aminu Waziri Tambuwal said “In Sokoto, the potential to generate electricity from hydro, carbon and solar sources are high. But I am very particular about wind energy because it has not been explored in the past. All that is needed is a political will and organizational capacity and capability to bring all stakeholders together and produce result”.
According to him, during his time as Speaker of the House of Representatives (2011 to 2015), efforts were made to pass legislations that would have removed power supply from the Exclusive Legislative List to the Concurrent Legislative List to allow states and LGs to generate power and distribute as they deem fit. “But that effort is yet to see the light of the day even though the process is still on. I am of the opinion that allowing States and LGAs to generate, transmit and distribute electricity will ensure accelerated development of the sector and ensure an end to erratic power supply in the country,” Tambuwal added.
