Monthly Archives: May 2008

Wake up and smell the coffee!

Merav Ankori, which has become an authority in the environmental and clean energy businesses, reveals tonight at Globes daily ’an innocent truth’ about Israel, as expressed so pure and simple by Al Gore: 

 

“I wish to ask, how is that here, in the land of the sun, there is no widespread use of solar energy? Although the know-how is here, it’s cloud-covered Germany that has an impressive solar energy industry”.

 

Mr Gore – you are going to meet today the people that can make the change: could you please convince them to make a reality check from time to time and realize that the sun is up already……. ? better late than never…

  

Power Generation: thin film 19% efficiency at the lab + breakthrough in cooling for CPV

 

THIN FILM: Recently, researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) announced that they have moved closer to creating a thin-film solar cell that can compete with the efficiency of the more common silicon-based solar cell. The CIGS thin-film solar cell recently reached 19.9 percent efficiency in testing at the lab, setting a new world record, as the NREL revealed on March 24th 2008.

 

CPV: While concentrator-based PV technologies have been around since the 1970s, they have received renewed interest in recent times. With very high concentrations, they have the potential to offer solar electricity for large-scale power generation, as long as the temperature of the cells can be kept low, and cheap and efficient optics can be developed for concentrating the light to very high levels. IBM said it developed a concentrator photovoltaics (CPV) cooling technology that can cool a solar cell from greater than 1,600 degrees Celsius to 85 C. IBM’s CPV technology uses a thin layer of a liquid metal made of a gallium and indium compound that is applied between the chip and a cooling block. These thermal interface layers transfer the heat from the chip to the cooling block so that the chip temperature can be kept low.