My wife needs one of these things from Strapya and Tokyo Coil Engineering. The companies have come up with a plan to prevent missing phone calls. A solar-charged cell phone strap.

The strap weighs just 40g (1 oz) and is just 12.5cm (5 in) long. Yet it can store up to 40 minutes of call time once fully charged.

Just one problem … it takes 6-10 hours to charge in perfect weather conditions.

The solution…let the strap hang out of your pocket or bag and walk around outside all day. Or, you can just plug the dang thing in every night to keep it charged.

Price - Y1,995 ($20)

source

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HSBC unveiled their latest project, the Canary Wharf headquarters in London with its 617 square meters of solar panels installed on the roof. HSBC is now the tallest corporate headquarter building in Europe using photovoltaic panels to create energy from the sun’s light.

A total of 422 monocrystalline photovoltaic Sharp panels were installed. The panels are guaranteed to withstand wind speeds of up to 140 miles per hour. The HSBC skyscraper is now able to see close to 1.5m kilowatt hours of energy generated.

That’s enough energy to power 20 homes for an entire year!

HSBC refused to disclose the cost of the investment and all we’ve been able to find is that it’s part of a multi-million ($90M actually) environmental efficiency program. Until now this program has helped the company reduce energy costs at their HQ by seven-percent since 2004.

Is this all about generating good press? Are they just trying to attract more green customers to their offices? If so, then Congratulations!

Image by SteveQB

Osaka’s Sharp Corp has a new residential solar cell panel (polycrystaline) that Sharp says has the highest solar-to-electric conversion rate to date. The new environmentally friendly product is called SunVista and will be released on Jun 18th. The addition of a third main electrode instead of the conventional two is the difference.

Sharp’s conversion rate will be 14.4% compared to the until now best 13.7% of Kyocera.Panels will retail for about $460-990. And Sharp wants to sell 17,000 of them each month!

Let’s see, what’s 17,000 x $600-700?

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Imagey by drawdenizlop

The US government, along with many investors such as Chevron, Goldman Sachs, and Google, is confident that solar power could become much cheaper than coal within the next 12 years. Taking into consideration tax incentives, carbon-capping legislation and the rising prices of natural gas, experts think that solar power is going to be more economical than coal by 2020.

“Chevron, Goldman Sachs, FPL, PG&E and other companies have filed more than 50 applications with the Bureau of Land Management to lease government-owned desert property for solar power systems. Google’s philantropic division put $10 million into eSolar, a start-up in Pasadena, California.” –Greg Chang, Bloomberg.

Along with the good progress of photovoltaic panels towards becoming cheaper and more efficient, investors are getting more excited about the potential of solar thermal technology. Implementing mirrors to direct sunlight to power turbines in desert areas could cover at least 50-percent of the local power requirements.

In the Mojave Desert, Sun Microsystems developed a thermal solar plant which contains 550,000 mirrors that tie together the sun’s energy and convert it into enough power to supply about 112,500 houses in the Los Angeles area. Though the costs are much higher than coal, this power station certainly shows the effectiveness of solar energy.

Sooner or later, it is going to happen.

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via CleanTechnica

Silicon photovoltaic panels are the most expensive solar installations at the moment but things are about to change because IBM claimed they have the technology to reduce the cost of harnessing the Sun’s energy for electricity, down to $2 / W.

The company announced in a press release on Thursday, that using a large lens that concentrates power to around 2300x, they managed to capture a record 230 Watts on a square centimeter of solar cell which was later converted into 70 Watts of usable electric power. The main problem with such a power concentration is cooling down the silicon cell but I guess IBM engineers are experts in doing it, though not for photovoltaics.

“Specifically, the IBM team used a very thin layer of a liquid metal made of a gallium and indium compound that they applied between the chip and a cooling block. Such layers, called thermal interface layers, transfer the heat from the chip to the cooling block so that the chip temperature can be kept low.”

If IBM’s technology turns out to be true and the company is able to cool the solar cell efficiently, concentrated photovoltaic systems may become the cheapest type of solar energy available on the market. This would be a very big step in going mainstream, don’t you think?

Everywhere online and on TV there are news about the cyclone in Burma, the earthquake in China and many other natural disasters that cause thousands of deaths every year and leave behind even more refugees. How can we solve this problem? How can we help all those people?

Andrew Leinonen seems to have it all figured out. He especially designed an airship concept covered in solar panels that can be used in rescue operations. It can be flown into a disaster area to provide all the needed power to the rescue effort.

Considering the size of this thing (20 m long), it can produce up to 125 kWh per day which is more than enough to power 25 shallow water pumps and provide clean water for some 12,000 people. Or it could keep 400 medical refrigerators on.

In order to do all these, the solar airship must be anchored and needs its own power box. Another important aspect of this flying rescuer is that it can fly autonomously to simplify the operations. Though it’s just a concept design, it sure seems useful except when rescue operations are being deterred by storms and bad weather.

via EcoGeek

A new survey by two Californian college researchers proved that companies in the solar power business will need more and more workers.

The attractive domain of turning the sun light into energy is very active in California where 16,500 to 17,500 people are employed to work for such companies. The study estimated 5,000 more jobs next year and most of these will be in the Bay Area.

Though there are open jobs for designers and salespeople, the biggest increase will be for people to install rooftop solar arrays. The technology is advanced enough, this being the reason why there will be a migration from lab jobs to field jobs. “You don’t need a Ph.D. or a B.A. to get into this industry. It’s an opportunity to rebuild the working-class jobs that have been lost,” said John Carrese, co-author of the survey.

Salaries for this kind of jobs will probably start from $31,200 a year for an entry-level installer, up to $83,000 a year for an experienced solar designer or engineer and the best candidates will be students from Californian colleges, said Carrese.

This may be the next boom in the economy, because it’s not rocket science to start such a business and you don’t need a Ph. D or a B.A., just intuition.

Solar power seems to be the future or at least this is what a South Korean village teaches us.  Donggwang is getting all its power directly from the sun and is totally energy independent with clean technology.

Today, Donggwang is a solar town because in 2004 the government subsidized the installation of solar panels on all of the 40 buildings in the village, paying 70% of the total cost. More than that, the local government is helping the community of the Jeju-du Island, to install a large wind farm. This is a long term plan that will raise the wind power generation up to 500 megawatts by 2020, in order to replace 20 percent of conventionally generated electricity.

Choo Chan Lee is a Seoul native that now lives in Donggwang. When asked by Gavin Hudson what he thinks about the environment he said :

“Yeah, the environment is a very important issue. In Jeju we don’t have many factories, so the air is very nice. Very nice environment. The motto is a clean city - clean island. They’re trying to do this solar and then the windmills. My favorite part of living in Jeju is the fresh air. The clean air.”

I think this is just the start and more and more cities will learn something from such a good example.

The efficiency of a solar panel is given by the percentage of the sun’s light that is being turned into electricity. The US National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) innovated a new thin film solar panel that just broke the world’s efficiency record, reaching 19.9-percent.

“The copper indium gallium diselenide (CIGS) thin-film solar cell recently reached 19.9 percent efficiency in testing at the lab, setting a new world record.” Treehugger noted.

Traditional silicon based solar panels may have a hard time when these multicrystalline silicon-based solar cells are going to be produced.

Hayword, California based, OptiSolar are trying their best to build the world’s largest solar photovoltaic farm (550-megawatt) 100 miles north of Los Angeles in San Luis Obispo County.

The company will produce clean and competitively priced electricity using low profile solar panels that will be placed on ballast on the ground. Thanks to the thin-film photovoltaic technology OptiSolar doesn’t need large structures that turbine-based systems require and will not result in noise pollution.

They are going to start construction in 2010 after completing the local approval process. When the solar photovoltaic farm will be ready it should be able to power up to 190,000 homes and would be a step forward to securing at least 20-percent of the State’s electricity from renewable energy sources by 2010.

Press release (pdf link)