Solar Energy Market damaged in Western Australia

The state and federal governments have damaged the growing solar energy sector with their indecisive moves in relation to the carbon debate and the feed in tarrifs.

This week the Barnett government pulled the plug on the renewable energy grid subsidy scheme. This was after the $127 million installation quota for solar panels was reached.

The solar tariff was originally set at 60 cents per kilowatt hour and now it has been moved down to 7 cents per kilowatt hour.

The incentive needs to be recalibrated. All the profits from Synergy could be used to fund alternative energy schemes.


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Company: Noble & Associates
Phone: 61894007400
Posted On: 1/1/0001
Contact via email: andrew@nobleaccounting.com.au
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A world beating Australian solar technology emerges

A new solar technology developed in Australia is set to bring down solar energy costs even further. Technique Solar based in Melbourne & run by Prof Ian Bates formally of RMIT University has developed solar panels that are claimed to be four times more efficient & three times cheaper than any comparable existing technology.

The panels are a hybrid of photovoltaic cells & acrylic lenses that are designed to track the sun as it moves across the sky. The design of the panels allows for the production of both heat energy & electricity.

With price per kw/hr expected to be anywhere from one third to one quarter that of existing technology, this recent advance in solar power generation is an initial indicator that the cost of solar power output will follow the price curve that other technologies exhibit which is down.

For more on Technique Solar visit their website


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Company: Noble & Associates
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Posted On: 1/1/0001
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Home Brew - Personalised Electricity from Solar

The following quote from ACS Publications Inorganic Chemisty Journal is telling - The point here is that energy storage needed for solar Personalised Energy (PE) is currently within reach of the chemist with the design of catalysts that effectively promote eq  1 or 2 in the forward (solar storage) and reverse (fuel cell) directions.

Personalized energy (PE) is a transformative idea that provides a new modality for the planet’s energy future. By providing solar energy to the individual, an energy supply becomes secure and available to people of both legacy and nonlegacy worlds and minimally contributes to an increase in the anthropogenic level of carbon dioxide. Because PE will be possible only if solar energy is available 24 h a day, 7 days a week, the key enabler for solar PE is an inexpensive storage mechanism. HY (Y = halide or OH) splitting is a fuel-forming reaction of sufficient energy density for large-scale solar storage. Read the full article


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Coastal living in Western Australia

Western Australia has one of the lowest population densities on the planet as well as one of the longest sparsely populated coastlines. The last couple of centuries have seen a steady migration of people from all corners of the planet into the most attractive locations particularly Perth.

Coastal living has always been highly valued, particularly where there has been access to fresh water at points where rivers merge with the ocean and where the sea has provided bountiful supplies of sea food. With a particularly dry climate, the expansion of populations along the West Australian coast has been limited.

With falling solar energy costs and more sophisticated desalination systems there is every reason to believe that human populations will spread out all along the WA coast line.

 


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Feed the grid with your car


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Tesla Motors moves to commercialise an electric car

For those Perth drivers who can get by with a car that will do 400km's on a single charge from their mains supply, an electric family car is on the way.

Daimler Motors has taken a 10% stake in the company and the US Department of Energy has provided the comapny with $365 million in low interest loans.

Rig your solar array on your roof and prepare to drive for free. Check out the cars here

 


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Our solar future in Western Australia

It's coming! A roofscape of solar panels are likely to emerge over the sky line in every Western Australian metropolitan suburb. Driven by frightening energy price rises, falling solar array costs and green energy rebates, consumers are highly likely to embrace a solar future. The embrace of this solar future will have a cascading effect on the use of battery driven transport. Why not use your solar array to power your transport as well as your home, office or factory?

 


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Solar plant yields water and crops from the desert - Perfect for Western Australia

The WA forest project will use seawater and solar power to grow food in greenhouses across the desert.

Vast greenhouses that use sea water for crop cultivation could be combined with solar power plants to provide food, fresh water and clean energy in deserts, under an ambitious proposal from a team of architects and engineers.

The Sahara Forest Project, which is already running demonstration plants in Tenerife, Oman and the United Arab Emirates, envisages huge greenhouses with concentrated solar power (CSP), a technology that uses mirrors to focus the sun's rays, creating steam to drive turbines to generate electricity.

The installations would turn deserts into lush patches of vegetation, according to its designers, and do away with the need to dig wells for fresh water, an activity that has depleted aquifers across the world.

Charlie Paton, a member of the team, and the inventor of the Seawater Greenhouse, said the scheme was a proven way to transform arid environments. "Plants need light for growth but they don't like heat beyond a certain point," he said.

Above certain temperatures the amount of water lost through leaves' stomata rises so much plants stop their photosynthesis and do not grow. The solar farm planned by the project runs seawater evaporators, pumping damp, cool air through the greenhouses. This reduces the warmth inside by about 15C, compared with the temperature outside.

At the other end of the greenhouse from the evaporators, water vapour is condensed. Some of this fresh water is used to water the crops, some for cleaning the solar mirrors.

"So we've got conditions in the greenhouse of high humidity and lower temperature," said Paton. "The crops sitting in this slightly steamy, humid condition can grow fantastically well."

The designers said that virtually any vegetables could be grown in the greenhouses. The demonstration plants already produce lettuces, peppers, cucumbers and tomatoes. The nutrients to grow the plants could come from local seaweed or be extracted from the seawater.

Michael Pawlyn, of Exploration Architecture, based in London, worked on the Eden Project for seven years and is now part of the Sahara Forest team. He said that the Seawater Greenhouse and CSP provided substantial synergies for each other. "Both technologies work extremely well in hot, dry, desert locations. CSP produces a lot of waste heat and we'd be able to use that to evaporate more seawater from the greenhouse. And CSP needs a supply of clean, de-mineralised water in order for the [electricity generating] turbines to function and to keep the mirrors at peak output. It just so happens the Seawater Greenhouse produces large quantities of this."

Paton said the greenhouse produced more than five times the fresh water needed to water the plants inside, so some of the water could be released to the outside, creating a microclimate for hardier plants such as jatropha, a crop that can be turned into biofuel.

The cost of the Sahara Forest Project could be relatively low as both CSP and Seawater Greenhouses are proven technologies. The designers estimate that building 20 hectares (nearly 50 acres) of greenhouses combined with a 10MW CSP scheme would cost about €80m (£65m).

Paton said groups in countries across the Middle East, including in UAE, Oman, Bahrain, Qatar and Kuwait, have expressed interest in possibly funding demonstration projects.

He said use of Seawater Greenhouses could reverse the environmental damage done by the glasshouses already built in places such as the desert region of Almeria, southern Spain, where, constructed over the past 20 years to grow salad crops, they now covered more than 40,000 hectares.

Paton said: "They take water out of the ground something like five times faster than it comes in, so the water table drops and becomes more saline. The whole of Spain is being sucked dry. If one were to convert them all to the Seawater Greenhouse concept it would turn an unsustainable solution into a more sustainable one."

Pawlyn said: "In places like Oman they've effectively sterilised large areas of land by using groundwater that's become increasingly saline. The beauty of the Sahara Forest scheme is that you can reverse that process and turn barren land into biologically productive land." Read more about a solar project perfect for the desert in Western Australia


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Solar System Investment Analysis Tool

 

This calculator determines if an investment in a solar energy system is financially viable.

The calculator compares the option of putting your money in the bank at a given interest rate or investing in a solar system.

Solar Power Investment calculator.xls (31.00 kb)


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Company: Noble & Associates
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Solar Panel Energy Calculation Information

Solar panels are classified according to their rated power output in Watts. This rating is the amount of power the solar panel would be expected to produce in 1 peak sun hour. Different geographical locations receive different quantities of average peak sun hours per day. In Australia, the figures range from as low as 3 in Tasmania to over 6 in areas of QLD, NT and WA.

As an example, in areas of the Hunter Valley in NSW, the yearly average is around 5.6. The monthly figures for this area range from below 4.0 in June to above 6.5 in December. This means that an 80W solar panel would produce around 320W per day in June and around 520W per day in December, but based on the average figure of 5.6, it would produce a yearly average of around 450W per day.

Solar panels can be wired in series or in parallel to increase voltage or current respectively. The rated terminal voltage of a solar panel is usually around 17.0 volts, but through the use of a regulator, this voltage is reduced to around 13 or 14 volts as required for battery charging.

Solar panel output is affected by the cell operating temperature. Panels are rated at a nominal temperature of 25 degrees Celcius. The output of a solar panel can be expected to vary by 2.5% for every 5 degrees variation in temperature. As the temperature increases, the output decreases. With this in mind, it is worth noting that, if the panels are very cool due to cloud cover, and the sun bursts through the cloud, it is possible to exceed the rated output of the panel. Keep this in mind when sizing your solar regulator.

 


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