Lifeboat Foundation

In the first and second parts of this series, pv magazine reviewed the productive lifespan of residential solar panels and inverters. Here, we examine home batteries, how well they perform over time, and how long they last.

Residential energy storage has become an increasingly popular feature of home solar. A recent SunPower survey of more than 1,500 households found that about 40% of Americans worry about power outages on a regular basis. Of the survey respondents actively considering solar for their homes, 70% said they planned to include a battery energy storage system.

Besides providing backup power during outages, many batteries are integrated with technology that allows for intelligent scheduling of the import and export of energy. The goal is to maximize the value of the home’s solar system. And, some batteries are optimized to integrate an electric vehicle charger.

ArtistGNDphotography/iStock.

The news was first reported by Reuters on Friday.

Peter Allen.

Published in Nature Catalysis, the six chemists discovered a method that could be used to produce other chemicals.

Metal halide perovskites are semiconducting materials with advantageous optoelectronic properties, low defects and low costs of production. In contrast with other emerging semiconductors, these materials can be easily synthesized via affordable solution processing methods.

In recent years, some engineers have been exploring the potential of metal halide perovskites for creating highly solar cells and light emitting diodes (LEDs). Their favorable characteristics, however, could also facilitate their use for fabricating next-generation electronic components, including transistors.

Researchers at Pohang University of Science and Technology in South Korea, the Chinse Academy of Sciences and the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China recently introduced a new strategy to develop transistors based on a metal halide perovskite, specifically tin perovskite. In their paper, published in Nature Electronics, they showed that the resulting tin perovskite-based transistors could attain performances comparable to those of existing silicon-based transistors.

Organometallic compounds, molecules made up of metal atoms and organic molecules, are often used to accelerate chemical reactions and have played a significant role in advancing the field of chemistry.

Metallocenes, a type of organometallic compound, are known for their versatility and special “sandwich” structure. Their discovery was a significant contribution to the field of organometallic chemistry and led to the awarding of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1973 to the scientists who discovered and explained their sandwich structure.

The versatility of metallocenes is due to their ability to “sandwich” many different elements to form a variety of compounds. They can be used in various applications, including the production of polymers, glucometers—used to measure the amount of glucose in the blood, perovskite solar cells, and as a catalyst, a substance that increases the rate of a chemical reaction without being consumed or changed by the reaction itself.

This is according to a press release by Scania published on Thursday.

Scientists at the University of Sydney have, for the first time, used a quantum computer to engineer and directly observe a process critical in chemical reactions by slowing it down by a factor of 100 billion times.

Joint lead researcher and Ph.D. student, Vanessa Olaya Agudelo, said, It is by understanding these basic processes inside and between molecules that we can open up a new world of possibilities in materials science, drug design, or solar energy harvesting.

Continue reading “Scientists use quantum device to slow down simulated chemical reaction 100 billion times” »

Transparent solar windows are not only generating news as demonstration projects—many have already been set up. On the list of installations for UE Power are its own offices in Redwood City, California, at the R&D facility of its partner in Northwood, Ohio, a commercial office building in Boulder, Colorado, and in Tokyo, Japan. In addition, it has an installation at Michigan State University. UbiQD also claims to have installations in multiple U.S. states, which include a Holiday Inn hotel, its own headquarters in Los Alamos, and the Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) in Golden, Colorado.

What’s the premium for transparency?

UbiQD’s product isn’t commercially available yet, but McDaniel expects the premium for transparent solar power to be not more than 30 percent over ordinary windows. He said that “Traditional solar cells are not sold at a cost per watt, not based on area, like windows. The additional window cost, per watt, is similar to utility-scale solar. We have a similar payback time to traditional solar [before incentives].”

Earlier this year, two-layer solar cells broke records with 33 percent efficiency. The cells are made of a combination of silicon and a material called a perovskite. However, these tandem solar cells are still far from the theoretical limit of around 45 percent efficiency, and they degrade quickly under sun exposure, making their usefulness limited.

The process of improving tandem solar cells involves the search for the perfect materials to layer on top of each other, with each capturing some of the sunlight the other is missing. One potential material for this is perovskites, which are defined by their peculiar rhombus-in-a-cube crystal structure. This structure can be adopted by many chemicals in a variety of proportions. To make a good candidate for tandem solar cells, the combination of chemicals needs to have the right bandgap—the property responsible for absorbing the right part of the sun’s spectrum—be stable at normal temperatures, and, most challengingly, not degrade under illumination.

The number of possible perovskite materials is vast, and predicting the properties that a given chemical composition will have is very difficult. Trying all the possibilities out in the lab is prohibitively costly and time-consuming. To accelerate the search for the ideal perovskite, researchers at North Carolina State University decided to enlist the help of robots.