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Commercial Market Potential for Solar Power Technologies
by Barbara M. Drazga02-09-2007 |
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Article:
According to a new report, Solar Power Commercial Market Applications from
Energy Business Reports, more and more industries are adopting solar power
projects to reduce their energy usage and costs.
Solar energy is free, abundant, and inexhaustible. The total amount of energy
irradiated from the sun to the earth's surface is enough to provide more than
10,000 times the annual global energy consumption.
The growth of solar energy in the U.S. has myriad benefits for the nation,
including:
- Consumer savings - Wholesale natural gas prices have more than tripled since
2001, leading to skyrocketing electric rates. Through displacement of natural
gas and reduction in the use of costly peak power plants that drive gas pricing,
solar energy can save U.S. consumers tens of billions of dollars.
- Growing domestic employment - The solar industry's current expansion is on
track to create more than 30,000 high quality jobs by 2015 in manufacturing,
engineering, and construction, many in small businesses. Watt-for-watt, solar
employs more labor than any other energy industry.
- Secure, reliable, domestic energy - Solar power stabilizes electricity prices
and protects against power interruption, shortages, and price swings.
- Clean generation and reduced water consumption - Worldwide solar installations
today avoid roughly eight million metric tons per year of CO2 emissions. Solar
consumes 98% less water per MWh than the most efficient natural gas generation.
Applications of Solar Power
Passive Solar Energy: Passive solar building design involves modeling,
selection, and passive solar technologies that maintain a building's environment
at a comfortable temperature through the sun's daily and annual cycles. Passive
solar design minimizes the use of active solar energy, renewable energy, and
fossil fuel technologies through:
(1) Direct gain or the positioning of windows, skylights, and shutters to
control the amount of direct solar radiation reaching the interior and warming
the air and surfaces within a building; (2) Indirect gain in which solar
radiation is captured by a part of the building envelope and then transmitted
indirectly to the building through conduction and convection; and (3) Isolated
gain which involves passively capturing solar heat and then moving it passively
into or out of the building via a liquid or air directly or using a thermal
store. Sunspaces, greenhouses, and solar closets are alternative ways of
capturing isolated heat gain from which warmed air can be taken.
Solar Heating Systems: Solar hot water systems use sunlight to heat water. The
systems are composed of solar thermal collectors and a storage tank, and they
may be active, passive or batch systems.
Solar Lighting: Also known as daylighting, this is the use of natural light to
provide illumination to offset energy use in electric lighting systems and
reduce the cooling load on HVAC systems. The use of natural light also offers
physiological and psychological benefits, although this is difficult to
quantify. Daylighting features include building orientation, window orientation,
exterior shading, saw tooth roofs, clerestory windows, light shelves, skylights,
and light tubes. Architectural trends increasingly recognize daylighting as a
cornerstone of sustainable design.
Solar Cooking: A solar cooker traps the sun's energy in an insulated box and can
be used for cooking, pasteurization, and fruit canning. Solar cooking is helping
many developing countries by reducing the demand for firewood and maintaining a
cleaner environment.
Photovoltaics: Photovoltaic or PV technology employs solar cells or solar
photovoltaic arrays to convert energy from the sun into electricity. Solar cells
produce direct current electricity from the sun's rays, which can be used to
power equipment or to recharge batteries. Many pocket calculators incorporate a
single solar cell, but for larger applications, cells are generally grouped
together to form PV modules that are in turn arranged in solar arrays. Solar
arrays can be used to power orbiting satellites and other spacecraft, and in
remote areas as a source of power for roadside emergency telephones, remote
sensing, and cathodic protection of pipelines. The continual decline of
manufacturing costs (dropping 3 to 5% a year in recent years) is expanding the
range of cost-effective uses to include road signs, home power generation, and
even grid-connected electricity generation.
Financial incentives such as the ability to sell excess electricity back to the
public grid have greatly accelerated the pace of solar PV installations in
Spain, Germany, Japan, the U.S., Australia, South Korea, Italy, Greece, France,
China and other countries.
Solar Thermal Electric Power Plants: Solar thermal energy involves harnessing
solar power for practical applications from solar heating to electrical power
generation. Solar
thermal collectors, such as solar hot water panels, are commonly used to
generate solar hot water for domestic and light industrial applications. This
energy system is also used in architecture and building design to control
heating and ventilation in both active solar and passive solar designs.
Solar Cars: A solar car is an electric vehicle powered by energy obtained from
solar panels on the surface of the car which convert the sun's energy directly
into electrical energy. Solar cars are not currently a practical form of
transportation. Although they can operate for limited distances without sun, the
solar cells are generally very fragile. Development teams have focused their
efforts on optimizing the efficiency of the vehicle, but many have only enough
room for one or two people.
Solar Power Satellite: A solar pow er satellite (SPS) is a proposed satellite
built in high Earth orbit that uses microwave power transmission to beam solar
power to a very large antenna on Earth where it can be used in place of
conventional power sources. The advantage of placing the solar collectors in
space is the unobstructed view of the sun, unaffected by the day/night cycle,
weather, or seasons. However, the costs of construction are very high, and SPSs
will not be able to compete with conventional sources unless low launch costs
can be achieved or unless a space-based manufacturing industry develops and they
can be built in orbit from off-earth materials.
Solar Updraft Tower: A solar updraft tower is a proposed type of
renewable-energy power plant. Air is heated in a very large circular
greenhouse-like structure, and the resulting convection causes the air to rise
and escape through a tall tower. The moving air drives turbines, which produce
electricity. There are no solar updraft towers in operation at present. A
research prototype operated in Spain in the 1980s, and EnviroMission is
proposing to construct a full-scale power station using this technology in
Australia.
The generating ability of a solar updraft power plant depends primarily on the
size of the collector area and chimney height. With a large collector area, a
large volume of air is warmed to flow up the chimney; collector areas as large
as 7 km in diameter have been considered. With a large chimney height, the
pressure difference increases the stack effect; chimneys as tall as 1,000 m have
been considered. A combined increase of the collector area and the chimney
height leads to greatly increased productivity of the power plant. Heat can be
stored inside the collector area greenhouse, to be used to warm the air later
on. Water, with its relatively high specific heat capacity, can be filled in
tubes placed under the collector increasing the energy storage as needed.
Turbines can be installed in a ring around the base of the tower, with a
horizontal axis, as p lanned for the Australian project described below and seen
in the diagram above; or - as in the prototype in Spain - a single vertical axis
turbine can be installed inside the chimney.
Renewable Solar Power Systems with Regenerative Fuel Cell Systems: NASA has long
recognized the unique advantages of regenerative fuel cell (RFC) systems to
provide energy storage for solar power systems in space. RFC systems are
uniquely qualified to
provide the necessary energy storage for solar surface power systems on the moon
or Mars during long periods of darkness, i.e. during the 14-day lunar night or
the12-hour Martian night. The nature of the RFC and its inherent design
flexibility enables it to effectively meet the requirements of space missions.
And in the course of implementing the NASA RFC Program, researchers recognized
that there are numerous applications in government, industry, transportation,
and the military for RFC systems as well.
Concentrating Solar Power (CSP) Developments: Concentrating solar power (CSP)
plants are utility-scale generators that produce electricity using mirrors or
lenses to efficiently concentrate the sun's energy. The four principal CSP
technologies are parabolic troughs, dish-Stirling engine systems, central
receivers, and concentrating photovoltaic systems (CPV). The year 2006 was a
milestone year for the CSP industry: A 1 MW plant built for Arizona Public
Service, the first parabolic trough plant constructed in nearly two decades,
went online and began delivering power. Solargenix-Acciona broke ground on a 64
MW parabolic trough plant in Boulder City, Nevada. Stirling Energy Systems, a
Phoenix-based provider of dish-Stirling engine systems, moved forward on
development after signing Power Purchase Agreements (PPAs) for two large plants
in Southern California.
The first of these contracts is with Southern California Edison to purchases all
the electricity generated from a 500 MW facility, with an option to purchase
power from a 350 MW addition. The second is with San Diego Gas & Electric, for
the power from a 300 MW plant, with options for up to another 600 MW. And in
August, Pacific Gas and Electric signed an MOU to buy at least 500 megawatts of
CSP from solar thermal firm Luz II starting in 2010.
Market Profiles
Worldwide, the PV industry sold over $15 billion of new product in 2005,
continuing a five-year trend of 30%+ annual market growth. Thanks to national
R&D programs and major capital investments in manufacturing, solar PV costs 1/10
what it did in the 1980s. Each doubling in cumulative manufacturing has brought
prices down by about18%. With electric rates and natural gas prices
skyrocketing, continued progress may bring rooftop solar costs below retail
electricity rates in the U.S.
Germany and Japan have taken the lead in solar manufacturing and installations
because of long-term national incentive policies designed to mainstream solar
power. Germany offers incentives for solar installations by paying three to four
times retail electric rates for the electricity generated from PV systems, while
Japan instituted a carefully designed rebate program that phased out over the
last ten years.
The U.S., on the other hand, offers a patchwork of more than 50 distinct
markets, each with its own interconnection and net metering rules and until 2006
had no incentives for individual installations of solar. Yet states have
increasingly invested in solar power
development; in the past decade, the number of states with solar rebates has
risen from one to 26 and the number of states with net metering increased from
11 to 36. Fifteen states offer homeowners tax breaks for solar energy, which may
include income tax credits, sales tax exemptions, and property tax exemptions.
In 26 states, state or local governments offer direct solar rebates.
California is the dominant PV market in the U.S. and the fifth largest market
for PV in the world. More than 15,000 systems have been installed on homes and
small businesses connected to an electric grid as of December 2005 under the
California Energy Commission's rebate program. The California Public Utilities
Commission created an 11-year, $3.2 billion program to provide homeowners and
businesses with rebates for installing grid-connected PV.
The benefits of solar power are compelling: it is environmentally benign, easy
to deploy, and it contributes to global technology transfer and innovation.
Moreover solar electric generation has the highest power density (global mean of
170 W/m2) among renewable energies. Solar power is pollution free during use,
while production end wastes and emissions can be managed using existing
pollution controls, and end end-of-use recycling technologies are under
development.
Once the initial capital cost of building a solar power plant has been expended,
ongoing operating costs are low compared to other power technologies as solar
facilities operate with little maintenance or intervention after initial setup.
Solar electric generation is most feasible and economically competitive where
grid connection or fuel transport is difficult, costly or impossible. However,
when connected to a grid, solar electric generation can displace the highest
cost electricity during times of peak demand, reduce grid loading, and eliminate
the need for local battery power at night or in times of high demand. Grid
connected solar electricity can also help minimize transmission/distribution
losses (approximately 7.2%).
Despite these advantages, many energy decisions today overlook solar power as a
modular technology that can be rapidly deployed to generate electricity close to
the point of consumption. Solar potential is clearly enormous. So why don't we
capture and make better use of this boundless, virtually limitless, free
resource?
There are several disadvantages to large-scale adoption of solar. For one thing,
solar cells are costly, requiring a large initial capital investment. Solar has
limited power density; to get enough energy for large applications a large
number of photovoltaic cells are needed, and this increases the cost of the
technology and requires a large plot of land. Like electricity from nuclear or
fossil fuel plants, solar power can only realistically be used to power
transport vehicles by converting light energy into another form of stored energy
(e.g. battery stored electricity or by electrolyzing water to produce hydrogen)
suitable for transport. Solar cells produce DC, which must be converted to AC
when used in currently existing distribution grids. This incurs an energy loss
of 4-12%.
Solar energy supplies electricity to several hundred thousand people around the
world, provides employment for over ten thousand, and generates business worth
more than one billion dollars. In the future, the pace of change and progress
will likely be even more rapid as the solar industry unlocks its hidden promise.
This report on Solar Power Commercial Market Applications looks at the various
applications of solar power in a range of industries. This report examines the
future use of solar power in commercial applications including transportation,
solar towers, agriculture, and outer space. An in-depth analysis of NASA's work
on photovoltaics and solar power is also provided. The report outlines 14 case
studies of commercial uses of solar power, and features profiles of major
industry participants.
About the Publisher: "Solar Power Commercial Market Potential" is published by
Energy Business Reports ( www.EnergyBusinessReports.com ), an energy industry
think tank and leading source for energy industry information and research
products. Details can be found at www.energybusinessreports.com
Contact Person:
Barbara Drazga
Company: Energy Business Reports
Email:
articles@energybusinessreports.com
URL:
www.energybusinessreports.com
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