DIY Photovoltaic Solar Panel Mount
On September 14, 2008 in Uncategorized
I have been getting more questions about the satellite dish mount that I used to mount my solar panel with, so here are some pictures that will hopefully give some more insight.
The original post can be found here: DIY Solar Panel Mount
This is a mount that I removed from a Dish Network satellite dish.
The elevation and skew are marked on the mount in degrees, making it easy to mount your panel at the correct angle. Here is a link to some great info about the Optimum Orientation of Solar Panels
Here is the mount, with the markings for skew visible:
The solar panel will mount to the part of the satellite dish mount with the skew markings on it. I used two bolts, one on each side.
The elevation markings can be seen here. With the mount oriented as it is in the picture, the solar panel would be face down on the table.
Looking down at the mount, you will see this:
The circular part slips over a piece of pipe which can be mounted to your house or set in the ground. Unfortunately I do not have measurements on the mount with me, but will update with them later.
Here is the part where the solar panel mounts:
The whole thing will then rotate about the pipe collar by loosening the elevation bolt.
Another view here:
The side opposite the elevation markings:
This is how the mount would look when mounted on a vertical pipe.
Here you can see that the elevation of the mount is currently set to an angle of slightly less than 40 degrees. (this is after removing a satellite dish from the mount.. actual angle will depend on your location)
Hopefully this information is helpful to anyone looking to use one of these satellite dish mounts to hold solar panels.
Solar Cells — Made In a Pizza Oven
On August 26, 2008 in Uncategorized
From smh.com.au (The Sydney Morning Herald)
FOR her 10th birthday, Nicole Kuepper received an inspirational present from her parents - her first solar-energy kit.
It sparked a fascination with solar technology that last night led to Ms Kuepper, 23, winning two Australian Museum Eureka Prizes for her scientific research.
She has developed a simple, cheap way of producing solar cells in a pizza oven that could eventually bring power and light to the 2 billion people in the world who lack electricity.
Ms Kuepper is a PhD student and lecturer in the school of photovoltaic and renewable energy engineering at the University of NSW.
“I love working with passionate people who want to help address climate change and poverty by thinking and experimenting outside the square,” she said.
Today’s photovoltaic cells that convert sunlight to electricity are expensive and need sophisticated, “clean” manufacturing plants.
Ms Kuepper realised a new approach would be needed if affordable cells were to be made on site in poorer countries: “What started off as a brainstorming session has resulted in the iJET cell concept that uses low-cost and low-temperature processes, such as ink-jet printing and pizza ovens, to manufacture solar cells.”
While it could take five years to commercialise the patented technology, providing renewable energy to homes in some of the least developed countries would enable people to “read at night, keep informed about the world through radio and television and refrigerate life-saving vaccines”. And it would also help reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
Ms Kuepper said that the solar cells should be of high enough quality to be used anywhere in the world, including Australia.
An advocate of green technology, she gives talks about solar energy to the public, has held miniature solar car races to teach indigenous children about renewable energy, and was a delegate at the 2020 Youth Summit in Canberra in April.
Ms Kuepper was awarded the British Council Eureka Prize for Young Leaders in Environmental Issues and Climate Change and a $10,000 study tour to Britain.
She also won the People’s Choice Award, in which almost 16,000 members of the public voted for their favourite scientist out of six finalists. Twenty Eureka Prizes worth $200,000 were awarded last night at a ceremony at Royal Randwick Racecourse.
Other winners included Professor Robert Clark, of the University of NSW, for quantum computer research, Professor Stephen Simpson of the University of Sydney, for studies of locusts and human obesity, and Professor Matthew England and his University of NSW team for discoveries linking ocean temperature and rainfall.
I can’t wait to see what they have figured out. This could be a major break through.
Necessity is the mother of invention, I suppose..
And with invention, comes innovation. Once this process has been released to the public, others will be able to expand on it to either make it more efficient, or to spur them to create other cheap efficient means of manufacturing solar cells.
Three cheers and six beers for Ms. Nicole Kuepper
New Material to Generate Electricity From Heat - Twice the Efficiency of Other Materials
On July 29, 2008 in Uncategorized
From Renewable Energy World:
Material May Help Autos Turn Heat into Electricity
by Pam Frost Gorder, OSUOhio, United States [RenewableEnergyWorld.com]Researchers have invented a new material that could potentially make cars more efficient, by converting heat wasted through engine exhaust into electricity. The researchers say that the material has twice the efficiency of anything currently on the market.
“We’d been working for 10 years to engineer this kind of behavior using different kinds of nanostructured materials, but with limited success. Then I saw this paper, and I knew we could do the same thing we’d been trying to do with nanostructures, but with this bulk semiconductor instead.”
– Joseph Heremans, Ohio Eminent Scholar in Nanotechnology, Ohio State University.
The same technology could work in power generators and heat pumps, said project leader Joseph Heremans, Ohio Eminent Scholar in Nanotechnology at Ohio State University.
The materials are known as thermoelectric materials, and they rate the materials’ efficiency based on how much heat they can convert into electricity at a given temperature.
Previously, the most efficient material used commercially in thermoelectric power generators was an alloy called sodium-doped lead telluride, which had a rating of 0.71. The new material, thallium-doped lead telluride, has a rating of 1.5 — more than twice that of the previous leader.
What’s more important to Heremans is that the new material is most effective between 450 and 950° Fahrenheit — a typical temperature range for power systems such as automobile engines.
Some experts argue that only about 25 percent of the energy produced by a typical gasoline engine is used to move a car or power its accessories, and nearly 60 percent is lost through waste heat — much of which escapes in engine exhaust. A thermoelectric (TE) device can capture some of that waste heat, Heremans said. It would also make a practical addition to an automobile, because it has no moving parts to wear out or break down.
“The material does all the work. It produces electrical power just like conventional heat engines — steam engines, gas or diesel engines — that are coupled to electrical generators, but it uses electrons as the working fluids instead of water or gases, and makes electricity directly.”
“Thermoelectrics are also very small,” he added. “I like to say that TE converters compare to other heat engines like the transistor compares to the vacuum tube.”
The engineers took a unique strategy to design this new material.
To maximize the amount of electricity produced by a TE material, engineers would normally try to limit the amount of heat that can pass through it without being captured and converted to electricity. So the typical strategy for making a good thermoelectric material is to lower its thermal conductivity.
In Heremans’ lab, he used to work to lower the thermal conductivity by building nanometer-sized structures such as nanowires into materials. A nanometer is one billionth of a meter.
Those nanostructured materials are not very stable, are very difficult to make in large quantities and are difficult to connect with conventional electronic circuits and external heat sources.
For this new material, he and his colleagues took a different strategy: they left out the fancy nanostructures, and instead focused on how to convert the maximum amount of heat that was trapped in the material naturally. To do this, they took advantage of some new ideas in quantum mechanics.
Heremans pointed to a 2006 paper published by other researchers in the journal Physical Review Letters, which suggested that elements such as thallium and tellurium could interact on a quantum-mechanical level to create a resonance between the thallium electrons and those in the host lead telluride thermoelectric material, depending on the bonds between the atoms.
“It comes down to a peculiar behavior of an electron in a thallium atom when it has tellurium neighbors,” he said. “We’d been working for 10 years to engineer this kind of behavior using different kinds of nanostructured materials, but with limited success. Then I saw this paper, and I knew we could do the same thing we’d been trying to do with nanostructures, but with this bulk semiconductor instead.”
Heremans designed the new material with Vladimir Jovovic, who did this work for his doctoral thesis in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Ohio State. Researchers at Osaka University — Ken Kurosaki, Anek Charoenphakdee, and Shinsuke Yamanaka — created samples of the material for testing. Then researchers at the California Institute of Technology — G. Jeffrey Snyder, Eric S. Toberer, and Ali Saramat — tested the material at high temperatures. Heremans and Jovovic tested it at low temperatures and provided experimental proof that the physical mechanism they postulated was indeed at work.
The team found that near 450° Fahrenheit, the material converted heat to electricity with an efficiency rating of about 0.75 — close to that of sodium-doped telluride. But as the temperature rose, so did the efficiency of the new material. It peaked at 950° Fahrenheit, with a rating of 1.5.
Heremans’ team is continuing to work on this patent-pending technology.
“We hope to go much further. I think it should be quite possible to apply other lessons learned from thermoelectric nanotechnology to boost the rating by another factor of two — that’s what we’re shooting for now,” he said.
This research was funded by the BSST Corporation; the State of Ohio Department of Development’s Center for Photovoltaic Innovation and Commercialization at Ohio State University; the Beckman Institute; the Swedish Bengt Lundqvist Minne Foundation; and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
Pam Frost Gorder is an assistant director of research communications at Ohio State University.
Couple this with some heat from the sun, a wood stove, a propane stove, a clothes dryer, or just about anything else that loses a lot of efficiency through heat output, and things would become a lot more interesting. I’m kind of miffed about the working temperature though, wish it was a bit lower.
SolarNetwork - Open Source Monitoring Project
On July 27, 2008 in Uncategorized
Found this on Slashdot:
http://www.solarnetwork.net/
“solarNetwork.net is an open-source project and experiment to test a method of distributed energy production. It relies on continuous participation and cooperation of an online community.
We hope this community develops to both 1) build out the infrastructure of the network, and 2) provide the real-world know-how and data to support a new type of energy company.”
“An Experiment
The project aims to construct the framework of equitable cost sharing that will underlie a business method outlined in the provisional patent.
Through solarNetwork.net, solar photo-voltaic energy is collected, consumed, measured and recorded locally at sites around the globe, called solarNodes. Data from each solarNode is aggregated at a central database of solar energy information.
SolarNetwork.net members, in theory, would not share electricity with each other; but they do share the savings that their local-energy generation delivers.”
“solarNetwork.net is being studied as part of a Masters thesis in the department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the School of Engineering at the University of Auckland, to be completed December 2008.
Until fairly recently solar energy has been sidelined as an unrealistic form of energy generation for the home.
In reality a large amount of solar energy falls on people’s roofs each day - maybe not enough to power your house, but at least enough to take note of.
Let’s say you live in San Diego, have a couple of 80 Watt solar panels, some motorboat batteries, and an inexpensive inverter. You set up the panels on your roof to fill the batteries under sitting your house during the day, so you can use the electricity in the evening. On a really sunny day you might be able to store a few Amp Hours in a battery which you could use later - maybe a few hours of a desk lamp’s light.
Clearly, it’s not a lot of energy, but we’d all agree: it’s not absolutely nothing. And if you actually used this system on that sunny day, maybe a few cents were shaved off your bill.
Now imagine that you had 2 houses with this solarNode setup: one in San Diego, and one in Sydney, and you kept track of the energy collected, using a very-low-power computer, and a charge controller. It might be a sunny day in SD, and an overcast day in Sydney, so that only one house (the SD house) would report full batteries to power that San Diego desklamp that evening. However, if there were a cooperative agreement between the two houses, that 12 cents of savings from solar electricity generated in San Diego could conceivably be shared between the two houses.
That’s right: 6 cents each. And maybe the next day, Sydney was beautifully sunny, and San Diego was grey. Or maybe, they both had sunny days - it’s just weather and we can’t control it. But, we’re pretty sure that it will follow the model of a Markov Chain, according with the predictable seasonal variances (i.e. Summer: hot, direct sunlight, Winter: colder, indirect sunlight) based on the hemisphere of the earth you live on. That helps a little.
Gathering the data streams from these small-sized generators is an interesting project, and crucial to the rollout of the software and network. But a few desklamps aren’t going make a difference to the power consumption and energy policy of a significant number of people, let alone the planet’s population. However, because we can extrapolate from this data set fairly well, we should have a very powerful bunch of “What-If” scenarios to run.”
The basic SolarNode client consists of a low-power computer attached to a charge controller. On a periodic basis, the SolarNode queries the controller to take a snapshot of the power being generated, and reports it to the SolarServer.
I would suggest checking this out, if you want to or are willing to contribute.
MIT Researchers Improve Solar Cell Performace
On July 14, 2008 in Uncategorized
From http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2008/solarcells-0710.html but found on Slashdot
This is something I am very excited for, and hopefully the rest of you are as well. Especially the fact that it can be adapted to existing solar cells without having to just switch technologies. What a very appealing and uplifting ‘invention.’
Thanks MIT!
MIT opens new ‘window’ on solar energy
Cost effective devices expected on market soonImagine windows that not only provide a clear view and illuminate rooms, but also use sunlight to efficiently help power the building they are part of. MIT engineers report a new approach to harnessing the sun’s energy that could allow just that.
The work, to be reported in the July 11 issue of Science, involves the creation of a novel “solar concentrator.” “Light is collected over a large area [like a window] and gathered, or concentrated, at the edges,” explains Marc A. Baldo, leader of the work and the Esther and Harold E. Edgerton Career Development Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering.
As a result, rather than covering a roof with expensive solar cells (the semiconductor devices that transform sunlight into electricity), the cells only need to be around the edges of a flat glass panel. In addition, the focused light increases the electrical power obtained from each solar cell “by a factor of over 40,” Baldo says.
Because the system is simple to manufacture, the team believes that it could be implemented within three years–even added onto existing solar-panel systems to increase their efficiency by 50 percent for minimal additional cost. That, in turn, would substantially reduce the cost of solar electricity.
German Town First to Require Solar Panels on New Buildings
On June 23, 2008 in Uncategorized
From http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,2144,3431273,00.html
“Marburg, a German college town of about 80,000, has become the first in the country to make solar heating obligatory for newly built or renovated buildings. The green bill has some residents and politicians up in arms
The law, passed on Friday, June 20 by a coalition of Social Democrats and Greens, has sparked a storm of criticism in the town of Marburg in the state of Hesse in western Germany.
“We are facing a green dictatorship but nobody dares to say anything,” said opposition politician Hermann Uchtmann.Marburg’s Green Mayor Franz Kahle pointed out that installing the solar panels would cost around 5,000 euros ($7,800), but the price would be offset by energy savings over 15 years. The German news weekly Der Spiegel, however, pointed out that the mayor is a tenant, not a home owner, and would personally enjoy the energy savings but not incur the cost of the panels himself.
But regardless of who picks up the tab, some feel that the first step has to be made, even if it’s uncomfortable. Klaus Vajen, a solar energy expert at the University of Kassel said that “sometimes one has to twist consumers’ arm for their own good.”
Fines await those who don’t comply
Slated to take effect on Oct. 1, the bill stipulates that the solar panels have to measure one square meter (10 square feet) for every 20 square meters of the building’s surface area. Those who don’t comply with the new law will face fines starting at 1,000 euros — dramatically reduced from the initially proposed 15,000 euros.
Exceptions are to be made, however, for buildings that are principally heated from a district heating network, a combined heat and power generator, or a wood pellet oven
Though Marburg’s measures are the country’s most ambitious so far, it is not the first town to take legal steps toward saving energy and slashing carbon dioxide emissions. The right-wing government in the southern state of Baden-Wuerttemberg already requires new houses to meet 20 percent of their heating needs with renewable energy sources
In addition, the federal German cabinet recently approved a comprehensive climate plan aimed at reducing CO2 emissions by nearly 40 percent by the year 2020. The package includes higher standards for energy efficiency in new and renovated buildings as of 2009
From http://www.news24.com/News24/Technology/News/0,,2-13-1443_2344648,00.html
Solar panels become mandatory
23/06/2008 07:26 - (SA)“Berlin - The central German college town of Marburg has become the first in the nation to require newly-built or renovated buildings to have solar panels installed.
The city says the new law was approved by the city council on Friday and will take effect on October 1.
The law requires any newly constructed buildings, as well as existing buildings that are expanded or altered, to include solar panels as part of the heating system.
The city says those violating the law will face fines starting at $1 500. The city is home to Marburg University and has 79 000 inhabitants.
The German government aims to slash the nation’s greenhouse gas emissions 40% from 1990 levels by 2020. “
From http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/jun/23/solarpower.greenbuilding
German town forces homes to fix solar tiles
The Guardian
Monday June 23, 2008Solar panels will soon grace the roofs of the quiet medieval town of Marburg under a controversial new law forcing owners of all new or renovated buildings in its limits to include solar panels, setting a national precedent.
A coalition of Social Democrats and Greens passed the ruling late on Friday to counter climate change and soaring energy prices. Anyone failing to comply will face a €1,000 (£790) fine.
The law stipulates that, from October, a 1 sq metre panel must be built for every 20 sq metres of surface area. It applies to new homes or existing buildings undergoing renovations to heating systems or roofs.
Conservatives said the law went too far: “This is an environmental dictatorship,” said the local Christian Democratic Union leader, Hermann Uchtmann. A local energy trade association said it was investigating legal action to reverse the ruling.
A few German towns have beefed up regulations to encourage energy conservation in new buildings. But Marburg, which is home to 80,000 people, has gone a step further by including the owners of older houses in the new legislation.
Installing the panels could cost homeowners up to €5,000, a figure largely offset by energy savings over 15 years, the town’s Green mayor, Franz Kahle, said.
Environmentalists predicted Marburg would become a trendsetter: “This town is a pioneer for renewable energy in Germany,” said Andree Böhling, an energy expert at Greenpeace in Hamburg.
Solar panels have been adopted at a comparatively rapid pace in Germany, despite its cloudy climes. This is largely because of a law that guarantees local power firms pay an above-market rate for 20 years for renewable energy fed into the national grid.
All I really have to say about this is: “What’s up, Germany?”
I have read of a few smaller places that have done this, one of which I believe was in Africa, but this German town is really stepping up to the plate on this one. Hopefully others will follow the trend.
