Foldable Solar Roof For Parking Lots

A foldable solar roof for parking lots is something new in solar technologies.

Today, solar energy is used all over the world. There are many improvements in already existing solar technologies. Entirely new technologies and innovative solar devices are emerging. More and more people have solar-powered homes. Back in 1956, the cost of solar used to cost around $300 per watt. Now, in the US, you can get rooftop solar for $1.49/watt from Tesla and a similar price from others.

According to the latest news, a company in Switzerland and its partner, Kronberg and St. Gallish-Appenzellische Kraftwerke (SAK), have created something unique in the field of the solar technologies - a foldable solar roof, that comes out only when the sun is shining. It is not a typical roof designed for residential use. This solar roof is meant for parking lots and generates power for on-site consumption, including for electric vehicles charging (there are two charging stations). It also provides shadow to keep vehicles cooled when the weather is hot.
         

                            Image credit: cleantechnica.com

The companies started this project back in the spring of 2020 when they built the foldable photovoltaic system on the Kronbergbahn’s parking lot. When the sun rises, the solar roof unfolds and soaks up the rays to generate solar power, then when it’s cloudy, raining, or during night time, it folds up. The foldable photovoltaic roof is named Horizon, its size is 43,056 ft2 (4,000 square meters), has a 420 kW generation capacity, and it covers the parking lot for 152 cars. The cost of the entire project is about 1.5 million Swiss francs.   

The foldable solar roof  was manufactured at DHP Technology headquarters in Zizers. It uses mono and polycrystalline solar cells and glass-free laminate tech. “The folding sunroof is lightweight because we use glass-free solar module technology,” said the DHP representative. “The installation is simple and is based on the plug-and-play approach.”

The parking lot has 1,320 solar panels and produces 350,000 kWh per year. Right now, the companies are looking for investors who are interested in sponsoring a system. There are 660 panels available and expected to be licensed soon to interested clients. The license agreement is for 15 years. 330 panels are already used by SAK and Kronbergbahn AG.

Investors will receive five different experience vouchers during their 15-year right of use - the vouchers vary depending on the investment. If you are interested in investing in a panel, you have two options. You can invest in a whole panel or by the quarter:

1. Entire Panel CHF 800 ($852)
2. Quarter Panel CHF 200 ($213)

The sources of this news are cleantechnica.com (you can see a video on their website), pv-magazine.com, and interestingengineering.com. 

Topher White Saves Rainforests with Solar-Powered Used Smartphones

Image credit : The New York Times

As we all know the forests (including rainforests) are essential for our planet. Millions of people depend on them for their livelihoods and they can help combat climate change by absorbing carbon dioxide. Unfortunately, poachers and illegal loggers do not interested in it. So, how to save them? Topher White, a physicist, and engineer have a brilliant idea of how to save the rainforests with the help of solar-powered used smartphones and advanced AI training platform (Google technology called TensorFlow).

The idea came to him in 2011 during a trip to Borneo, Indonesia. He was visiting a gibbon reserve in the heart of the rainforest when he stumbled upon logger illegally cutting a tree. Most surprising for him was that the man was working only a few hundred meters from the rangers' cabin. Covered by the usual noises in the forest as the chirps of birds, the buzz of cicadas, the banter of gibbons, the sound of chainsaws went unnoticed.

After returning to the United States, Topher White developed a solar-powered device and later founded San Francisco-based non-profit Rainforest Connection. The device consists of an old Android smartphone equipped with highly sensitive microphones that record the sounds up to three square kilometers around. When the sound of a chainsaw is detected, the phone sends a real-time alert to the cloud server that sends a notification to the rangers, who can then get the logging stopped. Detecting the sounds is possible thanks to the AI system that can be trained to identify all kinds of sounds, from mechanical sounds like chainsaws to the sounds of specific animal species.

A homemade solar panel system, also made from recycled materials, power the listening device despite the shades in the rainforest. And surprisingly, even in remote forests, you can often get decent cell reception that makes sending the alert possible.

At first, White had an intention to use commercial solar panels, but he hadn’t considered that the diminished sunlight under a canopy of trees could be a problem. Doing research, he found some papers from the 1950s and 1960s that mentioned sunflecks - transient spots of direct sunlight. “It turns out that 80 or 90 percent of the solar radiation that makes it through the canopy comes in the form of sunflecks,” White says.

D2solar, a solar-module prototyping firm in San Jose, Calif., helped White to design special flower-like structure, with the phone in the middle, and small solar panels sprouting as petals. These solar panels generate enough power for the phones, even under the forest canopy. They use discarded strips of monocrystalline panels and cut them into petal-shaped patterns. Each petal consists of three 0.5-volt cells, wired in series, and seven petals are then wired to each device in parallel.

“The idea was to space the petals based on the average diameter of the sunfleck and to distribute them as widely as possible around the device so that at any given time there was a high probability that the sun would be striking all the cells on a petal,” White explains.

“I was surprised that it worked,” says Michael Rowell, who was working at D2solar as an R&D engineer at the time. “If you stick a normal solar panel in the jungle, it won’t work no matter how big it is.” White’s solar flowers generate 1.5 V, which he boosts to 5 V using a simple circuit. And finally, his rainforest protective solar-powered devices were ready to be placed high up in the tree where they will be invisible.

Between 15 and 30 percent of wood traded on the global market is harvested illegally, according to the United Nations Environmental Programme and Interpol. In key tropical countries, illegal logging accounts for 50 to 90 percent of all forestry products on the market. White says that deforestation is a bigger contributor to the greenhouse gas emissions than all the world’s vehicles combined - cars, trucks, trains, ships, and planes.

White overcame many obstacles and complications to bring to the reality his simple solution. He now spends nine months out of the year installing and troubleshooting the “forest guardians”. Today, listening solar-powered devices are saving trees in Indonesia, Brazil, Cameroon, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, and Nicaragua. White won the support of the non-profit organizations, tribes, and local communities. And something very important, he’s won the support of environmentalists and forest law-enforcement groups. Randy Hayes, the founder of the Rainforest Action Network, calls White’s system “a powerful tool that could do a lot of good on the planet.”

Sources: spectrum.ieee.org & thejakartapost.com

Gel Makes Solar Panels “Sweat” to Cool Themselves

Image credit: pixabay.com

Last month I read something interesting in the news concerning solar panels and I decided to write a post about it in my blog. It is something new in solar power technology - gel-like material makes standard solar panels “sweet” to cool themselves. Liangbing Hu, a materials scientist at the University of Maryland, College Park says: “it’s a simple, elegant, and effective way to retrofit existing solar cell panels for an instant efficiency boost.”

Typical silicon solar panels convert approximately 20% of the sun’s light into electricity. Much of the rest turns into heat, which can warm the solar panels by as much as 40°C/104°F. As we know, the heating of the panels is one of the most serious problems - solar panels are much less efficient when overheated. In fact, with every degree of temperature above 25°C/77°F, the efficiency of the solar panel drops. 

In recent years, researchers have devised materials that can suck water vapor from the air and condense it into liquid water for drinking. Among them are researchers at the University of Texas who have created a new gel-like material. Initially, the gel was created to produce clean drinking water. It proves its effectiveness and has the potential to provide a clean, sustainable water source for millions.

The gel-like material is a mix of carbon nanotubes in polymers with a water-attracting calcium chloride salt. This substance absorbs water vapor at night when the air is cold, and humidity is high. Then it causes the water vapor to condense into droplets that the gel holds. When the heat rises during the day, the gel releases water vapor. If covered by clear plastic, the released vapor is trapped, condenses back into liquid water, and flows into a storage container.

Peng Wang, an environmental engineer at Hong Kong Polytechnic University, and his colleagues figure out another use for the condensed water: coolant for solar panels. So, the researchers applied a 1-centimeter thick sheet of the gel against the underside of a standard silicon solar panel. Their idea was that during the day, the gel would pull the heat from the solar panel. It initiates an evaporation process for the water it pulled out of the air the previous night, releasing it through the bottom of the gel layer. Thus the gel-like material can make solar panels “sweat" and cool - just like sweating cools the human body. The amount of gel needed per panel depends on its size and the temperature and humidity in your location. In a desert environment with 35% humidity, a 1-square-meter solar panel required 1 kilogram of gel to cool it. In a muggy area with 80% humidity, only 0.3 kg of the gel is needed per square meter solar panel.

The temperature of these solar panels can drop to 10°C/50°F, and the electricity output of the panels can increase by 15% to 19%. In the area of solar technology, this is considerable. “In a field where engineers struggle for every 0.1% boost in power conversion efficiency, even a 1% gain would be an economic boom,” says Jun Zhou, a materials scientist at Huazhong University of Science and Technology.

One disadvantage of this solution is that rain could dissolve the calcium chloride salt in the gel, sapping its water-attracting performance. Peng Wang acknowledged this as a possible problem, despite the hydrogel sitting beneath the solar panel, and being somewhat shielded from the rain. He said he and his colleagues were working on a second-generation gel that would not degrade, even when wet.

The team is also looking at another design option that could trap and re-condense water after it had evaporated from the gel - and potentially using the collected water to clean solar panels from the dust.

Currently, over 600 gigawatts of solar power exist worldwide, providing 3% of global electricity demand. This number may increase by about five times over the next decade.

Source: sciencemag.org

SmartFlower Solar Power System - an Alternative to Solar Panels

Image credit: smartflower.com

SmartFlower solar power system comes from Austria. It is an innovative and unique solar panel system that can be mount on the ground in your backyard. This high-tech “smart” solar power system is an alternative to rooftop mounted solar power systems.

When you install a conventional solar panel system you have some limitation like roof type and space availability while with the SmartFlower solar power system you only need to choose the place which has sufficient exposure to sunlight. Another advantage is that this portable solar panel system shaped like a flower, can follow the sun throughout the day and this is a far more efficient way of harnessing solar energy. The photovoltaic device does all of this autonomously through algorithm-based dual-axis tracking. Thus, SmartFlower can produce up to 40% more solar energy than a conventional solar panel system.

SmartFlower solar power system has a stunning design and some cool high-tech features. Its height is 16.4ft (5 meters), weighs around 650 kg, and it rotates throughout the day in the same way as sunflower petals do. The “smart” photovoltaic system occupies 194 square feet. It consists of 12 “petals” covered with solar cells, which open up every morning when the sun rises. The SmartFlower moves toward the sun at a 90-degree angle and produces approximately 2.5kW of electricity in peak sunlight conditions. When the sun goes down the petals close. 

The SmartFlower gathers information about weather conditions and takes it into account when decides whether it should be open or fold together for protection. In winds 29 mph+ the SmartFlower solar petals automatically move to a horizontal position. At 39 mph+, the solar petals will completely fold down. Also, the solar petals clean themselves through the anti-microbial brushes that are attached on the back of each petal.

The upgraded model of the SmartFlower is named SmartFlower +Plus. SmartFlower +Plus is the same as the main version but includes battery storage to store solar energy. The stored excess solar energy can cover cloudy days and peeks in consumption. SmartFlower +Plus can work on-grid and off-grid - completely independent from the grid. This model is available in two versions –one with a storage capacity of 4.6 kWh and the other with 13.8kWh storage capacity. In addition, there is another model of the SmartFlower that lets you charge electric cars. 

Besides tracking the sun and self-cleaning, other “smart” features are self-containing and self-cooling. The SmartFlower solar power system is an all-in-one complete solar energy system, with an inverter, battery storage, battery charger, monitor, and control box, all integrated into a single unit. SmartFlower solar system also has rear ventilation to keep the system up to 18°F cooler than it would be without it. That is good for solar cell efficiency, which means 5-10% more output on average.

The SmartFlower is available in eight colors (berry, ocean, amber, mermaid, pearl, lavender, jungle, and porcelain). It can be fast and easily installed (just plug and play). And by removing four bolts and one cable you can move SmartFlower anywhere you want.

According to the news, the Austrian manufacturer of the SmartFlower began bankruptcy proceedings in Germany in 2017. However, the U.S. division of SmartFlower operates independently from the original Austrian developer. So far, the SmartFlower has been installed at numerous U.S. backyards, in addition to organizations like the Detroit Zoo, Mary Baldwin University, and Virginia Wesleyan University. The United States division of SmartFlower is currently based in Boston, Massachusetts.

SmartFlower solar power system is a real alternative to solar panels. If you want to buy one of the models, you should know that before applying for all incentives and tax credits, the SmartFlower solar panel system ranges from $25,000 to $30,000. SmartFlower can generate between 4000 and 6500 kWh per year. The average home in the United States uses 10,400 kWh annually, so this will cover 40-60% of your energy bill.

You can visit the official SmartFlower website for more information.

Sources: solar.com, energysage.com & Internet

Styles Solar Ice-Cream Van

                              Image credit: stylesicecream.co.uk

Britain’s first solar ice-cream van is a concept of David Baker, the owner of Styles Farmhouse Ice-Cream, based in Rodhuish, Somerset. He designed Styles Solar Ice-Cream Van to reduce fumes from diesel engines at festivals. The Styles Solar Van idea came up to him in 2016 after customers, show directors, and event organisers complained about the diesel fumes from its regular vans.

The prototype was ready in 2018 and it consisted of four solar panels. The current model has eight solar panels and was ready in May 2019. Besides solar panels on the top, the van has a big bank of batteries inside. The solar panels and the battery storage power the freezers, ice-cream makers, and coffee machines. “In full sun the van can operate for up to five to six days. On cloudy days it will run for two to three days. The system can be fully recharged using mains electricity in just four hours.”- says Baker

The solar van is built on the Peugeot Boxer Van, though other van types can be used, too. Its latest Euro 6 low emission engine will get you wherever you want but when you are on site selling ice-cream you can rely entirely on solar energy. 

The Style Solar Van has been serving ice-cream to thousands across the UK five months of the year. Baker says that his team has attended around 160 events, including music festivals and agricultural shows. He estimates that solar energy saves him around £4,000, or nearly $5,000 a year. 

Baker’s family has farmed 300-acre land for 119 years. They were growing wheat, barley and oats, and milking cows and sheep. In 1988, Baker decided to diversify his business into making and selling luxury ice-cream in order to get more income. 

Currently, Baker concentrates more on the ice-cream side of the business while other farmers cultivate crops on his land and milk the cows. Styles Farmhouse Ice Cream now has 50 employees and supplies 250 luxury ice-cream shops and works events.

On 3 December, 2019, Styles Solar Ice-Cream Van participated at Somerset County Council’s climate emergency business summit, at Taunton Rugby Club. The van was an example of how local businesses are responding to climate change by reducing their carbon footprint. This summit is part of the county council’s plan to work towards making Somerset carbon-neutral by 2030, by involving local companies in strategies that will help reduce air pollution.

The eco-friendly vehicles officially debuted at the Ice Cream and Artisan Food Show in Harrogate, the United Kingdom which took place between 11-13 February, 2020. Styles Solar Ice-Cream Van is now available commercially and it can be ordered here.

Sources: darigold.com & wsfp.co.uk