Beyond the Solar Panel

The government tests cars for gas mileage. Now it's testing roof tiles for wattage.

Homeowners have long been able to partially power their homes with sunlight, but it meant clumsily mounting photovoltaic (PV) panels on the roof. Now the latest generation of PV panels look and act much like ordinary roofing tiles or shingles. And the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is evaluating nine of these commercial PV roofing products in hopes of providing an easy way for consumers to judge the panels' power potential.

"A lot of people are considering the use of PV products on their homes and businesses, and in order to make decisions on whether it's a worthwhile investment you need to predict their performance," says Hunter Fanney, head of NIST's Heat Transfer and Alternative Energy Systems Group in Gaithersburg, MD. "We are collecting detailed performance data to validate those models."

The roofing materials, which use various types of solar-to-electricity conversion, are being tested for 15 months. Fanney hopes to use the data to build a computer program and database with, among other things, average flat-surface solar radiation readings for neighborhoods across the United States (as measured by the weather service at the nearest airport). Punch in the performance characteristics of the roofing product you want to use, plus your location, roof orientation and slope, and other data, and -- bingo -- you'll know what kind of wattage you can expect from your roof.

According to Fanney, roofing tiles and shingles with embedded solar converters have been on the market for about three years. They look like regular roofing materials, keep out the sun and rain, and can be installed in much the same way. But by generating electricity, these tiles and shingles save consumers money.

Around 500 square feet of PV tiles can produce three kilowatts of electricity, according to Subhendu Guha, president and chief operating officer of United Solar Ovonic, a maker of PV shingles in Auburn Hills, MI -- and most roofs are several times that size. His company's version is dark blue and can blend with ordinary shingles of a similar shade. Or a builder might devote an entire sunny section to PV materials.

"A south-facing roof on a three-bedroom home could supply 20 to 30 percent of the home's electrical needs," says Paul Maycock, a consultant and head of PV Energy Systems in

Without subsidies and incentives, such as those in California, PV power costs about twice as much as utility power, says Thomas Leyden, vice president of east coast operations for PowerLight, a PV systems integrator in Berkeley, CA. That difference, however, is shrinking. "PV hardware prices have gone down tenfold in the last 15 years, thanks to new technologies, better manufacturing techniques, and more efficient use of materials," Leyden says. Prices are currently falling by about 5.5 percent yearly, he says, so they should come down another 50 percent in a little more than a decade -- and become fully competitive with utility power.

Maycock is even more optimistic, projecting that the installed price will fall from today's $8 or so per watt to $4 by 2014. That would make solar power "fully economic in the Sunbelt," he notes.

Meanwhile, Guha maintains that PV roofing is already economical at certain times of the day, in places where utilities charge extra for peak daytime usage. There, he says, it can be used to avoid paying those surcharges, a practice called "peak shaving."

Historically, the biggest market for residential PV roofing has been in Japan, which gets about half the sunlight that California does and the average residential user derives only a kilowatt. But government incentives, low mortgage interest rates, and high utility power rates have made residential PV popular there, says Maycock.

Source - MIT Technology Review

Storing Solar Power Efficiently

Thermal-power plants could solve some of the problems with solar power by turning sunlight into steam and storing heat for cloudy days.
By Peter Fairley

Solar proponents love to boast that just a few hundred square kilometers' worth of photovoltaic solar panels installed in Southwestern deserts could power the United States. Their schemes come with a caveat, of course: without backup power plants or expensive investments in giant batteries, flywheels, or other energy-storage systems, this solar-power supply would fluctuate wildly with each passing cloud (not to mention with the sun's daily rise and fall and seasonal ebbs and flows). Solar-power startup Ausra, based in Palo Alto, thinks it has the solution: solar-thermal-power plants that turn sunlight into steam and efficiently store heat for cloudy days.

"Fossil-fuel proponents often say that solar can't do the job, that solar can't run at night, solar can't run the economy," says David Mills, Ausra's founder and chairman. "That's true if you don't have storage." He says that solar-thermal plants are the solution because storing heat is much easier than storing electricity. Mills estimates that, thanks to that advantage, solar-thermal plants capable of storing 16 hours' worth of heat could provide more than 90 percent of current U.S. power demand at prices competitive with coal and natural gas. "There's almost no limit to how much you can put into the grid," he says.

Major utilities are buying the idea. In July, the Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E) signed a 25-year deal with Ausra competitor Solel Solar Systems of Beit Shemesh, Israel, to buy power from a 553-megawatt solar-thermal plant that Solel is developing in California's Mojave Desert. The plant will supply 400,000 homes in northern and central California when it is completed in 2011. Florida Power & Light, meanwhile, hired Solel to upgrade the 1980s-era solar-thermal plants it operates in the Mojave.

Ausra, meanwhile, is negotiating with PG&E to supply power from a 175-megawatt plant that it plans to build in California, for which it secured $40 million in venture financing this month.

What distinguishes Ausra's design is its relative simplicity. In conventional solar-thermal plants such as Solel's, a long trough of parabolic mirrors focuses sunlight on a tube filled with a heat-transfer fluid, often some sort of oil or brine. The fluid, in turn, produces steam to drive a turbine and produce electricity. Ausra's solar collectors employ mass-produced and thus cheaper flat mirrors, and they focus light onto tubes filled with water, thus directly producing steam. Ausra's collectors produce less power, but that power costs less to produce.

One megawatt's worth of Ausra's solar collectors has been producing steam in New South Wales, Australia, since 2004; the steam is fed into the turbines of a primarily coal-fired power plant. The final piece of the system--a proprietary heat-energy-storage system--should be ready by 2009.

Mills will not say what material his company's system will heat, although several recent solar-thermal plants by Ausra competitors--including one in Nevada that started up this summer and two under construction in Spain near Granada--plan to use molten-salt storage. Molten salts are inexpensive salt solutions that absorb considerable energy when they melt and give up that energy when they freeze.

What Mills can say for certain is that Ausra's storage system will lower its power-generation costs. That is a surprising statement since energy storage can as much as double the cost of electricity from photovoltaics or wind turbines.

Heat storage is more efficient than electricity storage: just 2 to 7 percent of the energy is lost when heat is banked in a storage system, compared with losses of at least 15 percent when energy is stored in a battery. More important, says Mills, is the fact that storage enables thermal plants to use cheaper turbines.

The bottom line is that Mills vows that adding storage plus savings from economies of scale and lower cost of capital (as banks become familiar with solar-thermal technology) will cut Ausra's current 10 to 11 cents per kilowatt-hour cost of power in half. By 2010, he expects solar thermal to provide California with baseline power cheaper than natural gas, currently set by the state at 9.2 cents per kilowatt-hour.

Why has solar-thermal power received little attention from the energy-storage community despite such promise? John Boyes, manager of the Energy Storage & Distributed Energy Resources at Sandia National Laboratories, in Albuquerque, NM, says that solar thermal is viable but inflexible compared with other means of storing energy, such as, say, coupling wind farms to large batteries, flywheels, and supercapacitors that can be placed almost anywhere on a power grid. "You can store energy anywhere you have electricity and a little bit of floor space," says Boyes.

The footprint of Ausra's planned 175-megawatt plant will be, in contrast, about one square mile.