Innovations In Solar Power A Look Into The Future

In this article, the author presents insights into the innovative solar technologies that are coming up thick and fast to address the growing ever growing energy needs.

With a growing economy and an increased sensitivity towards the environment, there has been a clamour towards the need for more and more renewable energy technologies. The Government of India has taken a mammoth step to promote ecologically sustainable growth while addressing India’s energy security challenge through the rollout of the National Solar Mission (NSM). NSM targets to create 20,000 MW of installed solar power capacity in the country by 2022. The Jawaharlal Nehru National Solar Mission (JNNSM) capitalizes on India’s tropical location and its endowment of vast solar potential of about 5000 trillion kWh per year energy which is incident over India. While on one hand, the JNNSM adopts the conventional methods of tapping the solar potential of India, , on the other hand, corporate are increasingly working to power equipments using innovative solar devices. The following section covers some of the innovative developments that have been brought about in the field of smart solar technologies in the recent times by some global leaders in solar technology.

Solar powered processor
Intel recently unveiled a computer with a processor running on postage stamp-size cell powered by solar energy. Showcasing what the future holds in the computing arena, the computer had its solar-powered CPU drawing sufficient power from two small overhead reading lamps to run animation and other Windows-based computing processes. However, only the processor was being powered by the lamps and other parts of the computer were powered through a traditional power supply. Intel CEO Paul Otelleni concedes that the demonstration is just a lab experiment and much more work would be needed to make an entire computer system that works on solar power but a ‘Pentium-class’ processor running on solar power was unheard of even six months ago. But as they say ‘Well begun is half done’ and it won’t be long before the likes of Intel would encourage the hardware giants of the world to come up with solar powered computer systems.

LED based Solar Lighting Solution
As per the National Sample Survey Office statistics, about 39% of households in rural India still use kerosene to meet their lighting requirements. Kerosene lamps generally provide poor quality light; produce greenhouse gas emissions and most importantly, have significant health and safety hazards associated with them. To address this existing need-gap, a number of players have jumped onto the LED based solar lighting bandwagon. Luminous, one such Indian player, made headlines recently when it launched its LED based solar lighting solution. The Luminous LED lights provide a high standard and a low cost solution to the problems facing rural India. This new product with a single light output represents a one-stop solution for all daily household lighting needs.

Spray-on solar cells
Mitsubishi Chemical Corp. has come up with a technology that enables solar cells to be applied to buildings, vehicles and even clothing in the same way that paint is applied. This breakthrough technology called the ‘spray-on solar cells’ means that the places where energy from the sun can be harvested are almost limitless. This new technology utilizes carbon compounds which, when dried and solidified, act as semiconductors and generate electricity in reaction to being exposed to light. The conventional technology requires crystalline silicon to be sandwiched between glass sheets and positioned on the roofs of homes and office buildings, or in space-consuming “solar parks’ and scientists have been working hard to increase both the energy-gathering efficiency of solar panels and make them easier to install and use.
Mitsubishi claims that the new painted-on solar cells would be particularly effective when applied to round or curved structures, such as chimneys or could also be applied to the exteriors of cars and theoretically used to help power the vehicle and even to such flexible surfaces as clothing. Mitsubishi Chemical is in talks with carmakers to build a car coated with the new solar cells that aims to give the vehicle sufficient power to travel upto 10 km after being exposed to sunlight for two hours.

Water solar panels
Solar panels have grown exponentially in the last few years driven by declining costs and growing energy prices. The growth has been further boosted by the advent of the low cost manufacturers of silicon solar panels from China. The declining cost can be attributed to falling prices of the raw material poly-silicon and subsidies from governments fighting climate change which have all contributed to shape a 150% increase in world solar demand in 2010. But the one major stumbling block which prevented solar panels from being extensively used was the heavy land cost that would skew the pricing mechanism. The land availability problem could be addressed by the revolutionary concept of floating solar panels, which could be installed on water bodies and put to rest the land availability issue. This technology, though on one hand saves expensive real estate as they are built on industrial water bodies like wastewater treatment plants, cooling facilities in factories and power plants etc, but on the flipside it involves an increased transmission cost as underwater cable is required to transmit power and the system maintenance cost is also higher than normal. But as more and more players jump into the arena of manufacturing floating solar cells the price points are bound to follow the downward trend.

The key now to a clean energy future is the setting of clear and challenging targets and the provision of reliable, long-term support to the solar industry and allow the industry to respond and deliver the required technology. The shift of focus to solar power has brought about a revolution in the solar technology and with the abundance of its availability in large parts of India, Solar energy has the potential to emerge as a significant part of the energy mix by 2030.

With India’s projected GDP growth pegged at 8%, the onus lies on the power sector to ramp-up its capacity to be able to cater to the burgeoning need for electricity to sustain the growth. With the existing infrastructure, the saga of energy shortage would continue and as per the Central Electricity Authority (CEA) India would face apeak demand shortage of 12.9%. This shortage of electricity in a country on the cusp of growth opens up avenues for ushering technologies to fill in the gap and cater to the energy needs of the Indian population. It’s now only a matter of time before solar- powered chips, and spray-solar cells would be as banal as mobile telephony is in present days. Chances are that the solar-powered chips are going to power the next laptop that we buy and/or the headlamp of the next car that gets launched would be powered by the spray-cells painted on the chassis of the car.

The author, Sandeep Roy is an Associate with a sustainability consulting firm cKinetics.

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