Re-Thinking Thinking

Some thoughts on a rainy Saturday, as I get ready for a jaunt to Uganda

NYT ran an article today about energy woes in Latin America. Supply disruptions, price increases, fears of instability. Here is the link for those who would like to read

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/13/world/americas/13chile.html?oref=login

Any doubt that developing better ways to generate electricity through renewables makes sense?

EU Incentives

How much is government doing to promote solar power generation? This will be an ongoing theme here - and my first post relates to the EU. Check out the "targeting" thinking from the
EU.

http://www.euractiv.com/en/energy/eu-renewable-energy-policy/article-117536

It will be fun to see how well the EU policy actually works

Brownfield Projects

If you were in the business of developing solar production facilities, where to put them? They are pretty big, and the land acquisition costs could be high. What about a brownfield site? Hmm. Brockton, Mass. seems to already have had that idea. Check it out

http://www.solarforecast.com/ArticleDetails.php?articleID=330

Michae

Info source

One of the reasons for creating this blog is to make it easier to find information about solar products. I just found a great resources called "Solar Forecast". Check it out

http://www.solarforecast.com/index.php

michael

More on CIGS

Hmmm. Just as I finished my last blog on CIGS, I saw a few more internet scraps worthy of mention. Add to the list

Solyndra
Shell Solar
SoloPower

as companies racing to produce and market CIGS based PV stuff. Seems CIGS is hot stuff.

CIGS to the rescue?

Money, money! Solar will become viable only when it becomes price competitive with conventional sources of electricity supply. Uggh! Silicon based technology has not yet found a way to bring costs down. But a new way of making copper based PV's might. It's called CIGS, and some major money is flowing into start ups to do CIGS production. As far as I can tell, the major potential players here are

Nanosolar
Helio Volt
Konarka
Miasole

I will track the progress of these ventures hoping, hoping, hoping that at least one of them will find a place in the market.

Introducing something

Hi

This is an initial post for a blog on solar power project development. Why do it? There is growing interest in how to develop projects for producing energy using renewables. These can be seen as typical commercial projects, and generally the press treats them that way. At the same time, little people (like me) have a stake in understanding if there really is a shift in energy production away from non-renewable, Co2 generating systems to more environmentally friendly and flexible systems. But will we have any role to play? Hmmmm.

Michael