Beautiful Solar Buildings

When we think about solar panels or solar energy, we always think of hot solar panels that are installed on top of building's roofs over top of shingles or flat surfaces.

Generally, they are an eyesore and expensive to install.

Well, since the solar power business has boomed in many parts of the world, and governments and private sector alike are now interested in powering up their grids with renewable energies, lots of private companies, laboratories and public sector entities have thrown in their cash and started developing solar energy programs, new solar energy techs and programs for the mass market.

Europe, China, India, the US, South Korea and Japan all have invested HUGE amounts in the technology and in some places, like in 2017 India, solar power is just as cheap as coal power!

This is what drives whole businesses to change, including the Energy industry.

And with interest in the market, comes innovation, not only in efficiency, but also in form factor and ergonomics.

I discuss this movement and where it may lead in the video below:

Now for some examples of great looking solar panels:

IKEA
Yep, Ikea is ready to sell you solar panels of its own.  Fortunately (or is it unfortunately), you won't be installing these yourself.  Experts do it after delivery.  They look pretty standard for solar panels, so nothing very beautiful about those, however, it does show that solar panels are becoming a sort of commodity in a similar way that LED lighting has become something of a standard for car lights nowadays.

TESLA
I love Tesla's concepts.  They always think of beauty whenever they design something, whether it is their cars, their battery packs and now solar panels on the roof.  The image below shows the new concept they are going with.  Can you tell that those shingles are actually solar panels?  This is a case of camouflage indeed!  You wouldn't know if those were solar cells or just normal shingles...

BUILD SOLAR
We've heard of solar roofs and solar windows.  But how about making opaque or semi-transparent walls solar power capable as well?  This company's concept can make walls look futuristic, have good insulation and generate power as well.  I don't think these are out yet, but does show some ideas and innovation.

SKYCOOL SYSTEMS
This is a spinoff company from Stanford University and these are NOT solar panels.  What they do is perhaps act to avoid additional energy needs for cooling buildings in hot areas or hot times of the year, thus avoiding the need for solar panels in the first place.   Less juice needed for cooling = less energy demand on the building.  The concepts currently look like ugly solar panels, unfortunately, but they could be melded properly to a roof surface in a similar way to the Ikea idea for solar roofs (or perhaps better), once they get these into commercial form factors.  What these panels do is absorb thermal energy (heat) from the bottom surface in contact with the building and shoot the radiation out into the cold, cold vacuum of space.  It's top reflective surface reflects 97% of all of the sun's energy back to where it came from, thus keeping the building cool even in strong heat.  Now, these clever guys thought of something pretty neat:  what if they coat solar panel surfaces with their energy re-transmission material?  That has the effect of keeping the solar panel cooler (increasing solar panel efficiency), and keeping the building underneath cooler as well, thus reducing the need for electricity in the first place.  So combining both material and solar panel tech could potentially require us to use fewer solar panels and still have energy to spare.  Great idea guys!

All in all, the Solar Energy industry is just gearing up as costs for solar are down enough to warrant such investments.  This will in turn make solar energy even more cost-effective than it is now... and with clever people working on these, we can have nice homes and offices, fully charged, nice to look at, and COOL!

Catch you all next week for another installment.

Instantly Rechargeable Electric and Hybrid Cars

Many among you have gone ahead and bought a hybrid vehicle in the past or are planning to either purchase one in the future... that or a completely electric motor vehicle.  Perhaps, like me, you are excited about using quiet electrical self-driven cars that are meant to be deployed in the market around the year 2020 by most large car manufacturers.

It's great, but right now I'm also thinking about how that would change my travel habits.  I mean, with self-driven cars and Uber, perhaps I don't need to worry so much about recharging the vehicle since whenever Uber sends me one, I would assume, they send me a car that has enough charge to get me to my pre-organized destination.

However, perhaps myself and others would go for an option of buying one such car, or sharing them with a few friends or family members in such a way that the car would need to recharge on occasion.  And currently, electric cars take a few hours to fully recharge, meaning, on a long trip, we can't just stop by a recharging station for some snacks and a bio break, and just moving along straight away.

Thankfully, because of the huge amount of buzz, investment and work done on electric vehicles and renewable energy sources in the past number of years, companies like Ifbatteries, have figured out an innovative way to resolve the issue by going about the problem of recharging batteries in a different way.

Instead of plugging your car in to recharge your polluting to produce traditional electric car batteries for a few hours, you would be draining your batteries' spent electrolyte solutions while simultaneously filling up with fresh charged up electrolyte solutions.  All done within the time you would normally "gas up".

Bonus to this is we'd be able to reuse generally the same type of refueling stations that are already dotting our road networks and reusing liquid transporting trucks that were previously used for gasoline (though modified to handle 2 different liquids in the tank since these flow battery systems need an anolyte and a catholyte to work in equal measure.

More on this and socio-economical impacts of such things in the video below:

Now here's what I find particularly interesting.  These spent electrolytes could easily be filtered and cleaned and then introduced into a power generation plant that would "recharge" the liquids by going the opposite direction in the redox reaction, thus rejuvenating the spent liquids and then sending that liquid back out to service stations.

This makes those liquids recyclable materials.  The concept of a flow battery that could be used to produce the energy to recharge spent electrolytes has already been designed in large scale in Germany.  The Ewe Gasspeicher GmbH flow battery in Germany is the largest battery concept in the world right now, and is capable of providing energy to 75,000 homes.  It produces 120 MW of power at 700 MWh.  Of course, it is a battery, which means it needs to keep charging the electrolytes and pumping it out.

In a cyclical concept using such a flow battery concept to charge electrolytes, which is transported to refueling stations for electric cars, and that takes in spent electrolytes, there would be a need for some new electrolytes to be reintroduced into the cycle, but essentially you have an environmentally friendly concept that is also cheap for the drivers and practical.

We could very easily hook it up with either solar, wind or geothermal energy capture structures for the recharging portion of the process, something that has become so much cheaper over the last few years that in some countries, like India, the cost for Solar is rivaling the cost of coal power plants.

Given these trends, I do believe we're on the verge of quiet neighborhoods filled with electric cars that are conveniently recharged with electrolytes that are themselves charged using totally renewable power plants.