Glenda Hoffman has an answer for the thieves, should they choose to return to her home in Desert Hot Springs, California. “I have a shotgun right next to the bed and a .22 under my pillow.”

Hoffman was the victim of a theft that one industry professional has dubbed “the crime of the future”. Another observer has come up with the term “grand theft solar” to describe the spate of recent burglaries in sunny California.

In May Hoffman lost 16 solar panels from her roof in three separate burglaries, one while she slept below. Happily for Hoffman her insurers have agreed to pay the $95,000 (£48,000) cost of replacing the panels. But as energy prices soar, and solar power takes off – at least in California – so opportunistic thieves have turned to the lucrative, and complicated, business of dismantling solar panels.

“I wouldn’t say it’s pervasive, but it’s going on,” California Solar Energy Industries Association executive director Sue Kateley told the Valley Times.

California is the leader for solar installations, with 33,000 across the state. Unsurprisingly, it is also the market leader for thefts of solar installations, although figures are hard to come by.

“The solar panel thing is pretty new,” said Contra Costa county sheriff’s office spokesman Jimmy Lee. “We’re seeing an increasing number of cases.”

One night in late August, 26 solar panels with a value of $20,000 were stolen from California’s first certified organic farm, Star Route Farms in Bolinas, 20 miles up the coast from San Francisco.

“It’s probably easier to steal a $20,000 car,” Rob Erlichman, president of Sunlight Electric, which sold the panels to the farm in 2006, told the Point Reyes Light. “To steal that many panels you need a truck and you need guys.”

A few miles inland, in Lafayette, a truck and some guys is just what the thieves had. A resident came home during the day to find three men on the roof of his house and five of his solar panels in the back of a rented truck. The men fled, leaving behind the truck and the panels.

Ken Martin, who runs a real estate company in Santa Rosa, California, found one day this spring that thieves had removed 58 panels with a value of $75,000 from an office building he owns. His proposed solution is to paint his solar panels bright pink. “At least if someone comes across them and they’re painted, they’ll know that’s my colour,” he said.

Law enforcement and the solar industry suggest other approaches to crime prevention.

Many companies now sell secure fastenings for solar panels, while some police departments are urging solar power users to inscribe their driving licence number on the panels.

But some warn that the thieves are too sophisticated to be troubled by such primitive deterrents. Tom McCalmont, who runs Regrid Power in Campbell, close to California’s Silicon Valley, said that the sophistication shown by thieves suggests that industry insiders are behind many of the thefts, a suspicion bolstered by supply difficulties with new solar panels.

McCalmont has experience of solar panel thefts: his own company lost $30,000-worth of panels to burglars this summer. “They knew which wires to cut, which not to cut,” he said. “This showed a level of expertise that indicated that whoever did it was from the solar industry.”

The Agricultural Sector
If you can think of one industry that won’t survive without the energy coming from the sun, what will be the first thing on your mind? There may be many sectors that must rely on the sun’s benefits. But the agricultural and horticulture industry will not thrive without it. They have no other options. If the sun will be gone, these sectors will die.

The sun is need by the agricultural and horticulture departments to be able to grow their produce. The latter is needed by people as well as animals. These sectors’ productivity will depend on the amount of energy that they are getting from the sun. It must be balanced in all ways. It can never too little. And it must also not be so much.

If it is too little, the plans may not be able to grow accordingly. The farmers won’t achieve the required harvests in order to feed the population. And if it is too much, this will damage the crops. This will also cause bad effects on people’s health. But if the latter is the case, people can think of ways in order to achieve the needed produce by manually trying to reduce the amount of heat that can be directed on the plants. But if the situation becomes unbearable, it might lead to drought and deaths.

Farmers must know when the sun will be up, when sunny days will be long and factors like that so that they can settle for what kinds of plants they must plant to survive the kind of weather condition. Here are only some of the things that they resort to in order to optimize the full benefits of the energy coming from the sun.

• Timed planting cycles
• Different heights of plants in between rows
• Tailored row orientation
• Mixing different varieties of crops to improve the yields

Do you ever wonder what farmers did in times like the Little Ice Age? It is said that English and French farmers resorted to fruit walls. These fruit walls help in maximizing the collection of the energy from the sun. These serve as the thermal masses. These walls help in keeping the plants warm to speed up the process of growing and ripening of produce.

The sun’s energy is also being utilized in these sectors in vital activities such as drying the crops, pumping of water, drying animals’ manure, brooding of chicks and a lot more.

It is hard to imagine the agriculture and horticulture sectors to survive without the solar energy. If there are anybody who knows the importance of the sun, these people are the first in line.

So if that’s how much energy we can get from the sun, why do we rely too much on fossil fuels which will disappear in 40 to 50 years time? The main problem is that the sun shines all throughout the world. That energy is so spread out that harnessing it is really a challenge. But still, there are other factors at work here, political, economical, and even cultural in nature which contributes to the slow progress of solar technologies. But that will need a whole chapter, nay, a whole book to discuss so let’s leave that alone for a moment.

There are various ways how we harness sunlight and the specific way may depend on how we plan to use that energy. But we can divide the usage into two general concepts, converting solar power into heat and the other one is converting it into electricity.

Using solar power to heat homes is a pretty good example of the first category. There are two ways that can be used, the first one relies on the positioning of the house’s windows and the second one involves the use of some mechanical devices to distribute the heat throughout the house.

Solar water heaters are also now available. What you do is provide a solar collector where the heat from the sun is trapped and collected. That heat is then transferred to the after that goes out of your faucets and showers.

Converting solar power into electricity, however, needs a little bit more explanation. There are basically two ways we can get electricity out of solar power. The first one involves the use of photovoltaic cells and the second one is using various solar thermal systems.

Photovoltaic cells are more commonly known as solar cells. These cells are made from silicon wafers and phosphorous. When sunlight strikes the surface of the silicon wafers, free electrons are produced. The electrons are then harnessed via attaching a wire to the cells. As the electrons leave the cells and pass through the wire, an electronic current is produced.

One major flaw of the photovoltaic cells is that they can be quite expensive plus they only convert a small amount of sunlight. Hopefully these cells can be cheaper, more efficient and more suitable to the needs of consumers in the future.

The great thing about solar energy is that it does not produce any kinds of pollution unlike fossil fuels which spit out substantive amounts of pollutants in the air and even in the water. Plus the sun is pretty much in good health ad it is still very far from dying. We can utilize more than enough energy from the sun that will last us for a lifetime.

The sun’s energy can be harnessed in different ways depending on how you would utilize the end product. There are so called solar collectors which are placed on the roof tops or used in buildings. The main purpose of these solar collectors is to provide heating and even ventilation for the houses and buildings. These collectors harness the sun’s energy by magnifying the sunlight several times and transferring that heat to air or water. That heated air or water is stored and will provide the building or home heating and hot water whenever needed.

The only problem here is that not all places have equal amounts of sunlight. As you go farther from the equator, the strength of the sun is reduced. But still, this is a much better solution than relying on electric grids which do not reach remote areas. It is just a mater of storing the heat generated from the solar collector properly. For example, some buildings in Sweden utilized an underground storage facility where solar energy is stored resulting to savings from heating the building and their water.

In areas where gas and fuel are out of reach of the pockets of poor communities, residents have to rely on solar cooking for their meals. They use this bowl shaped discs equipped with mirrors or reflectors which directs all the sunlight on the middle where a pot is placed. The same technology is being used in India, Sri Lanka, and Nepal. This serves are a good alternative from conventional fuels like coal, firewood, and gas. They can use these solar stoves during a sunny day and use traditional fuels when the weather is not that good.

This reliance by communities on solar cooking should encourage more studies on how to make photovoltaic cells cheaper for an ordinary household. At this time, the use of solar cells is not economically friendly for a single household. However, the approach here is to install a series of solar panels which would be shared by the whole community. This could be a good idea depending on your usage, but for basic lighting purposes these could work in small poor communities.

In some areas, community cooperatives have found ways to bring electricity to households out of reach of power grids. In the Philippines for example, a local cooperative provided households loans to enable them to install a basic solar power module which can produce enough electricity for three light bulbs. This ay be laughable in our standards but to these people who have been living all their lives with the flickering light of the candles, three electric light bulbs make a great deal of a difference.

The story is the same in other countries. In Israel, the high costs of photovoltaic cells have clamped down the growth of solar energy in the country. It if fortunate, therefore, that the Israeli government is now providing incentives for households that would use solar energy.

However, according to industry analysts, the costs of solar cells production will go down as the demand increase. Also, most are hopeful that recent discoveries and advancement in technologies will find a way to bring down costs of using solar energy.

Ordinary households using solar energy is an ideal scenario that we should all strive to achieve.

Furling acts by decreasing the angle of attack, which lessens the induced drag from the lift of the rotor, as well as the cross-section. One major problem in designing wind turbines is getting the blades to stall or furl quickly enough when hit by a gust of wind. A fully furled turbine blade, when stopped, has the edge of the blade facing into the wind. But True North Power NG has launched a small wind turbine without a mechanical furling system at their test site in Ayr, Ontario, Canada. Instead of furling system they are using a microprocessor which will manage the speed and power of the wind turbine rotor in all winds. This system was introduced this month and named as True North Power’s 1kW WIND ARROW. AFCTM’s USP is that it lets the WIND ARROW turbine to generate power under control in high speed winds when usual wind turbines have to be stopped or being forced in and out of wind mechanically.

Senior US and Canadian researchers termed this system as “first intelligent controller” because it works without mechanical furling system. They find this system more reliable than usual turbine controllers. The biggest advantage of this system is that it produces more energy annually than typical mechanical braking systems of the same size. This “intelligent controller” with no furling parts and fewer parts overall, is less prone to wear and tear and minimizes its opportunity for failure.

The AFCTM manipulates the WIND ARROW turbine and slows the speed when it approaches the power limit at around 30mph (~50km/hr) and 1200 watts. The AFCTM pulls strings or here, blades of turbines at optimal speed, until the wind gusts subside. The AFCTM releases the turbine once the wind gusts subside, so that it quickly regains its equilibrium in terms of speed and power. This AFCTM achieves all this tasks incessantly without putting additional burden on the system. If a wind speeds above 40 or even 50mph (~80km/hr) is experienced for a prolonged period, the turbine is controlled against over speeding while continuing to produce as much as 30% or more of its stated power. The controller has excellent mechanism when a storm approaches. It switches on its SOS mode or prefers Storm-Otto-Shutdown. The SOS mode is equipped with an electromagnetic braking system. The breaks remain operational till the storm subsides or waits for an operator to restart the system (controller RESET).

Intelligent controllers like the AFCTM are the need of the hour and they have an advantage over eco-friendly energy solutions.

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Columbus (OH) – Researchers at Ohio State University have accidentally discovered a new solar cell material capable of absorbing all of the sun’s visible light energy. The material is comprised of a hybrid of plastics, molybdenum and titanium. The team discovered it not only fluoresces (as most solar cells do), but also phosphoresces. Electrons in a phosphorescent state remain at a place where they can be “siphoned off” as electricity over 7 million times longer than those generated in a fluorescent state. This combination of materials also utilizes the entire visible spectrum of light energy, translating into a theoretical potential of almost 100% efficiency. Commercial products are still years away, but this foundational work may well pave the way for a truly renewable form of clean, global energy.A complete study of the team’s work appears in the current issue of “Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences” (PNAS).

Fluorescence and phosphorescence

Traditional solar cell materials use a property called fluorescence to gather electricity. Energy from the sun strikes whatever material they are made of resulting in a momentary “dislodging” of electrons into an excited state. The excited electrons exist due to a property called fluorescence. They last only a dozen or so picoseconds (trillionths of a second) in this state, which is also called a “singlet state.” The many picosecond dwell there is fairly typical among traditional solar cell material in use today.

The new material, which was accidentally discovered using supercomputers to determine possible theoretical molecular configurations, causes not only fluorescing electrons in the singlet state to be created, but also phosphorescing electrons in what’s called a “triplet state.”

These triplet state electrons remain in their excited state of phosphorescence for scores of microseconds (up to about 200 microseconds, or 0.0002 seconds). With such a long lasting state of free electron flow, their ability to be captured is theoretically significantly greater than existing technologies.

And if the research team’s current efforts (of using only a few molecules of the hybrid materials suspended in a liquid solution) can be extended into practical real-world scales, then products yielding nearly 100% solar efficiency may soon be achievable.

Solar cell technology

Today’s best solar cell technologies utilize several material layers to convert the infrared, ultraviolet and visible portions of the spectrum into electrical energy. This equates to about 61% efficiency in the furthest extremes of the technology, though something around mid-40% is far more typical. Solar cells like these are also incredibly expensive, fragile and impractical for mass production, making them useful for projects like satellites. They have no real potential to become real alternatives for the base consumer’s energy needs.

Quite recently, plastic solar cells have been created which achieve between 7% and 11% efficiency. While this may not sound like a lot, such products and materials are extremely inexpensive to produce in bulk quantities, costing about $3 per square meter. The idea of having a rooftop covered by plastic solar cells in place of tar-based shingles has drawn many a consumer’s thought since being first reported in 2007. Commercial consumer products based on the technology, which could offer up to 14% efficiency if theories are to be believed, are promised within the next five years.

Alternate forms of using solar power

One of the biggest downfalls of using solar energy on the Earth’s surface is that it only works when there is strong sunlight. If it is overcast or if there are clouds, then the resulting efficiency drops sharply and much less power is generated. Also, on most places during most of the year it is dark about 50% of the time. This means some kind of battery storage system must be used to gather the energy during the sun’s brilliance in daylight hours, only to then rely on batteries during the night. This adds expense and complexity to solar cell solutions and produces a solution which has peaks and valleys of available power.

Another form of solar power, however, has bypassed some of those limitations. A phenomenal heat absorbing material (made primarily of sodium) uses a relatively simple technology to power itself. By directing the sun’s rays through a large array of mirrors which focus the sun’s heat and light onto a single spot of the material, it quickly heats up to a few thousand degrees. The material’s properties allow it to absorb and store much heat, and then release it slowly over time.

Building technologies around this solution have allowed the sun’s direct energy to continue to give off power during darkened times, much like a battery solution but without the need of a battery. The heat is stored in an insulating container, only to be tapped to power steam turbines or some other form of heat-sensitive motor technology.

Still not enough, more to come

The materials these researchers have created is not ready for prime time. Only a few molecules were created through a joint effort of the Ohio State University team and a team of chemists from the National Taiwan University. They synthesized enough of the material to carry out preliminary tests. And while these early findings are truly remarkable, there are still more on the horizon.

Supercomputers are enabling an entire new area of materials. No longer do scientists have to physically create samples of every possible material in the lab, only to test and document everything they find about it. Today they can set up a series of parameters and instruct a supercomputing machine to find the one that best aligns with their desires, wants and wishes. And while such computations often takes many days or even weeks for each trial material, it’s more economical and feasible than the old route. Plus, it enables materials like these which were, in this context, accidentally discovered using computers.

The materials analysis these supercomputers carry out is only as good as they are properly designed, and the machine is powerful. Technology sciences like semiconductors and machine manufacturing are quickly overcoming every aspect of limitations regarding the machine’s power. And ironically, faster computers are allowing research teams to develop better and more comprehensive models for materials research.

It won’t be too long before supercomputers light the way for the truly revolutionary form of renewable energy generation. Who knows, it may come from a bacteria inside the digestive tract of a beetle. But, if you believe anything in science then you must believe it’s out there. We just have to find it. And tools like supercomputers, and efforts like these at Ohio State University, are proving time and time again how valuable they are in increasing man’s knowledge.

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Barack Obama has been elected as the 44th President of the USA and with his election, Solar Integrated Technologies rose by 30% yesterday after increases of 22% by Renewable Energy Corporation and 16% by the wind turbine maker Vestas. Barack Obama promised to spend $150 billion over the next 10 years developing alternative energy. Promises like these leave a legacy for future generations to imitate. Clean technology and green energy stocks have registered a new high as City analysts anticipate a major boost from the incoming president. The US election result has provided a much-needed encouragement at a critical time and that too for an industry which is still in its nascent phase. And this sector is threatened by the banking crisis and emerging economic recession. Some companies had seen their share prices halve in the turmoil that began in September. Reduction of carbon level, a cushion against fluctuating oil prices and creation of more jobs in economic slowdown would be the natural offshoots of this policy.

How the green energy analysts view Obama’s election to the highest office? Their mood is quite upbeat and they predict a major shift in the renewable energy policy of the USA. Earlier they were of the view that the Bush administration is not doing enough for the alternative energy. Kate Hampton, head of policy at Climate Change Capital, a UK-based investment manager, was delighted with the poll outcome and views it as a massive step forward for renewables. She opines, “We cannot overstate how divisive the Bush administration was, how far behind the US now is in the transition to the low-carbon economy and how high expectations are now that Obama is the president-elect.” Dean Cooper, alternative energy analyst with Ambrian Partners in London, is also expecting widespread change in the US widespread change in the US, considering that production tax credits for wind power generation companies and industries has been increased from one year to seven years, and more push towards a greener economy.

In the era of globalization, even European markets can’t remain immune to the fluctuations faced in the US market. “Since the onset of the most recent phase of the credit crisis, the European wind sector has been battered with an unweighted average decline of 45% compared to a decline of 23% for both the S&P 500 and FTSE Eurofirst 300 over the same period,” said Michael McNamara, analyst at Jefferies & Co, in a research note published at the height of the sell-off. “Much of this has been linked to fears that wind power developers would see themselves cut off from access to financing due to a toxic combination of a potential global closure of the project finance market and a drying up of demand for tax equity investment in the US.”

It’s highly unlikely that Barack Obama will abandon his commitment to create a new energy economy although the times are tough and public financing is not thriving. Obama’s energy and environmental fact sheets are chalked out well with details. In October, in an interview with Time magazine he confirmed that energy would be his number one priority if he gets elected to the highest office.

Obama and the Democrats intend to tackle the excessive carbon emission problem legislatively by floating “cap and trade” system. This legislation intends to impose a cost on harming the planet, boosting the alternatives and feeding public coffers. The president-elect also has a good investment plan to finance some of his investment program via a windfall profits levy. And he also wants to make crude obsolete in future. For instance, he proposes showering buyers of plug-in electric and other “advanced” vehicles with a $7,000 tax credit, as well as getting serious about producing ethanol from plant waste.