July 14-16, San Francisco<\/p>\n
InterSolar played a very prominent role this year as part of Semicom West, with three complete floors of the Moscone West Hall dedicated to solar energy displays. There were countless variations of photovoltaic solar panels from manufacturers around the world, with a strong showing of manufacturers from Germany and China. The growing photovoltaic field appears increasingly crowded, with many companies struggling to stay afloat amidst a depressed global economy and a sudden halt to PV demand from Spain due to abrupt policy corrections, closing a market which had previously been booming. Solar PV has been on a bit of a roller coaster ride with the market crash, installation slump, and drop in PV prices, so we may expect a shakeout of the weaker companies. Optisolar recently went bust<\/a> and was acquired by EPOD Solar (Allora).<\/p>\n
Gerhard Stryi-Hipp, the chairman of the European Solar Thermal Technology Platform (ESTTP)<\/a> posed the question: “How can fossil and nuclear power be replaced by renewable sources?’. He reports that approximately 50% of the energy used in Europe and a similar percentage in the United States is used for heating and cooling structures. To address this need, he says “solar thermal has the biggest potential under all the renewable energy sources”. The vision of the European Solar Energy Platform for Heating and Cooling is that by the year 2030:<\/p>\n
Meeting these goals will require a dramatic increase from the 13GWth currently installed up to 2400 GWth<\/strong> by 2030. By 2020 the goal is 80 GWth, requiring a 34% annual market grown, with a target of one square meter of solar thermal collectors for each inhabitant in Europe.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
ReflecTec – thin flexible lightweight reflective foil boasting 94% reflectivity.
\nReflective surfaces can be used on parabolic dish and trough concentrators. <\/em><\/p>\n
In the United States, there are still several limitation to expanding small scale solar thermal deployment – lack of trained installation technicians, low public awareness, and inconsistent availability geographically of collectors. Photovoltaics are already well known and increasingly accepted, and in most cases they integrate easily into existing infrastructure. Solar thermal collectors, while cheaper than PV panels, require plumbing know-how to install. The two technologies are in fact complimentary, many structures in Europe already have both working simultaneously.<\/p>\n
Article by James George<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
July 14-16, San Francisco InterSolar played a very prominent role this year as part of Semicom West, with three complete floors of the Moscone West Hall dedicated to solar energy displays. There were countless variations of photovoltaic solar panels from manufacturers around the world, with a strong showing of manufacturers from Germany and China. The […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,1,34],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/envirobeat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1400"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/envirobeat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/envirobeat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/envirobeat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/envirobeat.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1400"}],"version-history":[{"count":15,"href":"https:\/\/envirobeat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1400\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1417,"href":"https:\/\/envirobeat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1400\/revisions\/1417"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/envirobeat.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1400"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/envirobeat.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1400"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/envirobeat.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1400"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}