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Choice Magazine have a free online article with a little bit of useful information on solar hot water heaters.  While it will give a good backgrounder on the subject, it is not a comparison of available components.   One feels that the authors of the article were not quite clear about how this might be achieved.  It’s true that it would be quite difficult in such a large country with its different climates, energy options and water qualities.

Perhaps what they should have done was to confine the scope of the inquiry not to systems but to components.   That way perhaps at least the industry practitioners who are constantly putting together new systems, would have a little more qualitative information with which to make the choice.   I feel that with a system where the components are customised almost with every installation, the idea is not to educate the consumer, but the industry.

The methodology of evaluating solar hot water systems should be to compare like with like.  Comparing a flat panel collector with a heat pump system is just not good enough and ends up confusing readers.

Nanosolar have stated that approximately 6 square kilometers of land will be required to produce 1GW of nameplate solar capacity.  How much land is this really?  Well it is a square of 2.44km on a side.  I have superimposed such a square over the site of the Leigh Creek coal mine in the Gammon Ranges in the Australian outback.

Where is this in the scheme of things?  Let’s zoom out.

So in Summary the footprint of a solar farm is less than the footprint of a typical coal mine supplying a similar amount of coal-fired generation.  In addition, the land between the collectors can still be utilised for grazing.  The coal mining operations also require precious water, which is not required for PV.

The PV solar farm may make a lot of sense for some communities.  The concentrating PV operations like Solar Systems, might take note.

The new stars of Silicon Valley are the scientists engineers and business people of Nanosolar in Palo Alto.  Having taken their website down last week announcing that they would be back on September 9, they were true to their word.  Speculation was that perhaps a takeover was in the wind.  Thankfully this did not eventuate.  Instead the announcements were positive milestone achievements which might silence the critics of the last few years.  On Wednesday Nanosolar announced to the world the completion of their factory producing their new Nanosolar Utility Panel (TM) in a factory in Luckenwalde, and immediate availability of the panels.  This factory is a state-of-the-art robotic assembly plant incorporating the foil cells being made in Palo Alto.  The capacity of the panel plant is currently 640MW per annum.  Manufacture of the foil utilising their funky CIGS ink, is possible at a rate of 1GW per annum per machine.  The machine looks like a $2m capital item and it would not be a stretch to fit 20 of them in a small factory.   The days of the 20GW p.a. manufacturing site are now here.  Panel assembly will have to keep up.  If I was making silicon wafers for photovoltaics, I would be looking worried today.

The contractual commitments from power companies and other partners, is about $4.1bn.  It appears the $0.5bn invested by the venture and private equity partners, including the likes of Sergey Brin and Larry Page, have been well spent.  The list of investors has been pulled from their website, but the google cached version shows these investors:

• Mitsui – the 300 year-old Japanese keiretsu.
• Carlyle Group – largest investment group in the world
• Swiss Re – the largest reinsurer in the world
• Benchmark Capital – the eBay financiers
• Lone Pine Capital
• Mohr Davidow Ventures
• EDF – the world’s largest energy utility
• Energy Capital Partners
• Klaus Tschira’s First Ventury
• Jeff Skoll
• Pierre Omidyar
• SAC Capital
• GLG Partners
• LGT Capital Group
• Grazia Equity

Don’t you think that the media gets a little too close to the action sometimes?  When reporting the daily excitement (such as it is) of federal politics the columnists often ignore the details of the legislation.  And they still opine on the meaning of it all, but are often too taken with the personal politics and not the policy and the legislation.

It is true that too many readers (or viewers) lack the patience to wade through the details of the legislation being debated, and they just want a simplified picture.  I am not one of those.  I just care about the legislation in its own right.

I set out to find the answer straight from the horse’s mouth.  Without the media spin and the parliamentary BS.  Here’s how I went about it.

I googled “federal hansard” and eventually found my way to the Federal Government Hansard pages.  These pages are not very useful in themselves because they are not searchable.  They did however point me to the Parlinfo site which is the central portal for searching all parliamentary document collections.  I went to the Parlinfo Advanced Search Page here and then enter the search term of CPRS.  Then I ticked to search the Bills Digests.  My search resulted in 14 documents.  I chose the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme Bill 2009 and got a PDF file, of 94 pages and well-written.  It is a lucid explanation of what is being attempted, with the politics and the legalese removed.  A layman like myself can make sense of it.  The Digest does warn that it has no legal status and other documents should be consulted about subsequent amendments.

Jump to Page 15 for an Outline of the scheme, which essentially explains that the CPRS is a cap-and-trade scheme whereby the government sets an annual limit for GHG emissions, the government then either sells or issues emission units to liable parties such as power generators, who must then either buy or sell additional emission units in line with their actual CO2 emissions.  The liable parties are then required to surrender the emission units equal to its emissions over the relevant financial year.  If they do not then they are subject to a penalty.  The Australian model CPRS departs from the classical cap and trade model in that it sets a fixed price on an emissions permit for the first year and an upper limit on the price for the following four years.

Daily I have to delete handfuls of spam users (mostly from the .ru domain) and I am mighty tired of it.  From now on, if anyone wants to register as a contributor, then please email me on the obvious address a l e x . f i e d l e r @ s o l a r h o m e . c o m . a u

I have also performed a cleanup of old users.  If you have been inadvertently deleted, please let me know.

We should summarise what we know from a South Australian perspective about solar rebates for solar PV, solar hot water and building efficiency.  The federal government has some rebates and incentives available, instituted under the previous government.  The new federal government has promised some more emphasis but at the moment they are still just that, promises.

Solar Photovoltaics

The federal government rebate for the installation of photovoltaic panels and grid-connected inverters continues to gain in popularity.  Retailers are offering 1050W (rated) installations for $5000 and an $8000 subsidy applies.

The federal government is also subsidising the photovoltaic industry in other ways, with industry subsidies.  These help to make investment in this industry attractive.  Also the various academic programs in PV are funded through the national research council.

(Here we really should get the government to make some statements by way of a media release)

Solar Hot Water

The solar hot water systems for rooftop installations in domestic settings, havelong been subsidised in the country.  The subsidies are calculated based on renewable energy credits available depending on system size and efficiency.  They are designed to reflect the greenhouse gas saving.  The true effect is not easy to see, as this calculation does not take into account the method of heating that is being replaced.

The Australian parliamentary transcripts are a useful resource for anyone who cares about public life.  If you want insights straight from the people in power, then go there.  Don’t waste your time reading the newspapers.

Where these are on-line they will be searched for certain keywords, and the hits analysed.

All states have searchable collections with exception of Tasmania and the territories. The links are:

Federal Hansard is accessible through parlinfo

Mostly these involve searches of parliamentary proceedings. Most of the states have a separate Hansard Search for the Legislative Council, and the House of Reps.

The Federal govt has a more comprehensive search feature, which is organised into collections:

Collections:

Chamber, Legislation, Procedural, Committees, Library, Media, Parliamentary Handbook, Constitution, Conference, All Collections.

The Chamber collection is structured into

The Hansards themselves appear to return most results for the PV searches.

The Legislation Collection is structured into

Only the Budget papers seem to return hits for the PV search term.

A search of Committees collection does yield a few results.

The Libraries collection returns search results, but the actual article text cannot be displayed because of copyright restrictions.

The Media collection has a huge number of hits under Newspaper Clippings. The article text is unavailable as above, but the publication reference would still permit an external lookup.

None of the other collections are useful.

OK I realise I am just gagging to be flamed to death here, but hear me out.

First, some background: You should know that I like ice-skating. Not that I go that often, but it is something I can do, and it gives me some enjoyment. Here in Adelaide, the choice is limited to the Ice Arena in Thebarton, and even though a small rink has recently opened in Noarlunga, it is 45 minutes from the CBD .

Thebarton is a dump no matter which way you look at it. And yet the fundamentals are great!  It’s in a prime location, has plenty of parking, it’s popular, and there’s little competition.

I think the rot set in about 15 years ago, when the operators decided to build a ski slope directly above the skating rink.  I had a go myself and it was definitely a bit of fun.  The skiing punters came, but not in sufficient numbers. About 5 years later they tarpaulined the whole section off again, and just kept the ice rink. You can imagine this is a really classy look! Since then not a cent has been spent on the place and it is an embarrassment to SA. Refurbishment is so not an option, primarily because of the abovementioned alterations. It clearly needs to be knocked down, and I have not doubt it soon will be. What to replace it with, in this low carbon world?

Well I would love us to build a solar thermal ice skating rink. I first thought of it about a year ago, and gave the idea a little time to mellow.  A year later and I still can’t bring myself to file it under “harebrained schemes”, so I’m giving it a little air.  Give it a little thought and it will grow on you too.

The biggest benefit this concept has, is the lower running cost.  The efficiency of driving a refrigeration compressor directly off a turbine cannot be equalled.  Energy storage is in the form of lower temperature coolant.

It is a simple idea in principle. Use the steam from an Ausra CLFM array to drive a turbine. The turbine is connected to a compressor. The compressor chills brine to as cold as it will go and sends it to a holding tank.

This superchilled brine (of variable temperature) is mixed with a variable amount of warmer (but still cold) brine to achieve a constant temperature for circulating under the ice.  A constant temperature is necessary to achieve a good ice surface.

Apart from the attractive economics of this sort of facility, it would be a green flagship which says in essence: “You can live a low-carbon life, and still have fun”.Using an ice skating rink for what is essentially a technology showcase, has the benefit in that it normalises the technology far more quickly.

It will enjoy enviable press coverage, it may even be a brief world-wide media sensation.  “Catalyst”-style science programs would be fawning all over it.  It would be a victory for political moderates increasingly concerned about global warming. It would force developers to take another look at the economics of cold-storage technologies. Refrigeration being such a contributor to world electricity demand growth, this may serve as a model for large facilities of the future.  I am thinking cold-storage warehouses, office buildings, colleges, shopping malls.

If you have a view, get your skates on and drop me a comment.