Hope For Renewable Energy Policy At State Level

With the on-going political gridlock in Washington, the focus of clean energy policy has shifted to state level. A total of 29 states and Washington DC now have renewable standards and another 8 have set renewable energy goals. The standards require electric utility companies to produce some of their power from renewable sources. These have put an obligation on companies to reach a set target, and when the goals are voluntary, some states often use incentives to ensure these are met.

Residents have already seen benefits from these standards. Not onlyare they now seen as an effective way to lower carbon emissions and improve public health, but they also are helping to create local clean energy economies. For example, in 2012 nearly 195,000 people worked in the solar and wind industries. In some states this impact is larger than others. For example, in Texas there are now more people who work in the solar industry than who are ranchers.

With this also comes greater investment in the economy. In fact over the past decade $100 billion has been invested as a result of renewable energy standards. Unsurprisingly, this means that they have attracted the support of business and industry.

Farmers have also benefitted from renewable energy development. This is largelybecause they receive royalties from having wind turbines on their farms. These are not only an important source of income but as many renewable energy projectspay taxes, they help to support the local community as well.

These benefits now mean that state renewable energy laws are increasingly hard to repeal. Over the past year there has been a big push from conservative groups such as ALEC (American Legislative Exchange Council) and the Heartland Institute to weaken/repeal these laws. However, they have been unsuccessful; in the 13 states where they attempted to do so, not one bill was passed.

One example of where this occurred was in Kansas. Here a bill delaying renewable energy requirements failed in the House committee. This is mainly because local manufacturers of wind turbines joined farmers in the opposition of the bill. This support among different interest groups means that even Republican strongholds like Kansas are more supportive of renewable energy than before.

There is still some way to go before renewable energy gets the same kind of national support. This is partly because it is still quite small economically: it provided just 5% of the nation’s electricity in 2012. However, this is growing fast. State level standards are expected to add 76,750 megawatts of new renewable power capacity by 2025, which is enough to power 47 million homes.

This means that hopefully more people and interest groups will be in favour of these laws and there will be more opportunity to enact meaningful change.

Organic Solar Cells to Revolutionise Renewable Energy

Organic solar cells are a type of solar cell that produce energy by mimicking the process of plant photosynthesis. Compared to current silicon based solar cells they are thinner and more flexible. This means that the production process is likely to be faster and cheaper than before.

 

However, until recently they lacked the efficiency to be able to compete with their commercial counterparts. For instance, they can achieve just 12% efficiency in turning light into electricity, compared with 20-25% for silicon-based cells. This is partly due to the problem of consistency as scientists have been struggling to find out why some types of molecules outperform others.

This has changed with the new report by the University of Washington and the University of Cambridge. They discovered that the differences in the performance of molecules is due to their “spin”. “Spin” is a quantum property of particles related to their angular momentum with electrons being categorised as either “spin-up” or “spin-down”. One of the reasons why organic solar cells seemed to be inefficient is due to the process of “recombination”, where electrons lose their energy. Researchers now have found that if they arrange the “spin” in a certain way then they can block this loss of energy and increase the current flow from the cell.

The team believe that the new design concepts from this work will help to close the gap between the organic and more commercial silicon cells. In the long term this will help to deploy solar cells on a large scale. There are also benefits outside of renewable energy. The researchers also believe that some of the design concepts could also be used in OLEDs (Organic Light Emitting Diodes). This is a fast growing display technology used to make the displays on phones and TVs more efficient.

Dr Akshay Roa, who is a Cavendish Laboratory Research Fellow, has commented that “this discovery is very exciting, as we can now harness spin physics to improve solar cells, something we had previously not thought possible. We should see new materials and solar cells that make use of this very soon.”

The breakthrough is important it means that better designs can be created for these cells. Even though solar cells now provide less than 0.2% of power in the US, better designs mean that the cells become more efficient and cost effective. As a result, in theory organic solar cells may revolutionize the way that we collect renewable energy in years to come.

The study has been published in the journal Nature.

Related articles

• Regulating electron ‘spin’ may be key to making organic solar cells competitive (sciencedaily.com)
• Electron spin key to solar cell breakthrough (venitism.blogspot.com)
• Weaving power generation into the fabric of everyday life | Lou Del Bello (theguardian.com)