Government cut to solar tariffs blocked as appeal fails

The government has failed in an appeal against a decision which blocked its attempts to reduce solar subsidies.

The court case involved the government’s move to halve the payments made to households with solar panels, which it says are unsustainable. Solar businesses and campaigners had warned thousands of jobs could be lost as a result of the move.

Under the feed-in tariffs programme, people in Britain with solar panels are paid for the electricity they generate.

Confusion

The decision will lead to widespread confusion over what the tariff level is. The previous tariff was just over 43p per Kilowatt-hour generated. The new tariff of 21p per kilowatt-hour had been expected to come into effect from 1 April. But in October, the government said the reduced rate would be paid to anyone who installed their solar panels after 12 December, sparking anger from environmental groups and installers. The government announced a consultation on the proposals, which closed on 23 December – 11 days after the decision was to have been implemented. The High Court ruled that changing the tariffs in this way was “legally flawed”, a ruling the Court of Appeal has now upheld. The change had particularly upset industry as it affected projects which may already have been commissioned but not installed. ”This decision has very important implications for the whole renewable energy sector in the UK,” said Ben Warren a partner at Ernst and Young. ”It is a clear message that retrospective adjustment of support is not acceptable,”

Appeal

The government has put a contingency plan in place which would see the current tariff, of 43p, remain in place until the start of March. However, they are also considering appealing in the Supreme Court against the latest ruling, potentially allowing them to return to the cut-off date of 12 December.

A DECC spokesperson said: “The Court of Appeal has upheld the High Court ruling on FITs. We are now considering our options.”

They added that it meant there were “no guarantees” on any tariff consumers were offered after 12 December. The tariff for surplus electricity exported to the national grid remains 3.1p per kilowatt-hour paid in addition to the tariff, and is unaffected by the changes.

Money shortage

There is also uncertainty about the sustainability of the reduced rate – as a rush of installations now may use up the scheme’s remaining budget.

“The future of the feed in tariff beyond April 2012 is now hugely uncertain. Government and industry now need to work together to create a sustainable solar industry in the UK,” added Mr Warren. The Renewable Energy Association has called for the overall budget to be increased. ”The government’s action and the subsequent court case had together thrown the solar industry into a state of extreme uncertainty,” said chief executive Gaynor Hartnell. ”We now want to put this behind us as swiftly as possible, and work with government and supporters to secure a larger budget for small scale renewable energy generation,” she added

Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-16721328  Dated January 25, 2012

New Architecture and Civil Engineering Resources

The Engineering Sciences Social Network Sciencia.orgwas established to provide the very latest news headlines, references and resources from scientific journals, books and websites worldwide. This science and research content is contributed by the website’s users. There are currently almost 1.3 million stories distributed among 75 categories, a content base that is steadily growing. Sciencia.org covers news in all fields of biology, business, chemistry, engineering, geography, health, mathematics and society. The Engineering Sciences Category covers the design, manufacture, and operation of efficient and economical structures, machines, processes, and systems. This category is subdivided into eight sections including Architecture, Chemical Engineering, Civil Engineering, Communication, Control Systems, Electronics, Industrial Engineering, and Mechanical Engineering.

Sciencia.org’s Architectural Sciences Category deals with the design and construction of buildings. Within this section the website currently contains nearly 4,000 articles partly deriving from over 30 scientific Architecture journals.The latest additions include an article on a participatory process for the design of housing for a First Nations Community. First Nation (Indigenous) on-reserve housing in Canada is in crisis due to severe shortages, high reported instances of mold contamination, overcrowding and structural deficiencies. The paper describes a participatory approach for developing a culturally appropriate, environmentally responsive and energy-efficient housing type that the Haisla First Nation could implement in the future. Another study evaluates the mechanical properties of concrete considering the effects of temperature and aging. The authors used a multi-component hydration model for evaluating the degree of hydration of cement as a function of the mineral compositions of cement, the water to cement ratio, curing temperature and particle size distribution, the development of the compressive strength of concrete, the degree of hydration of cement, and the development of the elastic modulus and splitting tensile strength of hardening concrete.

The Civil Engineering Sciences Category of Sciencia.org covers design and construction of public works, including bridges, dams, and other large facilities. This category currently contains over 5,500 articles from more than 40 Civil Engineering journals. One of the latest inclusion is a paper on assessment and zoning of eco-environmental sensitivity for a typical developing province in China. This paper focuses on evaluating the eco-environmental sensitivity in Anhui province, a typical province confronted with contradiction between socio-economic development and resource restriction. For supporting landscape and urban planning and design, the authors recommend ecological construction and regional development for different zones of principal functions, and they construct an ecological security pattern from several ecological functions. Another article focussing on China discusses disputed South China Sea hydrocarbons. These disputes are often framed as being at least partially driven by the desire to gain access to much needed seabed hydrocarbon resources. The authors’ analysis shows that constraints on production mean that disputed South China Sea oil and gas may only constitute a small part of the solution to Southeast Asia’s growing energy security challenges, and does not have the capacity to reverse the trend of growing reliance on imports to the region.

Besides the highlighted Architecture and Civil Engineering Sections, Sciencia.org’s Engineering Sciences Category contains another six subsections including Chemical Engineering, Communication, Control Systems, Electronics, Industrial Engineering, and Mechanical Engineering.

Overall, 73,257 users of Sciencia.org monitor nearly 8,200 journals covering the broad spectrum of the sciences. They share about 3,000 new articles every day. Since new science content is discovered in real-time, the delay between original publication and appearance at Sciencia.org is not more than two days. The content at its’ frontpage is rarely older than 20-60 minutes after submission.

The site delivers its content through a number of RSS feeds including a “Most Shared Content” RSS Feed and an @Sciencia Twitter account which currently features 152,100 tweets informing 767 followers about the latest developments in the sciences. The online traffic can now also be watched in real time using a Sciencia.com ”Life Traffic Feed” and a “Real-Time View”.

Source: http://www.prweb.com/releases/2011/12/prweb9062860.htm

Producing bricks from waste

Developing fully sustainable and carbon-negative construction materials is the goal at Encos Ltd, a University of Leeds spin-off company. The company’s patented method for manufacturing carbon-negative masonry products from waste materials is the result of research carried out by Dr John Forth and his team in the School of Civil Engineering.

The process uses a combination of vegetable oil-based binders which are mixed with graded waste aggregates. The mixture is then shaped into bricks and blocks and cured using low temperature heat. During the curing process the oil undergoes a number of complex chemical reactions which transforms it from a viscous liquid into a solid binding matrix. Producing the products uses no water, and creates no waste.

Laboratory-produced samples have already passed crucial industry tests including fire, freeze-thaw and compressive strength. A third-party report produced by Best Foot Forward Ltd estimates that manufacture of the Encos masonry blocks and bricks would result in a reduction of 160% and 120% respectively in greenhouse gas emissions, compared to traditional clay bricks and concrete blocks.

A wide range of waste aggregates and binders can be used in the process. Encos recently commissioned a £200,000 demonstration manufacturing plant at Yorkshire Water’s Knostrop site in Leeds and will shortly be commissioning the necessary tests required before it brings its first product – a brick made of Furnace Bottom Ash (FBA) and Pulverised Fuel Ash (PFA) aggregates – to market. Another focus of the company’s activities, being carried out in collaboration with Yorkshire Water, is the use of Incinerated Sewage Sludge Ash (ISSA) as the aggregate. Encos is also investigating the use of other waste aggregates, including rice husk ash.

The process could significantly reduce the environmental impact of the construction industry and also greatly reduce the amount of waste going to landfill. “We’ve got a revolutionary product, we use very little energy in making our products and use a binder which actually stores CO2 as opposed to emitting it,” says Encos chief executive, Mark Nichols. “Not only does every tonne of bricks we create prevent about the same weight of waste material going to landfill, it also prevents an equivalent amount of primary resource being used.”

Encos is currently discussing its products with major suppliers, customers and architects to determine how Encos products can be used to improve sustainability in the construction industry. Meanwhile, companies such as Yorkshire Water are already enthusiastic about the potential waste management developments that the process provides:

“Partnering with Encos may allow us to beneficially utilise a waste stream formed when producing high quality drinking water and treating waste water on behalf of our customers, moving us toward towards our zero waste aspiration,” notes Jon Brigg, Innovation Development Manager at Yorkshire Water.

Source: http://www.engineering.leeds.ac.uk/faculty/news/2011/producing-bricks-from-waste.shtml

Solar Energy: Solar Concentrator Increases Collection With Less Loss

Converting sunlight into electricity is not economically attractive because of the high cost of solar cells, but a recent, purely optical approach to improving luminescent solar concentrators (LSCs) may ease the problem, according to researchers at Argonne National Laboratories and Penn State.

Using concentrated sunlight reduces the cost of solar power by requiring fewer solar cells to generate a given amount of electricity. LSCs concentrate light by absorbing and re-emiting it at lower frequency within the confines of a transparent slab of material. They can not only collect direct sunlight, but on cloudy days, can collect diffuse light as well. The material then guides the light to the slab’s edges, where photovoltaic cells convert the energy to electricity.

“Currently, solar concentrators use expensive tracking systems that need to follow the sun,” said Chris Giebink, assistant professor of electrical engineering, Penn State, formerly of Argonne National Laboratory. “If they are a few tenths of a degree off from perfection, the power output of the system drops drastically. If they could maintain high concentration without tracking the sun, they could create electricity more cheaply.”

LSCs can do this, potentially concentrating light to the equivalent of more than 100 suns but, in practice, their output has been limited. While LSCs work well when small, their performance deteriorates with increasing size because much of the energy is reabsorbed before reaching the photovoltaics.

Typically, a little bit of light is reabsorbed each time it bounces around in the slab and, because this happens hundreds of times, it adds up to a big problem. The researchers, who included Giebink and Gary Widerrecht and Michael Wasielewski, Argonne-Northwestern Solar Energy Research Center and Northwestern University, note in the current issue of Nature Photonics that “we demonstrate near-lossless propagation for several different chromophores, which ultimately enables a more than twofold increase in concentration ratio over that of the corresponding conventional LSC.”

The key to decreasing absorption is microcavity effects that occur when light travels through a small structure with a size comparable to the light’s wavelength. These LSCs are made of two thin films on a piece of glass. The first thin film is a luminescent layer that contains a fluorescent dye capable of absorbing and re-emitting sunlight. This sits on a low refractive index layer that looks like air from the light’s point of view. This combination makes the microcavity and changing the luminescent layer’s thickness across the surface changes the microcavity’s resonance. This means that light emitted from one location in the concentrator does not fit back into the luminescent film anywhere else, preventing it from being reabsorbed.

“We were looking for some way to admit the light, but keep it from being absorbed,” said Giebink. “One of the things we could change was the shape and thickness of the luminescent layer.”

The researchers tried an ordered stair step approach to the surface of the dye layer. They looked at the light output from this new configuration by placing a photovoltaic cell at one edge of the collector and found a 15 percent improvement compared to conventional LSCs.

“Experimentally we are working with devices the size of microscope slides, but we modeled the output for larger, more practical sizes,” said Giebink. “Extending out results with the model predicts intensification to 25 suns for a window pane sized collector. This is about two and a half times higher than a conventional LSC.”

The researchers do not believe that the stair step approach is the optimal design for these LSCs. A more complicated surface variation is probably even better, but designing that will take more modeling. Other approaches may also include varying the shape of the glass substrate, which would produce a similar effect and potentially be simpler to make.

“We need to find the optimum way to structure this new type of LSC so that it is more efficient but also very inexpensive to make,” said Giebink.

The U.S. Department of Energy supported this work. Argonne National Laboratory has filed for a patent on this application.

Source:  www.ScienceDaily (Nov. 2, 2011)

Hybrid Power Plants Can Help Industry Go Green: Affordable Solar Option for Power Plants

Hybrid cars, powered by a mixture of gas and electricity, have become a practical way to “go green” on the roads. Now researchers at Tel Aviv University are applying the term “hybrid” to power plants as well.

Author John Whear, a biomedical engineer at the Cancer Therapy & Research Center at The University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio, examines how to manage rainwater as a common pool resource. Whear studied management techniques for other common pool resources like fisheries and forests, as well as organizations developed for sharing scarce water, such as the Edwards Aquifer Authority in Texas and social systems in pre-colonial India.

Drawing from game theory, Whear argues that a successful common pool resource (CPR) depends on participant behavior, which requires monitoring and management. Effective monitoring can be made simple with the technology available today, he said.

Along with reducing pressure on ground and surface water supplies, Whear proposes that large-scale rainwater harvesting (RWH) systems can also lesson the threat of deadly flash flooding common to urban areas in Central and South Texas. By catching large amounts of the fast-falling rainwater and draining it slowly over several days, the RWH systems can decrease runoff and increase the amount that is absorbed into the ground and recharge zones.

“Once recharge can be determined with an adequate degree of certainty, the acquired data could be used for the economic benefit of participants,” Whear said. “Possibilities include a flood control tax abatement and aquifer recharge credit.”

Whear first presented a rainwater harvesting paper last year at the 2010 ASME conference. In that paper he examined the options for distributing harvested rainwater and began contacting water management organizations. “That’s when I learned that rainwater harvesting is as much a social issue as it is an engineering one,” he said

Source: www.ScienceDaily.com (Nov. 3, 2011)