Tag Archives: Edison Only Links

Nanotechnology Energizes Solar Panels

Something very small [nanotechnology] is happening in the world of solar panels, but it promises big changes. It cuts to the heart of solar panel engineering, and the big dream solar aficionados have harbored for decades……thin film technology that is both cost effective and practical.

With nano-solar technology, the panels themselves change as well, their manufacturing becoming more like a film making process than adhering silicon-like materials to glass substrates. The use of customized nano particles has the ability to make the cells better able to capture incoming solar radiation, thereby increasing panel efficiency; and also enabling a cheaper manufacturing process. To give you a sense of the scale, a nanometer is equal to 1 billionth of a meter.

Konarka

Check out a photo below of Konarka’s, plastic, organic, thin film material, and visit them to see their typical product performance spec sheet. Konarka Technologies is located in Lowell Massachusetts, and was originally founded in 2001 by a team of researchers at UMass at Lowell, including Mr. Howard Berke, who now serves as Konarka’s Chairman and CEO.

Nanosolar, is now marketing their nanosolar panels, boasting a 15% panel efficiency. On a thin piece of aluminium, the company adds a nanoparticle ink, at a rate of printing 100 feet of solar cells a minute. They can produce panels [containing many solar cells] for 60 cents per watt, retailing them for about $1.00 a watt when production is full-scale. A fully installed Nanosolar panel system would cost about $2.50 a watt, much lower than the $6-8 a watt today with conventional solar panels. You can see an interesting video of their panel making operation and also via this photo below.

Nanosolar was founded in 2002, recently benefiting in 2010 from a revamped team of management talent with experience in growing technology companies into potent billion dollar organizations. The new team is headed by Mr. Geoff Tate, Chairman and CEO, and located in San Jose, CA.

The U.S. Department of Energy’s Idaho National Laboratory has teamed up with Microcontinuum Inc. and the University of Missouri to develop a very interesting nanoantenna which can capture up to 80% of the sun’s mid-infrared rays. Spiral nanoantennas, 1/25th the width of a human hair, do the work. These little babies can also harvest energy after the sun goes down! See photo below, and check out this website and fascinating video. Since these arrays absorb infrared radiation, they also absorb the sun’s infrared energy reradiated by the earth after dark. Similarly, they also take in heat from industrial processes. This opens up a whole series of applications for absorbing waste heat and reradiating it as electricity, effectively cooling buildings, computers, equipment, etc. … without air conditioning. This could be revolutionary in just a few more years. From tiny nanotechnology, big new applications grow.

Microcontinuum was originally founded in 1998 by a former team of Polaroid scientists and engineers. Dr. W. Dennis Slafer is currently President and CFO, Cambridge, MA.

New Energy Technologies, Inc. says it’s come up with a patent-pending method of spraying windows with a nano-thin photovoltaic material. The spray is an organic semitransparent material that converts sunlight to electricity. Using this technology the company will produce its SolarWindows, equipped with a nano film 1/1,000th the thickness of a human hair. Researchers found that its super small solar cells can harness more artificial light than other solar cells “under normal office lighting conditions, without the benefit of outside natural light from windows.” Check them out!

Mr. John A. Conklin is President and CEO of New Energy Technologies, located in Columbia, MD.

Editor’s Deep Dive

Thomas Edison was a big fan of solar energy … “I’d put my money on the sun and solar energy. What a source of power! I hope we don’t have to wait until oil and coal run out before we tackle that.”

Time ® is a registered trademark of Time Inc.

Thomas Edison – Poster Child for the Home Schooled

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The story of the growth of home schooling has been nothing short of amazing. Starting in 1985 when only about 50,000 students were home schooled, that number in the last few years has been rising about 8% per year. The US Department of Education estimated that as of 2007about 1,500,000 students were home schooled. Dr. Brian Ray, President of the National Home Education Research Institute, believes that as of the Spring of 2008, that number was over 2,000,000. There also are some very serious local benefits with home schooling as well—savings to local school construction and operating budgets, probably measured in billions of dollars. With this in mind, let’s talk about another home school success.

The world’s greatest inventor, Thomas Edison, was home schooled by his mother, Nancy Elliot Edison. After performing poorly in the traditional one-room schoolhouse of yesteryear, his mother refused to believe the teacher’s assessment that young Tom’s “brains were addled” (mentally slow). Clearly Tom was experiencing the world quite differently from his classmates, and mother Nancy knew her son had quite a bit of capability from the things he was doing and experimenting with around the house. Through a great deal of nurturing and leadership, she gave him the basic tools to learn, both in the form of process and content; and empowered him to learn.

Nancy Edison encouraged her son to have both a head and hands approach to learning, allowing him to have his own laboratory in their small basement-a place where his father became quite concerned as various small explosions emanated, along with strange smells. Nancy endured over dad’s protests and imbued Tom with four life-long pillars of learning:

Do not be afraid to fail, keep trying, learn from your mistakes
Read across the entire span of literature, not just what you like
It is OK to work with your hands and learn from life, not all important things come from books
Never stop learning, keep improving yourself.

In later years, a grown and very successful Thomas acknowledged that his mother’s discipline for a focused life was responsible for his great success. Today we hear a great deal of classroom interest in involving children in a head and hands learning environment. Renovated and new museums almost always involve head and hands exhibits or hands-on themes for learning.

Tom obviously learned differently from the standard rote learning and recitation of the day. It was fundamentally necessary for Edison to have a visceral feel for the information he was learning, especially for a need to experiment and react to the results of those experiments. Throughout his life Edison developed a love for literature and could quote many great poems and passages.

His life-long learning style motivated his strenuous recording of experiments, thoughts, and observations in thousands of detailed laboratory notebooks, which scholars are still mining today, 79 years after his death. So intense was his love of information, communications, and learning that he placed his own corporate office in his beautiful and well-stocked library. To him, a corporation was a continuous learning environment. In our Information Revolution today, symbolized by the ubiquitous Internet, Edison would be one very happy fellow!

Many modern-day home schoolers who visit the Thomas Edison National Historical Park in West Orange, New Jersey agree whole-heartedly. Young Edison fans come to the site to see and hear first-hand the story of the great inventor, responding very well to hands-on activities at the site. A recent summer camp for young folks ages 4-11 drew many home school parents and children. As they were making wet cell batteries in response to that morning’s program, I could not help but remember Edison’s famous quote….”Fail Your Way to Success!”

For you home school parents out there, check into our website at www.thomasedison.org where you can find lots of information about Edison and plenty of educational resources as well. Let us know what you think about Mr. Edison and the educational tools we have made available.

“To invent, you need a good imagination and a pile of junk.” ~ Thomas Edison Quote

GE Charging Station Bypasses High-Priced Gas Pump

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What do you get when GE Ecomagination engineers using smart grid technology team up with Yves Behar, a renowned industrial designer? You get a beautiful and smart parking spot charging station for electric vehicles. Known as the GE WattStation ™, this sleek and attractive portal for city streets will start making its appearance in 2011; and can re-charge vehicles in just four to eight hours.

The first Wattstations will be used for streets, but other models for use in garages, homes, parking lots and such will soon follow. The initial street models will display various color LED lights on their sloped head to indicate the charging port is available for use (green), in use (blue), unavailable (red); but this is only the beginning, because such portals can later be morphed into information gathering and reporting points for the smart grid and consumer use. Who knows, maybe someday, electric vehicles sitting there at a cluster of Wattstations might be used during emergency utility conditions to feed a portion of their stored energy back into the grid, or perhaps providing emergency power to nearby buildings during an outage.

The Wattstation technology helps our nation reduce pollution, reduce its dependence on imported oil, and helps a utility system cope with what will be a significant increase in EVs and their charging needs. This is where GE’s smart grid technology comes into play and provides the necessary real-time communications between the charging posts and the utility company. When it all works right, GE engineers believe that for every 10,000 drivers operating conventional gasoline powered vehicles who switch to EVs will save 33,000 metric tons per year of carbon dioxide emissions; which is equivalent to removing the annual carbon dioxide emissions of 6,500 conventionally powered cars.

Expect utility companies, EV manufacturers, and consumers to show strong interest. This changes our concept of the traditional gas station from a greasy, noisy, environment to a smart and elegant aluminum post, open 24/7/365, with no signs showing gas price hikes. Who’s not for that?

In the Thomas Edison garage on the grounds of his historic Glenmont estate in West Orange, NJ sits the original charging station he used for his legendary work with EVs and the development of his landmark nickel-iron storage battery. All this happened over 100 years ago. Were Thomas alive today to witness GE’s new Wattstation, he would be smiling, and probably already generating many new ideas and twists for it. Between all this excitement over such new technology and sophisticated design, he also would probably smile and say…..”Well done GE!”