Knox County Detention Center opens its 300 panel solar thermal farm in Knox County, Tennessee. One of the largest of its kind, the solar hot water system will save the county approximately $60,000 a year. Trane and FLS Energy are responsible for the conception and installation of the solar farm.
Learn how solar energy can benefit your home or business. First Light Solar presents The Economics of Solar: a free, fun and informative solar energy workshop open to the public. Starting July through December 2010, six workshops will be held at different eco-friendly businesses in and around the Asheville area.
PRESS RELEASE
Knox County Detention Facility to Start Gathering Sunshine
- New solar farm, one of the nation’s largest, expected to save $60,000 in annual natural gas costs -
Knoxville, Tenn., July 13, 2010 — A new solar farm will soon enable Knox County officials to harvest sunshine to meet the hot water demands at the [...]
Governor Perdue visits Camp Lejeune solar project
On May 20, N.C. Governor Beverly Perdue made a stop in Eastern North Carolina where military housing developer and builder, Actus Lend Lease, Atlantic Marine Corps Communities (AMCC) and FLS Energy are developing the largest solar powered residential community in the continental U.S. at Camp Lejeune in [...]
FLS Energy's work at Camp Lejeune is featured in this National Public Radio "All Tech Considered" story. The Camp Lejeune community is quickly becoming the largest in the continental U.S. to heat water with solar energy.
from WNCMagazine.com
http://www.wncmagazine.com/feature/sustainability/evergreen_solar_farm
Written By:Eric Seeger
It’s a sunny spring afternoon, and michael shore is about to take a group of Buncombe County high school students on a tour of the future. Well, at least the energy part of it. They stand in front of roughly three acres of gleaming new solar panels, each flat [...]
A new method of predicting solar storms that could help to avoid widespread power and communications blackouts costing billions of pounds has been launched by researchers in the UK.
Scientists report success in boosting the ability of zinc oxide solar cells to absorb visible light simply by applying a blended mixture of various off-the-shelf dyes commonly used in food and medical industries -- in a soak-then-dry procedure not unlike that used to color a tee-shirt in a home washing machine.
The era of personalized energy systems -- in which individual homes and small businesses produce their own energy for heating, cooling and powering cars -- took another step toward reality as scientists reported discovery of a powerful new catalyst that is a key element in such a system. The advance could help free homes and businesses from dependence on the electric company and the corner gasoline station.
Find dusting those tables and dressers a chore or a bore? Dread washing the windows? Imagine keeping dust and grime off objects spread out over an area of 25 to 50 football fields. That's the problem facing companies that deploy large-scale solar power installations, and scientists have now developed a possible solution -- self-dusting solar panels -- based on technology developed for space missions to Mars.
The basis for solar energy is absorbing light and then effectively disassociating electrical charges. Researchers report that conjugated polymers are excellent materials for such a system, thanks to their light absorption and conduction properties.
By embedding the element selenium in zinc oxide, researchers have made a relatively inexpensive material that could be promising for solar power conversion by making more efficient use of the sun's energy.
One of the most promising technologies for making inexpensive but reasonably efficient photovoltaic cells just got much cheaper. Scientists in Canada have shown that inexpensive nickel can work just as well as gold for one of the critical electrical contacts that gather the electrical current produced by colloidal quantum dot solar cells.
A new process that simultaneously combines the light and heat of solar radiation to generate electricity could offer more than double the efficiency of existing solar cell technology, say the engineers who discovered it and proved that it works. The process, called 'photon enhanced thermionic emission," or PETE, could reduce the costs of solar energy production enough for it to compete with oil as an energy source.
Researchers have succeeded in growing sea-urchin shaped nanostructures from minute balls of polystyrene beads using a simple electrochemical process. The spines of the sea urchin consist of zinc oxide nanowires. The structured surface should help increasing the efficiency of photovoltaic devices.
