Just to add a little to Tony’s great recap of April yesterday, one of the more interesting aspects of April 2012, I think, was that it ended up just barely warmer than March. I am unaware of any time in our history here in Northcentral Wisconsin when April was cooler than March (in the same year). This year it almost happened. The average (or mean) temperature for March was 45.8. The average temperature for April was only 46.1!

One of the most interesting events of the month of April was an extreme temperature drop on the 16th. On the 15th the high temperature was 75. At the beginning of the day (midnight) on the 16th, the temperature was still 65. By the end of the day the temperature had dropped to 32 and we had light snow. Most of the temperature drop – about 25 degrees happened over a span of just a few hours during the morning.

The most interesting trend in the numbers of an uneventful month was the low temperature from the 10th to the 12th. For three days in a row, Wausau had a low temp of 29 degrees. One other night (the 17th) there was a low of 29 for a total of 4 nights in April (in Wausau) with a low of 29.

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And a little follow-up on the current economic woes the solar industry is currently feeling. It seems it is not only U.S. and European solar panel producers feeling the pinch. LDK solar in China has laid off nearly 10,000 workers since last July. No matter where the contraction is occurring, it is not a great sign for the industry. However, the over supply of panels right now is leading to very low historical prices for solar panels, so now might be one of the best times for consumers to jump in.

Have a nice Wednesday! Meteorologist Justin Loew.

Posted under Alternative Energy, Monthly Recap

Last week I wrote one of my periodic “things-might-look-bad-but-progress-continues” blog posts about economic malaise alongside an innovation explosion in the solar industry. In it I mentioned a German company Heliatek making a new organic tinted solar panel. Now they have achieved a record efficiency for dye-sensitized solar cells at 10.7 percent. They are planning a roll-to-roll manufacturing process that will hopefully lead to economically competitive production in the near future. Way to go Heliatek!

In another very recent nugget, and new transparent graphene material dubbed “GraphExeter” (according to this article), could help improve solar panels even further by be a transparent conductor of electricity. The material could go near the top layer of solar panels, let the light through, and conduct more electricity. Could it increase solar panel efficiency by up to 30? We will wait and see.

Ford Focus Electric

If you are an early adopter and are looking for an EV to hook up to your solar panels, check out these recent reviews of the Ford Focus and the Nissan Leaf. One option for charging might be the GE Wattstation. It is certainly stylish, but I always wonder, is it cheap? I suppose, most people that can afford and electric car can also probably afford a Wattstation.

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Just a reminder that the entry period for the snowmelt contest is done. No more entries will be accepted. We are now in the stage of watching and waiting to see when the snow will melt. From what I could see from this weekend, we still have a few days to go. Six people predicted today’s date. Way to take a chance and go out on a limb, but the winning date will not be today.

Have a fine Monday! Meteorologist Justin Loew.

Posted under Alternative Energy, Technology

Yesterday I made the case that natural gas is by far the best choice for a bridge fuel during the next few years while we continue to invent a cleaner energy future, after lamenting the fact of the solar industry’s current swoon. It is interesting to note that even though the economic foundation for widescale solar power adoption is shaky (propped up to a big degree by government subsidies) the solar story is still a bright on. Research into improving the efficiency and output of solar panels continues at a fast pace and it is likely that the price of panels will continue to fall in coming years. Even if natural gas is plentiful and cheaper than dirt, there are many reasons for the continued adoption of solar power for our increasingly electrified economic and transportation infrastructure.

Here are some recent stories that caught my eye:

At the University of Tokyo scientists have developed extremely thin solar cells - thinner than spider silk. Such cells, while not being as efficient as their crystalline brethren, could fins their way into many of our small modern day gadgets and sensors.

Other thin solar cell research ongoing at Rice and Tsinghua Universities has created a dye-sensitized solar cell that could theoretically be mass-produced at a fraction of the cost of current cells. This is great news, but the efficiency of these cells is quite low. High efficiency AND low cost is of course the “holy grail”.

Theoretically boosting the efficiency up to a whopping 40% is what is claimed in this recent article about Australian Scientist’s efforts to get more out of every photon. The article is a bit light on details which usually means it is a breakthrough that is years away from mass-production – if ever (in some cases).

The University of California at Berkeley is a bit better at describing their recent developments in an effort to boost the efficiency of solar cells. The key to their finding is that solar cells should emit light as easily as they absorb light in order to reach peak efficiency.

Heliatek Flexible Panels

In the arena of coating plastic or glass with solar cell material, Heliatek in Germany has developed a new technique similar to the technique used to make OLED flat screen display panels. The panels, which could possibly be used to make tinted electricity-generating windows, are rather expensive but they think they can develop a market.

Twin Creeks Solar continues to steam ahead with their vapor deposition method of producing thin solar cells. Their equipment should lower the cost of manufacturing solar cells thus keeping downward pressure on the end-user price. Remember that you read about Twin Creeks solar previously here in the blog.

Japan continues to push hard into renewable energy in order to replace the power they lost after the earth-quake and Fukushima nuclear disaster. Maybe their increased demand will blunt the loss of subsidies out of Europe (at least a little). One of their projects includes a floating solar power plant. I know they do not have a lot of space on the islands, but a floating solar power plant seems to be begging for damage from wind and waves. Hopefully Japan will have better luck with their renewable investments than here in the U.S. It is interesting to note that the U.S. now leads the world in renewable energy investments, but I wonder if we lead in renewable energy installation or even production in recent years due to the bankruptcy of several major government sponsored projects to the tune of billions of dollars.

In a not so revolutionary but still interesting development, Naked Energy of the UK plans to offer a combined solar power and solar water heating device. Heating water with solar power is one of the projects I have been interested in for my own house.

Taken all together, there is certainly still some progress in the solar industry, even as the government funding dries up.

Have a nice Thursday! Meteorologist Justin Loew.

Posted under Alternative Energy

While covering alternative energy stories over the years I have mentioned many different innovations and the companies who develop them into products. Often times the companies are start-ups with big plans for the future. It has now been long enough that this blog roll contains a history of some companies from inception, to going public, to mass production, and then….decline.

Solyndra (and its scandal) went from boom to bust fairly quick. For First Solar the process has been a bit longer and they are certainly not busted…yet. I have followed the company since it went public and even cheered when their stock price rose above $160 dollars back in 2007. Here was a U.S. company using a fairly new technology (thin film solar panels) becoming a world leaders. The future looked bright. Unfortunately the future was built upon a house of cards. The housing crisis hit in the and revealed that much of the world’s economy was running on a mountain of debt, not the production of real goods and services. The debt crisis has been slow to unfold over the last 2 or 3 years but it is now hitting home in Europe where First Solar (FSLR) had traditionally been quite strong. FSLR is closing its plant in Germany – story here (use google translate to read it in English). The gist of the article is that European Nations are ending most of their alternative energy subsidies and this means the solar market is kaput. I knew that solar production was somewhat dependent on government subsidies but I didn’t realize it meant nearly everything in Europe. FSLR is also laying off some employees in Malaysia. The stock price today, $18 and change.

It is a sad turn of events for those of us who are optimistic for a clean energy future. It just shows once again that central planning does not work out very often. It is very difficult to force things into the market that are not cost competitive. The one bright spot is that so many solar panels have been  produced in the last couple of years (a lot in China) that there is an over-supply on the market and the prices are the cheapest they have ever been in relationship to the price of oil. I have been saving up some money to buy an electric car, but I might use that money on some dirt cheap (relatively speaking) solar panels instead. I was thinking about starting simple and just installing enough capacity to run the water heater, or maybe get a new solar water heater.

Then again, natural gas is also dirt cheap right now, and I mean really dirt cheap! Running the water heater with natural gas is barely costing anything. Natural gas is so cheap that I was thinking about buying a conversion kit for my car. According to a TV report I viewed a couple weeks ago, the cost of running your car on natural gas is less than half of running it on regular gasoline. At that rate, and $4 per gallon gasoline, it would not take too long to pay for itself. But I would need to fuel it up somewhere.

Kulps' Stratford CNG Station

Thankfully some forward-thinking business people in the area are already planning for more compressed natural gas (CNG) usage. Kulps of Stratford have already installed a fueling station. Maybe more will follow. Many truck fleets around the U.S. are already converting completely over to CNG, and saving A LOT of money in the process. It is a good thing.

At this point you might be thinking it is not such a ”good” thing, after all, CNG is a fossil fuel. And what about the fracking problems? First of all, the fracking problems, according to many scientists, are overblown. Second of all, CNG is the cleanest realistic fossil fuel we could use in order to clean up the air and environment, while we continue to develop better technologies (like solar and nuclear) for the future. Forget biofuels, most of which are beset with environmental and financial problems. CNG is where it is at for the short term to clean up the environment AND act as a bridge to a cleaner alternative energy future. I think environmentalists are making a HUGE strategic mistake by battening down the hatches and giving it all they got to shut down natural gas production.

Considering AGW, natural gas would not seem like a good solution until you compare it with coal, oil, and biofuels. If developed nations switched most of their energy production and transportation infrastructure over to natural gas for the next decade we would emit a lot less carbon dioxide. Not only that, it burns sooooooo much cleaner that we would simultaneously clean up the air land and water. Not only that, we would save a lot of money and stimulate the economy! Not only that, the government wouldn’t be wasting billions of dollars in loan scandals like Solyndra. In fact, the government would receive a mountain of money from drilling royalties. And the biggest “not only that” – maybe there would be less support for destructive bloody wars in the Middle East. They could keep their oil because the U.S. is literally drowning in natural gas. Did I mention that natural gas can be made from waste material as well? Natural gas seems like the ideal bridge fuel. Now if only the government would get out of the way.

Have a pleasant Wednesday! Meteorologist Justin Loew.

Posted under AGW, Alternative Energy, Climate Change, Pollution

I suppose it could be said of every age in human history that there was “great promise and peril” involved with all we could imagine to do and build. I wonder if today’s dichotomy is more extreme. I have often heard it said that we are currently in a Schrodinger economy that seems both alive (growing) and dead (drowning in debt) at the same times. The Lifeboat Foundation has certainly found plenty of perils to worry about in the near future. In the case of the environment, as I mentioned yesterday, we are either headed for mass starvation, death, and world-wide calamity or an abundant future with clean energy, depending on which lens you are peering through on any particular day.

I mentioned the great progress in battery and electric vehicle technology yesterday, but these will do no good unless we have a clean source of energy to “fill them up”. Wind power is an option, but it is limited, and comes with some drawbacks. Biofuels might be a good bridge fuel (to the future), but are they really that much better than natural gas (another “bridge” fuel) when everything is considered (land use, infrastructure development, etc). About the best biofuel story I have seen recently is this lab result which created liquid fuel from carbon dioxide and electricity supplied by solar panels. Who knows if this could be scaled up for industrial production, but if we could take carbon dioxide out of the air and make fuel out of it, that would be ideal from an AGW perspective – if we continue to use liquid hydrocarbons to power the economy many decades into the future.

Then there is nuclear energy, which has taken a beating since the Fukushima disaster in Japan. Japan has of course shut down nearly all of its reactors, Germany has promised to retire all of theirs, and funding is drying up for the construction of newer safer fission reactors. As far a pollution and AGW is concerned, the phasing out of nuclear power right now will probably lead to the use of more fossil fuels, not more renewable energy sources, because our Schrodinger economy is not good enough to pay for the expensive alternatives. Two new modular reactors are being considered in the U.S. but they are mired in regulatory approval and will not come online perhaps until 2020. There is still hope for nuclear fusion reactors as new computer simulations have shown some promise, but these will be quite expensive to build and are probably years away.

One of the cheaper and cleaner alternative options we have right now is solar power. The price has fallen dramatically in the last 5 years from about $4 per watt down to $1 per watt and there are many signs it will continue to get cheaper. The price drop is due in part to technological innovation but also due to an oversupply on the market. Chinese solar panel manufacturers are running full steam ahead flooding the market - with the help of government support. This has led to a burgeoning trade war between the U.S. and China and the implementation of tarrifs.

Blythe Solar Power Plant Goes Bankrupt

I know the reasoning behind tariffs, and perhaps this will help U.S. manufacturers survive, but the end result is usually bad. Tariffs (economic warfare) often lead to real physical war. They also raise the price on the taxed items. Perhaps we should just buy up all the cheap solar panels while they are on the market instead. Maybe our solar power plant projects in the U.S. would not be going bankrupt (after recieving billions in loans from the government) if we managed our purchases better. Solar would also likely benefit from a more intelligent power grid and the use of information technology to save on installation costs.

Outside of all the current technological “fixes” we could implement to the world from potential future peril (like AGW) there are also more mundane measures that would help. If it is too difficult to stop emitting carbon dioxide, maybe we could focus on methane instead, as less of the gas floating around the atmosphere would lead to a significant reduction in possible future warming of the atmosphere. Then there are more radical futuristic ideas like engineering our bodies to be less energy intensive. Although instead of re-engineering the human body, it would be much easier to stop having so many kids.

I’ll leave you with one last positive data point to consider for today: extreme poverty around the world has decreased dramatically in the last couple of decades. The percentage of people living on the equivalent of less than $1 per day has dropped from 42% in 1981 to just 14% today.  Now why would this be a positive thing for the environment? Becoming wealthier usually means increased usage of resources, doesn’t it? Typically, yes. However, wealthy people usually choose to reduce pollution as we have seen almost all metrics of pollution decline in recent decades in the developed nations of the world. When people have greater food and energy security, they do not focus as much on day-to-day living and instead on the future world where they will live. Most people choose an un-polluted future world. Also, with the price of traditional fossil fuels continuing to rise, it is likely the new prosperity will lead to the use of alternative energy sources.

Have a pleasant Tuesday! Meteorologist Justin Loew.

Posted under AGW, Alternative Energy, Climate Change, Technology

In case you were gone over the weekend, check out Tony’s recap of the month of March 2012. It was a whopping 15.8 degrees above normal and it ended up being the warmest March on record in Wausau and most Northcentral Wisconsin cities. Everyone loved the warm weather in March but it did come with some downsides. Some sensitive fruit trees and plants are blooming early and they could suffer from a hard frost. Precipitation was also below normal which is something I am perpetually concerned about. With the precipitation (rain and snow) deficit in March, we are now officially a tad below normal for the year. It is not the worst thing in the world but it would be nice if we started to see a little more rain in the weather pattern. Our best chance for the next 7 days looks to be tonight.

My comments on the numbers from March; it was quite interesting to see that the average high temperature and the average low temperature were both exactly 15.8 degrees above normal. Besides all of the record high temperatures we also had 9 records for the warmest low temperature. We probably also broke records for the most 70 degree days in March and the most above normal (+15.8 degrees) any month has been in Wausau’s record books, but I didn’t have the time to dig up all of that information to confirm.

Another thing you probably didn’t miss over the weekend is the very cool weather on Saturday. Tony provided a good explanation here. Mother nature threw us a big surprise when the clouds did not break up in the afternoon. What is most surprising to me is that we didn’t see this type of inversion (locked in the low cloudiness and fog) at any point during the month of March when we were hitting record high temps. During a typical year, when the snow melts, we tend to get a couple days like that when the fog/clouds do not dissipate. This year isn’t typical and it didn’t really happen until the last day of March, Saturday, when the high only reached 42.

The record warm March dovetails nicely with the release of the latest IPCC Climate Risk Report that Tony blogged about a few days back. The report highlights included a greater chance of more frequent record high temps and heat waves than record cold in coming years. Looking at this March would probably prompt a lot of AGW theorists to say “see, see, I told you environmental Armageddon is upon us”. Thankfully, there has not been a lot of that type of hysteria going on over the past few weeks. I wonder if the IPCC and various media outlets have taken some of my advice. I doubt they are reading our blog here, but I would be flattered if I had that much influence.

Instead of blaring out extreme headlines and statements, the IPCC’s report couches its language in the “chances” that certain climate changes will occur. March of 2012, as extreme as it was, does not mean that future heat waves and more warming are 100%, rock-solid guaranteed but it is a data point that supports the now several decade trend of a warming climate. It is more evidence that backs mainstream AGW theory.

Why it is not a 100% guarantee of future “environmental Armageddon”, I have explained many times in the blog. Not only is the climate system complex, dynamic, and non-linear, but human society is as well. Some unforeseen natural interactions within the earth’s climate could conspire to tip us into a cooler trend or even an ice age. Even harder to predict is the action of humans, therefore climate modelers generally stick with some pretty tame assumptions about future population and energy usage.

I am much more optimistic. I have dabbled in energy predictions off-and-on and I think that we will have much less fossil fuel usage a lot sooner than the IPCC expects. As potentially as gloomy a picture that could be painted by the latest IPCC Climate Risk Report (and other depression-inducing reports) and by the extremely warm March, you could paint an equally optimistic picture by just monitoring the latest tech progress.

The CTO of Tesla recently proclaimed that we are near a tipping point in the adoption of electric vehicles. Now, he might be “talking his book”, but the trend in battery technology is unmistakable. The batteries and the vehicles themselves are set to go down in price in coming years. The range an EV can travel on one charge is increasing. It already makes sense for thousands of the moderately wealthy among us to purchase EVs. It will become even more obvious to the rest once the price comes down. After all, most of us do not drive more than 40 miles during a typical day’s commute. For those who might not like the idea of plugging in their car every night, wireless chargers are coming into their own. There is even a suggestion to put magnetic/electric coils in the highways in order to charge as you drive. The latter idea is interesting and could be done - technically - but I doubt it would ever be commercial viable/economically feasible.

In the realm of battery technology, highly efficient and cheaper rechargeable batteries using sodiumn instead of lithium are under development at Argonne National Laboratories. Envia has developed a battery with twice the storage capacity as normal but it is not out of the lab yet. Researchers in Hong Kong have even claimed to have created a new flexible graphene “battery” that operates on heat energy alone!

It is not only battery technology that will help propel EVs of the future (and store copious amounts of alternative energy), it is super capacitors as well.

Flexible Paper Supercapacitors

Once again we find flexible graphene being used to create flexible supercapacitors. Who knew it would be as “easy” as using DVDs and laser writers. These flexible paper-based supercapacitors are probably a little closer to economic reality (and producing environmental “salvation”). New insights into the mechanism of charging and dis-charging supercapacitors should continue to move things forward in years to come.

Now just to be fair, battery progress and EVs face a bumpy road ahead. Fisker and A123 have found some tough-sledding in the EV market. First A123 said it expected much better demand for batteries in the coming year, then doubts and financial troubles (as I suspected and have covered in the blog) started to creep into the A123 conversation. On top of that Fisker has been forced to recall most of its A123 battery packs.

Evacuated Tube Transport

Outside of EVs (meaning cars) there is also some movement in electric scooters as Scoot tests the market for such services in San Francisco. There is even room for improvement in super-sonic air travel. A recent design indicates super-sonic jets could fly without generating a sonic boom and be much more efficient. Dreaming a couple decades into the future? Maybe vaccuum tube trains.

There is much more but there is only so much space for one blog post and only so much time in the day. You can be assured I will continue to keep you updated on where technological progress might take us.

Have a good Monday! Meteorologist Justin Loew.

Posted under AGW, Alternative Energy, Climate Change, Monthly Recap, Technology

Whether you like them or not, giant wind turbines are likely coming to the Great Lakes. The Federal government is fast-tracking (lessening regulatory barriers to) the installation of wind farms on the Great Lakes. I suppose if they are going  to make it very hard and more expensive to produce energy from coal, then they had better be working fast on finding a replacement. Natural gas would see to be a nice (cheaper, cleaner, more efficient, less CO2) bridge fuel but the current U.S. government does not seem to have much interest in exploiting this fuel for its benefits.

So we are going to get wind turbines. For the record, I don’t like wind power as a “solution” to our energy needs. I know that it is the best current alternative energy option, but it does not come without negative side effects.

Example: Off Shore Wind Turbines

Besides killing winged animals by bludgeoning or making their lungs explode, they create sight and noise pollution as well as alter the weather around their vicinity (in the case of big wind farms). I hope I am not being a hypocrite or a NIMBY on this issue. I am a big advocate of conserving energy (I live fairly miserly compared to many) and the adoption of alternatives, but I have never gotten on the wind turbine bandwagon. I would rather have solar panels dotting the landscape, but more preferably rooftops. I don’t want to see large wind turbines stretching for miles around Lake Superior or Michigan. I don’t want to hear them when I am trying to sleep on the shore. Also, I don’t want to be the taxpayer that pays for their removal 20 years from now when they are decommissioned.

What do you think? Are large wind farms on the Great Lakes a good idea? Should the development be fast-tracked?

Have a good Sunday. Meteorologist Justin Loew.

Posted under Alternative Energy

After marvelling at the progress in solar power last week, I think it is time for a wind power update. It is still there (wind power). It is still the cheapest form of alternative energy. Nothing new. The amount of wind energy produced climbs with the erection of each new mega-turbine.

The downsides to wind energy/turbines remain the same. Noisy. Kills flying animals. Disrupts the local weather (in the case of large wind farms). Ruins the beauty of the natural landscape. And now we can add one more downside risk for ocean based turbines – hurricanes. A recent study found that many ocean-based wind turbines would be destroyed by hurricanes during their 20 year lifetime. This should certainly factor into the lifetime cost of ocean-based wind farms – making them a little more expensive than what is currently estimated. Another part of the cost of wind turbines that not too many people seem to mention is de-commissioning cost.  Whether whacked by a hurricane or just worn out from a normal life-cycle (about 20 years), how much will it cost to take the turbines down? What about the huge blocks of cement left in the earth? Before we cover too much more of the earth with these huge turbines, maybe we should consider some of the lifetime costs.

Overall, I still support wind energy in general, but it is definitely not a panacea. It will not be too much longer before we reach the point of diminishing returns with wind turbines. Already, the average wind speed around the globe is decreasing. While it would take at least a doubling or tripling of current installation numbers to have a dramatic effect, each new turbine takes a little more momentum out of the air.

New Nuke Plant Construction

So maybe nuclear power is a better option? It could be, but there are safety concerns. Plus the production of nuclear fuel is still highly dependent on the availability of cheap fossil fuel energy, and Peak Oil is having an effect on prices, even if it hasn’t caused a total collapse of society. In any case, amazingly, the U.S. has approved the construction of 2 new nuclear reactors in Georgia. These new “third-generation” reactors are supposed to be safer than the one that melted down in Fukushima last year. But don’t expect these to come online until around 2020 or so. Just because they have been approved doesn’t mean they will not have to jump through another million bureaucratic hoops before the construction is finished.

And if you follow the cold fusion story, which I suppose is a future energy wild card, even if the chances it is real or economically viable are quite small, here is a recent video from NASA explaining a possible new cold fusion method. The video is scant on details. Is it just theory? Do they have a good grasp on what they are talking about? Is a super clean energy future right around the corner? I doubt it, but I am willing to learn more.

In the cold fusion realm, I have been following the Rossi E-cat story. Rossi is an Italian scientist that claims to have created a cold fusion machine (the E-cat) and is trying to sell it to different power companies around the world. Many people think it is a fraud. He has held demonstrations to convert skeptics but won’t allow anyone to “look under the hood”. Suspicious? Definitely. I hope it really works, but some other people and potential investors are starting to cry foul.

Have a good Monday! Meteorologist Justin Loew.

Posted under Alternative Energy

First off, the comment section should be working again. For those of you reading today, maybe make a little test comment to say hi or tell your favorite joke you have heard recently. If things aren’t working, we will take another whack at the problem.

Most everyone is raving about the recent record warmth, which is understandable, just remember that it can come with some negative consequences as well. Due to the persistent warmth, the maple syrup harvest will likely be quite poor this year. Growers of fruit trees here in Wisconsin and other parts of the country could experience a poor growing season if we end up with some hard frost later this month or in April. The problem is that the cherry trees (and probably some apple trees as well) are getting buds and might flower early. The flowers are highly susceptible to frost. If the buds or blossoms are killed off by frost, some crops could be decimated. Recent research has also shown a negative effect on some animals. Butterfly populations in the Rocky Mountain states have declined in recent years because of an earlier start to the growing season.

Cherry Blossoms

It seems they have the same problem that we might encounter this year. When mountain flowers bloom too early, they can be killed by a hard frost. Then when the butterflies hatch, they do not have as much food to support their life cycle. There is another negative aspect of current heat waves which I won’t recap here but you can find in this past blog post.

So continue to enjoy the warm weather but remember that from a natural perspective, it would be much better if our current warm spell was producing high temps around 45 or 50, instead of 60s and 70s. Speaking of 70s, we will probably not have 70s in most of the area again until this weekend. High temperatures today and tomorrow will likely be in the mid to upper 60s. This is still warm enough to potentially break some records, it will just not feel as much like Summer. The record high in Wausau today is 65 and the record high tomorrow is 68. Right now I am forecast highs of 66 and 68 respectively.

It will feel a lot more like Summer again over the weekend, not only becuase high temps will likely reach the low to mid 70s, but because the humidity will be rising as well. The increasing dewpoints will lead to a chance of widely scattered showers and thunderstorms from Saturday all the way through the middle of next week, but it should not be enough rain (or last long enough) on any particular day to ruin your outdoor plans. We should break some record high temps on Saturday and Sunday but on Monday it will be iffy as the record is 73. Here are the records highs that were broken yesterday with the old record in parentheses.

• Wisconsin Rapids 77 (72)
• Wausau 75 (67)
• Stevens Point 75 (67)
• Marshfield 75 (65)
• Merrill 72 (65)
• Antigo 72 (64)
• Rhinelander 71 (62)

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Earlier this week I was mentioning how efficiency gains do not always translate into a better environment and less pollution, because as energy becomes cheaper we tend to use more of it…a lot more. As we mature further into the information age, I think efficiency gains will produce more positive results because we won’t have as much need to move large masses of product and people around the globe.

Therefore, it is a good sign that solar power continues to get cheaper by the day. Some would say a lot of it has to do with a glut of solar panels on the market and/or subsidy support from the Chinese government, but there is also a lot of technological innovation going on. It might take a while for green energy technologies to have an impact on pollution levels but we are moving in the right direction rather fast.

A recent study has suggested that technological advances should allow manufacturers to bring the price of solar panels (and solar generated electricity) down to levels comparable with coal before the end of this decade. This was not considered remotely possible just 5 or 10 years ago, but that is how far we have advanced.

Several companies are making this happen with different approaches. One method involves using less silicon to make the panels.

Twin Creeks thin solar panel

Current manufacturing for silicon solar panels wastes a lot of silicon. Ampulse is using a new vapor deposition method to create thin silicon cells from the “bottom up” and Twin Creeks has developed a way to “peel” thin layers of silicon off of bulk silicon (ingots/blocks). I have not seen any numbers as to the efficiency of the related products but they should become available soon as these two companies license their methods to other producers. If the thin silicon wafers work as promised, solar panels could come down in price to 50 cents per watt or less.

Other more speculative research has involved the use of silicon nanoshells to absorb more light from the sun, thus making solar panels more efficient. Also, computer simulations at MIT have shown the potential for precisely manufactured metamaterials that have ridges and valleys on their surface could absorb more wavelengths of light. In the realm of solar thermal power, a company called Halotechnics is developing newer materials that will allow thermal plants to operate at a higher temperature. This would increase the efficiency solar thermal plants which are already more efficient than photovoltaics.

In other great news, Solar Frontier is dramatically expanding its operations in Japan. They of course have basically shut down their nuclear power plants and are looking for alternatives. Hopefully solar power will fill more of the need going forward. Also, UCLA scientists have just broken a world record efficiency at 10.6% for cheap-to-produce tandem solar cells.

In not so good news, Abound Solar is starting to lay off employees and First Solar is talking about not opening some of its new manufacturing facilites. It is a tough marketplace and not all companies will thrive.

The most disturbing news in solar energy is that installation and permitting costs continue to be stubbornly high. At least some web-centric entrepreneurs are trying to reduce some of these costs. Even company Eight19 is battling against government permitting and installation costs in trying to sell very cheap thin film solar panels in developing countries. I would expect someone to have come up with a cheaper way to install solar panels by now, but I suppose it quite often involves work on steep roofs and this can be complicated. As far as permitting goes, it is almost unconscionable that governments are getting in the way of solar adoption. If they want more alternative energy, they should keep their bureaucrats and regulations under control.

Have a nice Thursday! Meteorologists Justin Loew.

Posted under Alternative Energy, Heat, Records, Spring