200 MW Solar Farm For China

 

China Longyuan Electric has commenced developed of a 200 MW solar power plant in the Golmud Desert of Qinghai, which will be the largest facility of its kind in the nation. The first phase of the AUD $700 million project is expected to have 36 million kWh of annual power generation capacity online by September of next year.
 
The Golmud desert is located in the Qaidam Basin and experiences 3,300 hours of  sunshine annually, making it ideal for the generation of clean power via solar panels. The region has the highest level of solar irradiation in China. 
 
Once completed, the solar farm will save 12,500 tons of coal annually and reduce yearly emissions of carbon dioxide and industrial dust by 6,067 tons and 175 tons respectively.
 
China Longyuan Electric Power Group, one of the five state-owned power generators in China, is no stranger to renewable energy - it's also the nation's largest wind power producer, with nearly 50 wind farms across the country. The company had a wind power generation capacity of 2,630 MW in 2008 and plans to boost this to 6,000 MW by 2010 and to 20,000 MW by 2020. Longyuan will likely become one of the world's top three wind farm operators by 2012.
 
In late May, Longyuan also signed an agreement for a 300MW solar farm project with the municipal government of Chifeng, Inner Mongolia

Longyuan says it is also close to launching an IPO in Hong Kong, with the company aiming to raise as much as HK$5 billion

Australian Researchers Help Break Solar Power Conversion Record

 

Researchers from the University of New South Wales have played the key role in attaining the highest conversion efficiency for solar power, setting a new world record of 43 per cent of sunlight converted into electricity.
 
Led by Scientia Professor Martin Green, Research Director of the UNSW ARC Photovoltaics Centre of Excellence, the University of New South Wales team with assistance of US groups have demonstrated a multi-cell combination which has set the new benchmark.
 
As sunlight is made up of many colours of different energy levels, different materials can better capture the full spectrum. By combining the materials, Professor Green and his team developed the high converting solar cell array.
 
Their silicon cell was optimised to capture light at the red and near-infrared end of the spectrum, allowing conversion of up to 46 per cent of light into electricity. When combined with four other cells, each optimised for different parts of the solar spectrum, the five-cell combination converted 43 per cent of the sunlight into electricity, bettering the previous world record by 0.3 per cent.
 
While the new record was not directly comparable to the 25 per cent efficiency world record for an individual solar cell set by UNSW last year, it's an important pointer for the future potential of solar photovoltaic power.
 
The ARC (Australian Research Council) Photovoltaics Centre of Excellence officially came into being on 13th June 2003. The Centre is charged with the mission of advancing silicon photovoltaic research and applying these advances to the related field of silicon photonics.
 

News for Monday 24 August, 2009

 

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