Tuesday, March 10th, 2020
TIM SYLVIA, - pv magazine
Stephan: Another breakthrough in solar technology. The price is dropping and the efficiency and output is going up. All of this is helping the world transition out of the carbon era.
Credit: Vincent Shaw/pv magazine
There are two solar module manufacturers, Risen Energy and Trina Solar, that have unveiled first-of-their kind 500W, 72-cell PV modules.
How will the advent of 500-watt solar modules change the solar industry?
“For applications where you have a lot of area, particularly commercial and especially utility-scale, it’s really significant,” CEO of Cinnamon Energy Systems Barry Cinnamon told pv magazine. “You could just use fewer modules, it reduces handling costs and overall balance-of-system costs go down.”
If there are less modules needed to reach the capacity specifications of a project, that means overall project costs will go down as these modules become economically viable. A significant area that will see cost reduction will come from the racking and trackers.
“It’s going to drive down the cost of racks and trackers per module,” said Matt Kesler, head of technology at OMCO Solar, an Arizona-based racking and fixed tilt tracking manufacturer. “It’ll reduce the cost per watt of installation labor. It’s also going to give a premium on racks and trackers that are designed […]
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Tuesday, March 10th, 2020
JONATHON RAMSEY , - autoblog
Stephan: More good news about the developing post-carbon technologies that are emerging.
Fred Hunstable and Brad Hunstable and their revolutionary electric motor.
In the past two years, companies have promised electric motors producing far more torque density, measured in kilowatts per kilogram. Avid said its Evo Axial Flux motor makes “one of the highest usable power and torque densities of any electric vehicle motor available on the market today.” Equipmake says its motors develop “class leading power densities.” Yasa claims its “electric motors … provide the highest power/torque density available in their category.”
Enter Linear Labs, which says it has a motor to beat all. The company declares its Hunstable Electric Turbine (HET), perhaps with unintentional shades of Ayn Rand, “The Motor of the World.”
The company told Autoblog, “The defining characteristic of this motor [is that] at very low RPMs … [for] the same size, same weight, same volume, and the same amount of input energy into the motor, we will always produce – at a minimum, sometimes more, but at a minimum – two to three times the torque output of any electric motor in the world, […]
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Tuesday, March 10th, 2020
Dr. Maximilian Holland , - CleanTechnica
Stephan: Norway is a country that explicitly has made individual and, thus, social wellbeing a higher priority than profit. And what has that produced? By almost any social outcome measure you can think of, life span, general health, child care, education, average income, prison system, literacy, etc., etc., Norway is a superior society to the United States. So maybe it should not be surprising that they are also leading the way in the transition out of the carbon era. Here's some data.
Norway, the global leader in the transition to electric vehicles, has seen its strongest ever February with over 68% market share for plug-in passenger vehicles. The vast majority of plug-ins were pure electric (BEV), which took 49.7% of the overall market. Pure fossil vehicles continued their decline, to just over 20% market share.
Norway’s highest ever plug-in vehicle (EV) February market share was right off the back of its strongest ever January result. With historical data suggesting March results will be higher still, the first quarter of 2020 should comfortably achieve over 66% EV market share.
Norway’s top 5 EVs in February were: the Audi e-tron (now including the ~€48,000 “e-tron 50” variant), Volkswagen e-Golf, Nissan LEAF, Renault Zoe, and Hyundai Kona EV. Meanwhile, Tesla has not yet prioritised 2020 cross-Atlantic shipments of the Model 3 (2019’s overwhelming best seller) to Norway. There will likely be a Model 3 surge in March, further boosting the country’s overall EV market share for Q1.
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