IKEA Selling Solar Panels!

         The Sweden-based company known as Ikea, best known for cheap basics such as its Billy bookcases and Ektorp sofas, plans to offer solar panel packages at all of its 17 British stores within the next 10 months. It said the move follows a successful pilot project at its Lakeside store to the east of London, which sells one photovoltaic system almost every day.
        Britain offers subsidies to encourage the takeup of photovoltaic panels in a bid to boost production and help it meet legally-binding targets to cut carbon emissions. A solar panel owner receives subsidies for generating solar-sourced electricity exporting excess power into the grid. An average semi-detached house would earn as much as $1,200 a year through subsidies and savings on energy bills, an IKEA case study showed.
      IKEA's offer of panels made by China's Hanergy Holding Group Ltd., a power producer and manufacturer of thin-film photovoltaic panels, involves a minimum spend of 5,700 pounds for which customers get 18 panels which should break even within roughly 7 years. "We know that our customers want to live more sustainably and we hope working with Hanergy to make solar panels affordable and easily available helps them do just that," said Joanna Yarrow, IKEA's head of sustainability in the United Kingdom and Ireland.

Featuring: The Husqvarna Automower Solar Hybrid

          For those living in the rural areas surrounded by grass, it would be a hassle to continuously trim those weeds and plants with a lawnmower that you may haul towards the ground back and forth. Therefore, it is no surprise that Husqvarna Global Design Centre, located in Sweden, has thought of the idea to create a robotic lawnmower that is able to complete the task for you, whether you are at home, away or even when it is raining outside.

       
          There is four main components to the lawnmower: its body, charging station, transformer cable and loop wire. 90% of its body is made of recyclable materials and it is quite small in size (almost equivalent in size to a carry-on luggage). In addition to its charging station, it comes with a large integrated solar panel. This, in turn, helps cut the lawn in a shorter period of time while having a lower power consumption and an extended battery life.

For more details, click here.

Nanotechnology used to make Solar Energy 25% more efficient

        Sol Voltaics has announced recently that by using nanotechnology, it is helping build solar cell modules to be 25% more efficient than the solar cells marketed in society today. If the company is able to deliver SolInk as how it is perceived in advertisements, then this could mean it would help make it excessively cheaper to introduce solar cells to a more broader set of customers.
        This nanotechnology is said to have the capacity to make solar power in residential areas and business environments more affordable, which can be necessary to increase adoption of solar energy and to help compete at the same cost of electricity produced from fossil fuel plants. This argument alone has helped Sol Voltaics raise $11 million in funding from public and private Scandinavian investors.
         CEO of Sol Voltaics, Dave Epstein, has claims that with nanotechnology, "we can increase the efficiency of energy capture, conversion and storage. There's no smoke and mirrors here." With two advances, it is made possible. The team, led by founder Lars Samuelson (a Lund University professor), created a technology known as Aerotaxy, which makes it cheaper to create nanomaterials. With this, they are able to create gallium arsenide nanowires that can serve as solar collectors and that they can integrate directly into solar wafers, known commonly as solar cells.
          As a material, gallium arsenide has been used in solar for years because of its high reliability and high efficiency at converting light into electricity. However, gallium arsenide is expensive to manufacture. SolInk dramatically reduces the cost by minimizing the amount of materials being used. In addition to SolInk's benefits, rivals such as Innovalight (bought by DuPont) can boost a solar panel's efficiency from 15% to almost 16.1% while SolInk is claimed to build the efficiency from 15% to almost 19% or from 20% to 25%. The theoretical limit in converting sunlight to electricity is approximately 27% to 29%.
         With Aerotaxy, it helps build nanomaterials by mixing vapors in the air in just a second. The active materials, then, bond to form larger, uniform structures while in motion. Nanowires are literally able to grow in the air. Also, with Aerotaxy, it helps generate tens of billions of nanowires per second on a continuous basis. "It's like cranking out nanowires with a popcorn popper instead of a craftsman. That's the makings of an affordable and scalable technology for mass production," said Epstein.
          According to Greentech Media, demand for solar is growing globally as we know it, with the total number of gigawatts expected at 29.8 in 2012 to 50.8 gigawatts in 2016. Epstein figures that solar is here to stay, since the sun is the only resource that will surely outlast fossil fuels, wind, and other clean energy sources in the run. "In spite of what you might hear, solar is a healthy market," said Epstein.

CEO of Sol Voltaics, Dave Epstein