Tower of power

 From The Guardian

Australia’s first office tower with a “solar skin” is expected to be built next year in a landmark moment for the construction industry and decarbonisation efforts.

The eight-storey building at 550-558 Spencer Street in West Melbourne will cost $40m and has been designed by the architecture firm Kennon on behalf of Dr Bella Freeman.


It will be covered by 1,182 solar panels the same thickness as a regular glass facade.

The system – called Skala – is manufactured by the German company Avancis and relies on a “thin-film PV module” sitting atop a network that channels the electricity generated into the building’s main power supply.

It is capable of producing 50 times the energy of the average rooftop photovoltaic solar array used in residential housing and will eliminate 70 tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions each year.

When complete, the system will supply almost enough power to cover the building’s energy needs. With the addition of extra panels on the roof, the building is expected to have almost no ongoing power costs and will be carbon-neutral after a few years.

As construction relies on heavy machinery, transport and manufacturing processes powered by fossil fuels, many buildings start with a significant carbon footprint, referred to as “embedded carbon”.

The building sector accounts for 39% of CO2 emissions globally. According to the World Green Building Council, cement production contributes to 7% of all emissions globally, while steel production is responsible for between 7% and 9% of emissions.

The architect, Pete Kennon, said the Spencer Street building would pay off its carbon debt and “actually be carbon neutral”, without relying on offsets and other accounting measures.

Transparent solar windows

 From CleanTechnica

More than 20 billion square feet of windows are installed every year, and the leading firm Andersen Corporation apparently plans to make some of those billions into energy efficient, transparent solar energy generators that could kick the pace of global energy decarbonization into high gear. The well-known maker of windows and doors just chipped in for a $30 million Series B funding round that will help push the not-so-well-known transparent solar innovator Ubiquitous Energy out of the startup shadows and into the bright sunshine of the global building industries marketplace.

The idea of transforming windows into fully transparent, see-through PV powerhouses has allured researchers for years. Conventional solar panels block the sun, so that’s out. Thin film PV technology offers an alternative route, but the problem is squeezing out enough clean kilowatts to make the endeavor worthwhile. Thin film is transparent, but overall the technology is not as efficient as conventional photovoltaic panels.

Ubiquitous Energy appears to have solved the riddle with its proprietary transparent solar UE Power™ technology. The key breakthrough is a formula that enables visible light to pass through, while reserving invisible light at both ends of the spectrum to generate electricity.

The company has been hammering away in the lab for the past 10 years and it finally sailed onto the CleanTechnica radar last November, after it installed 100 square feet of its new transparent solar panels above the main entrance to the building of the Biomedical and Physical Sciences Building at Michigan State University.

That MSU project is small potatoes compared to 20 billion square feet, but it was enough to get the attention of Andersen Corporation. The 115-year-old firm is known more for its attention to style, but building decor is not the whole story. Energy efficiency is also a focus of innovation at the company, and energy efficiency is the unsung hero of the decarbonization movement.

All of this means that fossil energy stakeholders could lose their grip on the global economy more quickly than expected. Ubiquitous Energy doesn’t expect that windows can get the job done alone, but they will function alongside other clean energy solutions to push carbon out of the picture.

Some fossil stakeholders are catching on faster than others. So far the pace has been far too slow, but legacy firms like Shell (wind energy and green hydrogen) and BP (solar energy) and have been getting in position to take it to the next level — as soon as government policy makers decide to get serious about climate action, that is

That brings us to another participant in the $30 million round for Ubiquitous Energy, the Japanese firm ENEOS. Last August, ENEOS worked with Nippon Sheet Glass to install the transparent solar windows at an NSG facility in Chiba. The plan was for the installation to undergo a one-year evaluation ending in August 2022, but it seems that ENEOS has seen enough to take the plunge.

ENEOS is the biggest oil company in Japan and it also has a heavy hand in the natural gas and petrochemical business, but it also has a large and growing portfolio of utility scale PV power plants under its belt. The hookup with Ubiquitous Energy’s transparent solar panels at the NSG facility hints that ENEOS is looking at a whole ‘nother market, as industrial firms seek to decarbonize their facilities.

The bigger picture is a flipping of the script for the building industry. Historically, the nature of a building is to suck up energy and spit out carbon. Solar technology provides a pathway for buildings to produce their own carbon free energy. Rooftop PV panels are already mainstream, and now windows can contribute to the building-as-power-plant trend.

Last November, a new study that modeled solar adoption in Melbourne, Australia caused quite a stir when it described how “comprehensive adoption of existing rooftop PV technology alone throughout the city could radically transform Melbourne’s carbon footprint, significantly reducing its reliance on grid electricity generated by burning fossil fuels,” and that “further gains could be made through the widespread deployment of emerging, highly efficient ‘solar windows’ and photovoltaic technology integrated in building facades.”

According to the study, buildings in Melbourne could provide for 74% of their own electricity when fully decked out with rooftop and window PV, along with other energy efficiency measures.

This transparent solar window just leaped from startup status to mainstream market with an assist from the leading window maker Andersen Corporation (video screenshot courtesy of MSU).

The ultimate in power windows

From Cosmos:

Australian researchers say they’ve developed new perovskite solar cells that could effectively and efficiently transform seemingly ordinary windows into active power generators.  The semi-transparent cells let light through, allowing two square metres of glass to be as productive as a standard rooftop panel – yet still be a window – according to a team led by Jacek Jasieniak from the ARC Centre of Excellence in Exciton Science and Monash University.

As such, they suggest in a paper in the journal Nano Energy, they could be something of a game- changer for architecture and urban planning, as well as electricity generation.  Work is now under way investigating how the technology could be built into commercial products, but that is likely to be a decade away.  

The concept is not new, Jasieniak acknowledges, but he says previous designs have fallen short because they were expensive, unstable, inefficient or all three.  He and colleagues report using a different approach based around an organic semi-conductor that can be made into a polymer. When used in place of the common but “unstable” solar cell component known as Spiro-OMeTAD, it produced “astonishing results”.

“Rooftop solar has a conversion efficiency of between 15 and 20%,” Jasieniak says. “The semi-transparent cells have a conversion efficiency of 17%, while still transmitting more than 10% of the incoming light, so they are right in the zone.”

The first application is likely to be large windows in high-rise buildings, the researchers suggest. They are already expensive to make, so the additional cost of incorporating the cells would be marginal.

Architects could have the flexibility to vary the degree of transparency, and with it the generation potential. And they may choose to rethink how they position and angle buildings to optimise solar capture.  Lead author Jae Choul Yu says the next project will look at a tandem device. “We will use perovskite solar cells as the bottom layer and organic solar cells as the top one,” he says.

Semi-transparent perovskite cell

Solar glass

The first commercial installation of solar glass has been built in Australia, in a shopping centre in Western Australia:

Perth-based building-integrated solar PV company ClearVue Technologies has notched up another key milestone, with the completion of its first commercial demonstration – a solar glass atrium at the entrance to a suburban Perth shopping centre.

The ASX-listed company said late last month that the solar atrium at the Warwick Grove Shopping Centre, made out of ClearVue’s transparent solar glass, would be used alongside battery storage to power lighting, signage and a display screen at the retail outlet.

Just how much energy the solar atrium is expected to generate was not specified, but ClearVue said the display screen inside the centre would provide up to date data on the amount of power generated, energy saved, and carbon emissions offset by the solar glass. 

[From RenewEconomy]

My guess is that it will generate less electricity than a conventional solar panel, because it needs to let some of the light through into the building.  But imagine buildings with solar glass windows and solar roof-tiles. 

Solar windows

Source: EcoWatch

We can already have a solar roof from Tesla--tiles which look like ordinary roof tiles but are actually mini solar panels.  Now it looks as if we might be able to have solar windows too:

There's an estimated 5 to 7 billion square meters of glass surfaces in the U.S. For windows on homes, cars and buildings, these glass surfaces perform a few basic functions—letting light and fresh air in when open, and blocking bugs and keeping the cold out when closed.

Now they could all serve another, altogether revolutionary, purpose—generating electricity.

A new paper in the journal Nature Energy describes how transparent solar panels could be placed over all windows and transparent surfaces in the U.S. to generate energy and decrease reliance on fossil fuels.

If that happens, nearly all the electricity demands of the U.S. could be met in conjunction with rooftop solar panels, and as long as storage capabilities are improved.

"Highly transparent solar cells represent the wave of the future for new solar applications," said Richard Lunt, leader author of the report at Michigan State University, in a press release. "We analyzed their potential and show that by harvesting only invisible light, these devices can provide a similar electricity-generation potential as rooftop solar while providing additional functionality to enhance the efficiency of buildings, automobiles and mobile electronics."

[Read more here]

They're not nearly as efficient as conventional rooftop solar, but if they're cheap enough, that won't matter.