Seeking the Solar-Tech Revolution

With the sun blazing and temperatures in northern Colorado stretching into the 90s for weeks on end, it’s not hard to imagine that solar power could provide a viable alternative to fossil fuels for a sizable fraction of the West’s energy demands. But that’s still a long way from reality, according to New York Times reporters Andrew Revkin and Matthew Wald. “Moving this energy source from niche to mainstream — last year it provided less than 0.01 percent of the country’s electricity supply — is unlikely without significant technological breakthroughs,” the pair reported this week.

Fortunately those breakthroughs are starting to accelerate. This week researchers at the New Jersey Institute of Technology unveiled a design for inexpensive solar cells that can be painted or printed on flexible plastic sheets. The cells replace conventional photovoltaic cells with carbon nanotubes (a nanometer is one billionth of a meter) combined with tiny geodesic carbon “Buckyballs” (technically called fullerenes and named for Buckminster Fuller) that capture electrons and conduct the resulting current.

“The process is simple,” said lead researcher Somenath Mitra, chair of NJIT’s Department of Chemistry and Environmental Science. “Someday homeowners will even be able to print sheets of these solar cells with inexpensive home-based inkjet printers.”

At the same time scientists are devising new ways to make electricity not just from sunshine but from the sun’s heat, using “solar thermal” systems that capture heat to make water boil and use the steam to turn a turbine just as in a coal-burning steam engine. A Spanish company called Acciona Energy has constructed a solar thermal plant outside Boulder City, Nev., 25 miles southwest of Las Vegas, that uses 47 miles of trough-shaped mirrors to collect enough heat to produce 64 megawatts – a fraction of a typical coal-fired plant’s output, but far beyond the largest photovoltaic installations.

In other energy news:

-- In May Presco Inc., the Texas company drilling for natural gas near the Project Rulison site, where an underground nuclear test took place in 1969, sold the operation to Noble Energy Production Inc. of Houston. On the same day, the Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission cited the Presco operation for eight violations, leaving Noble holding the bag and no clear indication on who might pay any damages and fines. That’s the sort of thing that has State Sen. Gail Schwartz of Snowmass re-examining the collection of oil and gas severance taxes to make sure the production industry pays its share in the Western Slope energy boom. “It’s important that we have a high level of accountability for their activities in Colorado,” Schwartz told the Aspen Times last week, pointing out that energy and gas production could harm not only the environment but other major Western Slope industries, particularly tourism.

-- Gov. Ritter may be winning fans among environmentalists for his chopper-powered parachute visits to various potential energy-development sites on the Western Slope, but the locals aren’t so thrilled. The Moffat County commissioners made public this week a letter they wrote officially to the helicopter-riding Governor, who visited Vermillion Basin in the Yampa Valley in northwest Colorado last week and voice the state’s opposition’s to natural gas exploration there, and it fairly drips with derision. “Governor, we do have a vision for Vermillion Basin,” the commissioners wrote, “and take great offense to you flying from the Front Range, standing on one of our community’s mountains, and attempting to recreate a vision that we have put our sweat and blood into over the last several years.”

-- If you’re looking for another side-benefit to renewable energy besides saving the earth, how about raising the value of real estate in barren windswept corners of the West that don’t happen to have oil underneath them? The Lower Arkansas Valley, in Southeastern Colorado, has been economically battered by drought, flat commodity prices and the drying up of small communities, but big wind farms spreading across the area are boosting property taxes as well. Built in 2003 by a joint venture comprising PPM Energy, Inc., U.S. arm of ScottishPower, and Shell WindEnergy, Inc., the Colorado Green Wind Project in Prowers County remains the largest wind power project in the state.