Metals Tech

Town officials are considering placing a moratorium on solar energy development to allow the town time to develop regulations for potential solar projects.

A public hearing on the idea is scheduled for 5:45 p.m. Wednesday in the board room at the municipal building, 60 Main St.

Town Supervisor Mary Ann Ashley said the town doesn’t have any rules on the books specifically related to solar power and wants to be prepared if a company approaches the town.

“We’re assessing our current laws as far as alternative energy and to determine what we should or shouldn’t have,” Ms. Ashley said. “A moratorium allows us time to do that work, to create a law for solar and possibly other alternative energy sources.”

The town of Malone enacted a three-month moratorium on solar development in September after being approached by representatives of Minnesota-based Geronimo Energy, which revealed plans to build a 950-acre solar farm in the vicinity of state Routes 30 and 11B in the town.

The farm would cost the company about $165 million and produce 150 megawatts of solar power. If approved, construction is scheduled to begin by spring of 2020.

In December, the moratorium was extended by six months. In June, Malone Town Supervisor Andrea Stewart said the town’s proposed local law regulating the development of solar farms was nearly complete.

Ms. Ashley said the town hasn’t been approached by a company, but is aware of Malone’s situation and wants to be proactive.

In other business, the town board is scheduled to discuss the proposed town deputy clerk position and the Riverside Renaissance grant.

New business includes discussing a request from the Rensselaer Falls Fire Department, a resolution from the town of DeKalb related to Amish transportation and a letter from the village of Waddington regarding the Bassmaster fishing tournament.

A new wind farm is providing power for WPPI Energy, of Sun Prairie.

The Bishop Hill III wind farm, in northwestern Illinois between Moline and Peoria, began operating in May, developer Invenergy said. A ribbon-cutting ceremony was held June 29.

The 53 turbines can produce up to 132 megawatts of power but its output is expected to be capped at 119 megawatts because of transmission connection agreements, Invenergy has said.

WPPI — a not-for-profit regional power company that serves 51 locally owned electric companies in Wisconsin, Michigan’s Upper Peninsula and Iowa — has a 22-year agreement to buy 100 percent of the energy produced.

“Not only does it more than double the wind energy in our portfolio, but it is also projected to lower our costs to WPPI Energy members,” WPPI president and CEO Mike Peters said.

WEC Energy Group, of Milwaukee, whose subsidiaries include We Energies, said it plans to buy an 80 percent ownership share of the wind farm at a cost of $148 million. WPPI will continue to buy the power it produces, and Invenergy will operate and maintain the turbines.

Innovation company InnoEnergy and industry organisation WindEurope will partner to sponsor a joint ‘hackathon’, which will develop wind energy technologies for the future.

The second annual hackathon has been dubbed “Hack the Wind” and will split participants into teams to develop wind energy technologies and compete for a share of a €20,000 prize. The event will be held at the WindEurope Conference 2018, which will run from 25-28 September 2018 in Hamburg, Germany.

To be awarded a share of the prize, participants will be challenged to propose and present innovative and implementable solutions to a series of potential challenges facing the wider rollout of wind energy. Challenges will relate to a variety of relevant areas, including blockchain applications and predictive maintenance, which means that solutions will have a potentially transformative impact on the viability of the sector.

What are WindEurope and InnoEnergy’s expectations for the hackathon?

More than 80 participants took part in the inaugural Hack the Wind hackathon in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, and prize-winning solutions included an artificial intelligence-based predictive maintenance solution developed by Jungle AI.

The organisers expect a greater number of participants this year, and hope that the technologies and solutions presented at the event will help to fulfil the potential of wind energy as a clean, renewable source. As well as the opportunity to fund and develop wind energy technologies, such hackathons offer innovators a chance to form partnerships which can also serve to further the implementation of wind power.

What have the stakeholders said about the event?

For WindEurope’s deputy CEO Malgosia Bartosik, the event could become an annual opportunity to accelerate the development of the wind energy industry. She expressed her hope that the hackathon would continue to grow in popularity: “We are always looking for ways to make our conference better, and last year’s Hack the Wind was a brilliant way of not only giving attendees something to learn from but of fostering innovations and creating new start-ups. We are tremendously excited to see this year’s event build on that success.”

German energy company E.ON said Thursday the start of turbine installation at the Arkona wind farm in the Baltic Sea sets the clock ticking for a 2019 launch.

The company said it started installing the first of the 60 turbines planned for the 385 megawatt facility in the German waters of the Baltic Sea. Once completed, Arkona will have enough power to meet the annual power demand of around 400,000 average households.

“We are confident that we will soon be producing clean and sustainable electricity with the first turbines,” Holger Matthiesen, the facility’s project director, said in a statement.

The transformer station for the Arkona wind farm was installed on its foundation in April. It represented one of the largest lift projects of its kind in the industry at more than 5,000 tons. Each turbine weighs about 1,000 tons.

E.ON and Norwegian energy major Equinor, which changed its name from Statoil this year to reflect low-carbon trends, are working together on the installations necessary to get Arkona up and running by early 2019. For its part, Equinor last week connected a 1 megawatt Lithium battery storage system for its Hywind wind farm off the Scottish coast, marking its early start into battery storage for wind power.

E.ON is retooling its portfolio in the German energy market as the country charts a path to become a regional leader in renewable energy development. Wind power represents the largest component of Germany’s renewable energy sector.

Compared with conventional energy, Arkona could save up to 1.2 million tons of carbon dioxide, a potent greenhouse gas, per year.

The joint effort from E.ON and Equinor represents a $1.4 billion investment.

The Silver Institute finds the amount of silver loading may fall from 130 mg per cell in 2016 to roughly 65 mg by 2028. Alternative and cheaper raw materials, such as copper and aluminum, are not expected to replace silver in commercial cell production, at least in the next decade.

The amount of silver needed to produce conductive silver paste for the front and back of most PV cells may be almost halved, from an average of 130 mg per cell in 2016 to approximately 65 mg by 2028, according to the Role of Silver in the Green Revolution report published by CRU Consulting – a division of CRU International Limited – on behalf of the Silver Institute.

The report’s authors explain the amount of silver used in solar cell manufacturing has already decreased to a much larger extent, from 400 to 130 mg between 2007 and 2016. The authors also predict cell output will grow from 4.7 W now to 6 W by 2030, contributing to a 10.5 mg reduction in silver use per Watt, the report notes.

However CRU’s analysts state silver’s unmatched electroconductive qualities mean there is a “physical limit” on the possibility of further reducing silver loadings in cell production, as efficiency losses outweigh the benefits achieved from cheaper raw materials such as copper or aluminum.

During the next decade, non-silver based PV metalization technologies are not expeccted to gain significant market share as they tend to have shorter lifespans and the global PV market, the report states, is moving toward more compact and efficient solar panels.

CRU predicts module efficiency may rise to around 25% by 2030, which would result in a 24% reduction in the number of panels needed to produce a given amount of electricity.

“These two factors – thrifting and efficiency increases – may decrease silver loadings enough that it would take a significant increase in solar capacity’s growth rate to keep silver demand from slipping – an increase that the industry as it currently stands will not be able to deliver in the long term,” the report states.

As a consequence, CRU experts forecast silver demand for the PV industry of around 70 to 80 million ounces per year until a decline to between 50 and 55 million ounces in the mid-2020s. Only by 2030 is demand expected to recover, to approximately 66 million ounces per year.

In a separate report published in May, the World Bank forecast a significant drop in the silver price, to $13.42/toz, by 2030. Up to 2021, however, the commodity price is not expected to change by a great margin, according to the analysts. Expected to close at $16.45/toz in 2021, the more significant decline in silver prices will come later, to a predicted $15.04/toz in 2025.

According to a report published by the Silver Institute in April, global industrial demand for silver grew around 4%, from 5,768 million ounces in 2016 to 5,990 million last year. This spurt was mainly due to the record growth of the PV industry, which pushed demand for silver as a component of silver pastes for solar cells, from 79.3 million ounces in 2016, to 94.1 million ounces in 2017 – year-on-year growth of around 19%.

A group of North Carolina State University students who want to make a positive difference in the way people travel have logged countless hours building something they think will change the way people get from place to place.

For more than a year, at least 40 N.C. State students have volunteered their time to build a solar electric car from scratch.

“We believe that this is a more effective way to inspire change,” said senior Cody Biedermann. “We see our approach as different than other solar teams. We like to make a car that’s full-size. It looks like a full car, it has wheels the size of a real car.”

More than 200 solar panels will go on top of the car to provide energy. The students built the panels by hand.

“You just put the material down across this and you put the resin on it and it hardens. You pull it off and that’s a panel,” said senior Grant Hierman.

The students call themselves the SolarPack. The goal is to have the car ready to drive by July 14.

“What’s especially great is, since we really believe in it, that it can affect change, it feels like we’re doing something bigger than just putting work into a project,” Biedermann said.

The SolarPack group plans to go on a tour with the car to personally thank their sponsors in the Raleigh area as well as other states like Massachusetts, Illinois and Wisconsin.