Envision Solar has long made large commercial solar arrays for large commercial parking lot installations. Tomorrow, its first single vehicle Solar Socket goes on display for the first time at the California Center for Sustainable Energy in San Diego.

Each shade structure holds a 1.8 kW array, which provides enough electricity to fully charge the electric vehicles they provide shade for; making 8-10 kWh in a six hour day. Thus, this one, the smallest unit the company makes, is specifically designed to provide enough power to fully charge the Chevy Volt during a six hour day while parked there.

This is their first solar electric vehicle charger with a residential application, and COO Desmond Wheatley is very excited about the engineering challenges they were able to address because of this, enabling a “tree” shape with a single “trunk”. Each Solar Socket is perfectly engineered to power just one car, and the trunk enables the use of a finely engineered tracking system to gently move the array to maximize power production. The tracker boosts the power production by 25%.

But Wheatley told me that he also envisions parking lots full of these Solar Sockets, all gently following the sun in unison: “Quite a sight from out of your office window!” He assured me that because it is so carefully balanced – and of course, the tracking needs only an infinitesimal movement each time it moves to stay with the sun – that the tracker uses only a negligible amount of the power it produces.

This particular unit is designed to be portable, by GM’s request, because it is traveling to shows around the US over the next few months, so instead of the ” trunk” of the solar tree being rooted in the ground, this sample has these orange “feet” under the car, with the car providing ballast. But to install one in the ground, he says it would take about a five foot hole in the ground to set the 8″ pipe into a concrete footing.

The shade provided by the solar array also provides an additional benefit, he says, since 80% of the energy needed in an EV can easily go to cooling the battery. Cars parked in the sun can get to 150 degrees, which – as hard as that is for you or me, is actually even harder on the battery. The shade provided as the sun crosses this on an average sunny day cuts this to about 100 degrees, which helps to keep the batteries from freaking out while you’re at work!

Each measures six feet across and sixteen feet in length – which, serendipitously enough, is the exact size of a typical parking space, and also about the size of the average driveway at home.

Susan Kraemer@Twitter

In an article in the New York Times, US to Investigate China’s Clean Energy Aid, Senator Schumer voiced a complaint that China is engaging in unfair trade practices by supporting clean energy development with government funds.

Schumer is right. It is unfair. Don’t they know we are a plutocracy! How can we compete? The US is unable to emulate china in this level of support, because our hands are tied. The corporate control of all the Senate Republicans (and two or three Senate Democrats) in this country by the fossil fuel industry effectively eliminates competition by the newer renewable energy industry.

Chinese legislation encourages renewable energy. It nationalized its transmission in two weeks in order to allow huge amounts of new renewable energy. It passed legislation requiring utilities buy any and all the renewable energy put onto the grid, along with a clear cap and trade policy, a national Feed in tariff, and this week a carbon tax, all of which encourages investment with the market certainty that investors need, and the results have been both predictable and astoundingly encouraging.

But now the losers are complaining.

It’s not China’s fault. It is our fault. We have Senate rules that allow a minority party to prevent votes on clean energy. Senate Republicans are now openly and officially committed by party platform to fossil energy protection for the foreseeable future, since now only climate deniers need apply. They must now adhere to the the fossil industry’s no “climate tax” pledge, advanced by one of its many front groups, Americans for Prosperity.

The one clean energy investment splurge we have been able to do in the last thirty years, within the stimulus bill in March (not the Bank Bailout bill of 2008) was during a freak event.

Democrats held 60 seats in the Senate for a few months before Kennedy died, for the first time since Republicans started using the 60 vote tactic to prevent simple majority votes a few decades ago.

The Recovery Act invested a one time $90 billion in renewable energy to build 16 Gigawatts of renewable energy, which will have doubled renewables once all spent. Some of it is in the form of investment tax credits for next year, some of it in the form of grants funded only once the new clean energy farms open for business. This was the greatest investment in thirty years.

But the US Senate is unlikely to ever write policy that is as progressive again.

Susan Kraemer@Twitter

First Solar, which broke the $1.00 a Watt price barrier last year, is currently the low cost leader in being able to produce (non-silicon based) thin film at $0.76 cents a Watt, and they have been rewarded with contracts from major utilities such as PG&E for solar thin film installations on a utility scale.

But now Swiss solar equipment manufacturing giant Oerlikon Solar has announced that their company can enable solar manufacturers to produce their amorphous silicon thin film modules at a cost under $0.70 cents per watt (€ 0.50). Silicon is both more widely available and more sustainable than typical thin film solar; that contains rare earth minerals.

Their new equipment to mass-produce thin film silicon solar modules lowers costs by making it possible to use thinner layers of silicon, reducing material costs, and it uses more reflective back sheets that can capture stray electrons escaping around the edges otherwise; increasing efficiency.

Those changes reduced the capital expenditure for its customers by 25%, enabling solar panel production with (NREL rated) 12% efficiency, almost half that of the most efficient traditional solar.

(The lower efficiency of thin film just means that it just takes more square feet of panel to make the same electricity. But since it can be painted or printed directly on glass windows, plastic and other cheap construction materials, it is not the great flaw you might think.)

This has been a year of major shake ups in thin film solar. Until this year, the relatively lower price for thin film was its competitive strength against traditional silicon-based solar. But with the worldwide ramp-up in solar production, silicon prices also dropped dramatically, battling thin film on its home turf, low cost.

Thin film producers became simply unable to compete on what had been till now, their strength – prices lower than those for traditional panels.

As a result of the precipitous drop in silicon-based solar, making it more competitive with thin film, even Applied Materials got out of the thin film solar business a few months ago, no longer able to compete with silicon-based (traditional) solar PV.

However, as a wholesale supplier of equipment to the solar industry,  to make panels with, the award-winning innovator is at the beginning of the supply chain. So panels made on this equipment won’t be producing power in a field or on a roof till 2012. If the recent past is any indication, during this much time in this very fast-changing business, anything could happen.

The Oil Drum is reporting that Kite Gen has readied a prototype of its innovative wind power device for testing next month.

We’ve covered Kitegen before, back when it was just a theoretical idea, albeit one that holds the promise of an EROEI better than anything that can be obtained by any traditional wind or solar technologies. The KiteGen simply harnesses that rapid un-spooling motion of a kite as it reels out in the wind, so that instead of being a heavy static structure this renewable energy device is simply a light and flexible kite.

However, as the creative force behind it Ugo Bardi points out, “it’s one thing on paper, another is the reality of putting together a machine that had never been built before. It is an incredible challenge that Massimo Ippolito has taken onto himself and that he is succeeding in overcoming; step by step”.

Getting the real prototype built has been a challenge. Kitegen Research had to abandon the initial plans of building the first prototype near the town of Berzano, not far from Torino, in Italy, after almost a year of trying to persuade the local NIMBY contingent. That has generated almost one year of delay; since everything had to be moved to the new site and a completely new set of permits had to be obtained.

Bardi claims “These are NOT just kites. The kitegen is a full fledged robotic system that controls a number of kites together. It is like planes flying in formation. If planes were controlled by someone on the ground just looking up at them, flying in formation would not be possible – of course. In the case of the Kitegen, there is no pilot; the software controls the kites on the basis of the input it receives from an array of sensors and moves the kites by calculating their position in real time. So, if the Kitegen works as expected, the likely thing you’ll see is exactly what you say: many kites flying from the same hill.”

The technology that has been developed for the kitegen is impressive: it is an extremely modern approach which is based on keeping costs low by using simple and inexpensive materials. For the structural parts on the ground, the system uses only aluminium, steel and carbon fiber. Dyneema (high strength polyethylene) is used for the cables that control the kite.

The power generator is based on neodymium-boron-iron magnets. The key element of the system is its sophisticated software that controls everything and that makes it possible to use a relatively simple design. This is a typical characteristic of modern robotics and the kitegen is, actually, a robot that controls the system in real time on the basis of an array of sensors; some located on the kite, some on the ground.
Kitegen Harnesses Unspooling Motion for Energy
The kitegen plants can be spaced of a few hundred meters from each other. So the “power density” of a kite energy farm can be very high. Of course, the kites will have to fly in parallel so they are controlled by the same kind of sophisticated technology that controls Predator drones.

Bardi says “It is no amateurish stuff – it is not a madman flying a kite. It is top class sophisticated engineering. Actually, it is one of the technological revolutions of our times. Software and sensors together: it is robotics moving ahead by leaps and bounds. It is unbelievable what these things will be able to do – not just kites!”

Related stories:

Google Builds First Offshore Superhighway for Wind

The solar industry seems to be finally waking up to the fact that it has enemies, according to Jennifer Runyon, the editor at Renewable Energy World. She noted that at Solar Power International this week in Los Angeles, after Rhone Resch, President of the Solar Energy Industries Association (SEAI) highlighted all of the great achievements in the solar industry, and the rosy future he hopes for, he made an unusually direct statement.

The renewable energy industry has enemies and the enemies have deep pockets. Resch said that Big Oil spent $500 million to defeat legislation that would have created a national Renewable Energy Standard and cap and trade climate legislation.  He explained that millions of dollars are being spent in California under Prop 23 to repeal that state’s RES.

Resch urged the industry to act like a team – Team Solar.  He said every member of the solar industry should join SEIA and contribute to the SEIA political action committee, pointing out that if everyone in the room gave $10, it would equal the amount of money that the oil and coal lobby has at its disposal to promote its own agenda.

The concerted attempt by the oil and gas industries to stop AB32, California’s clean energy and climate bill using Prop 23, the Trogan Horse of a “temporary” halt to pollution law, seems to have been the catalyst that has woken up the clean energy industry. Runyon said that she didn’t think she had ever seen the solar industry so frank in its assessment.

A Google map overlay reveals where the money for and against Prop 23 comes from.

While most of the sources are self-explanatory, Kansas might seem to be an odd place to be spending money to fight against renewable energy in California.

Anti-renewable energy funds are coming from Kansas because Kansas is the primary home of the Koch Brothers whose sizable inherited wealth is all invested in the fossil industry. The Koch Brothers AstroTurf organization The Tea Party is a useful idiot being exploited to kill the development industry in this country. This week a video provides evidence refuting their claim of there being no connection between the two.

I agree with Resch that it is high time that the solar industry got serious about developing the clout it needs against the very real enemies that are arrayed against a switch to a sustainable economy, for their personal gain. And not just the solar industry.

The entire green tech sector is in the same boat as solar when it comes to being up against the far stronger fossil industry that now controls our congress. This counter-lobbying force needs to be more inclusive than just solar money can make it, in order to make the change that this nation and the world needs. Even private citizens should join. There are far more of us than of them.

Image: Google Mapped Prop 23 funding
Susan Kraemer@Twitter