Earl Energy lights up $5M equity offering for miltary power options

Earl Energy lights up $5M equity offering for miltary power options
March 30th, 2011

Earlcon

An Earlcon systems

PORTSMOUTH, VA – Companies with a renewable energy focus are likely to get yet another boost in attention and backing following the Obama administration’s shoves in that direction and increasing focus on energy due to both Japan’s struggles with its nuclear plants and the disruptive political climate in the Middle East. One firm that may benefit is Earl Energy, a company owned and led by veterans that provides power plant engineering and energy management primarily to the military, has opened a $5 million equity offering.

One of the company’s signature products is its Earlcon: the Energy at Remote Locations Container, a fully configurable energy solution for the expeditionary environment. It is a family of rugged and rapidly deployable power generation systems that employ a combination of solar, wind and battery storage integrated with the latest generation of Tactical Quiet Generators .

Equipped with the Earl Energy Management System, a proprietary smart power distribution system that dynamically manages and prioritizes loads ensuring critical equipment, such as communications, surveillance, and other devices, receive continuous power where grid supplied power does not exist.

The company focuses on renewable energy sources and develops unique power systems for military needs. Those include a diesel-lithium battery field generator and a solar panel array.

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Digital Summit: www.digitalsummit.comEarl Energy lights up $5M equity offering for miltary power options

Solar Technology News-Artifical Leaf

• One Artificial 'Solar Leaf' Could Power Entire Household
• one prototype work for 45 hours straight without dipping in efficiency
• ...could actually make it onto the market because of its low cost. It’s created from nickel and cobalt, making large-scale manufacture feasible.
• 'artificial leaf' is submerged in water under direct sunlight, allowing it to break down the liquid into hydrogen and oxygen. 
• These gases are then stored in the fuel cell

It’s no surprise that the most notable scientific breakthroughs have come from technology that allows us to do what nature does, well…naturally.

photosynthesis solar leaf

For instance, scientists have spent years trying to replicate photosynthesis, a process so intricate and complicated it took a multitude of trials to figure out. But they have made a breakthrough—and the impact it could have on off-grid living is huge.

The announcement of the breakthrough was made by the American Chemical Society, an organization of researchers that were able to create an “artificial leaf” capable of turning sunlight directly into energy for later use.

So what makes it different from any other solar cell currently on the market? Just like a regular leaf, it uses water.

In fact, the “artificial leaf” is submerged in water under direct sunlight, allowing it to break down the liquid into hydrogen and oxygen. These gases are then stored in the fuel cell.

While the process is impressive, the amount of energy it can produce is even more amazing—one single leaf could power an entire household in a developing area. They’ve already seen one prototype work for 45 hours straight without dipping in efficiency.

While the technology itself has been around for nearly a decade now, this particular model could actually make it onto the market because of its low cost. It’s created from nickel and cobalt, making large-scale manufacture feasible.

Daniel Nocera, Ph.D. and head researcher on the team said it best:

“A practical artificial leaf has been one of the Holy Grails of science for decades. We believe we have done it. The artificial leaf shows particular promise as an inexpensive source of electricity for homes of the poor in developing countries. Our goal is to make each home its own power station. One can envision villages in India and Africa not long from now purchasing an affordable basic power system based on this technology.”

Photo Credit: Yoko Nekonomania via Flickr CC

Posted on March 30th in Solar Products by Kayla.

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Solar Energy Investing News

Truth About Solar Energy Stocks

The bottom line is that the sun can provide us with more energy than we actually use on a daily basis.

Of all the energy sources available to us, the Sun is our largest source by far, dropping 970 trillion kWh worth of free energy on us every day. Enough solar energy strikes the United States each day to supply its needs for one and a half years.

Put another way, the amount of solar energy the Earth receives every minute is greater than the amount of energy from fossil fuels the world uses in a year!

Now modern attempts to harvest the sun's energy date back to the 1870s, and the first solar motor company was founded in 1900. The first documented design was a concentrating solar power (CSP) device.

Today, CSP plants have been radically improved. Modern plants usually use huge arrays of parabolic trough mirrors to superheat oil or molten salts, which is then used to drive a turbine. Such designs have two key advantages: They can provide their own power storage and continue operating when the sun goes down; or when the sun isn't shining, they can be switched over to run on natural gas.

Of course, most solar investors will find the bulk of solar opportunities – not in CSP – but in photovoltaics (PV).

PV is what most people think of when talking about solar. This is what you see when you gaze upon solar panels on the roof of a home or building.

From solar cells to panels to ingots – silicon-based PV is where we've seen the most opportunity for investors. Some of the most establish PV or PV-related companies include

Solar Break-Thru: Two Energetic Electronic States from One Photon

Scientists Generate Two Energetic Electronic States from One Photon

Double yield via singlet fission could mean 35% efficiency boost for solar

December 2, 2010

Researchers from the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) and the University of Colorado, Boulder (UCB), have reported the first designed molecular system that produces two triplet states from an excited singlet state of a molecule, with essentially perfect efficiency.

The breakthrough could lead to a 35 percent increase in light-harvesting yield in cells for photovoltaics and solar fuels.

The experiments, using a process called singlet fission, demonstrated a 200 percent quantum yield for the creation of two triplets of the molecule 1,3-diphenylisobenzofuran (DPIBF) at low temperatures.

In singlet fission, a light-absorbing molecular chromophore shares its energy with a nearby non-excited neighboring molecule to yield a triplet excited state of each. If the two triplets behave independently, two electron-hole pairs can be generated for each photon absorbed in a solar cell. This process could subsequently increase by one third.the conversion efficiency of solar photons into electricity or solar fuels.

The researchers identified DPIBF as a promising candidate while searching for molecular chromophores that have the required ratio of singlet and triplet energy states.

Earlier, NREL and Los Alamos National Laboaratory had demonstrated an analgous two-electrons-from-one photon bonus using semiconductor quantum dots in a process NREL termed Multiple Exciton Generation. The latest advance is the first to demonstrate the electron multiplication phenomenon via  the singlet-fission process in molecules.

Until this most recent advance, singlet fission had been known as a somewhat obscure phenomenon occurring at low efficiency in a small number of molecular systems. In 2004, NREL and UCB revisited singlet fission as a potential way to maximize solar photon conversion efficiency. In 2006, NREL’s Arthur J. Nozik and Mark C. Hanna calculated the gains in thermodynamic efficiencies that were possible with solar cells based on singlet fission. These activities led to a much more extensive search for the best candidate molecules in a collaboration between NREL and the research group at the UCB led by Josef Michl.

The research has been published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.  Authors are NREL’s Justin C. Johnson and Arthur J. Nozik, and UCB’s Josef Michl.  For a technical summary of this article, please visit http://www.nrel.gov/news/pdfs/technical_summary_20101202_press_release.pdf

NREL is the U.S. Department of Energy's primary national laboratory for renewable energy and energy efficiency research and development. NREL is operated for DOE by the Alliance for Sustainable Energy, LLC.

Visit NREL online at www.nrel.gov

Guest Post: PETE-Photon Enhanced Thermionic Emission

Guest Post: I'd like to take a minute to discuss PETE with you and the readers of http://www.stlouisrenewableenergy.com/.

Guest Post by:Jack Lundee

j.lundee@gmail.com

http://everythingleft.wordpress.com

http://www.twitter.com/j_lundee

New Device Out Of Stanford Combines Light And Heat

Solar energy, more commonly defined as radiant light and heat from the sun, continues to be harnessed for energy production. Most accountable renewable energy invokes the following:

 *Solar Radiation

*Wind Power

*Wave Power

*Hydroelectricity

*Biomass

 And only a fraction of the radiation gathered from the sun is really used.

Scientists have always used both light and heat from the sun to produce energy, however, they hadn't yet discovered a way to efficiently utilize both simultaneously - Until now! A device out of Stanford University is promising not just one production of the solar energy but two by being able to harness the power of both light and heat.

A Photon Enhanced Thermionic Emission device, or PETE device, is not only a state of the art technology but could potentially reduce the costs for the production of solar power to the point of where it could be a real competitor against oil as a source of energy. This is great for two reasons: 

• 1) the environmental aspect of having solar power being a big player in the energy game is huge considering that it's a renewable and clean energy source and 

• 2) therein lies a real competitor to the oil industry. This is not to mention it also could open the door to ending dependency on oil both home and abroad.

What a PETE device ultimately does is simultaneously combines light and heat from solar radiation, which helps to produce electricity from solar technology. Engineers at Stanford have come up with a way to use light and heat of the sun to create electricity so that it can produce more efficient and cheaper forms of solar power methods. What this means is that unlike most solar panels, which have decreased efficiency as the temperature rises, the PETE technology process creates panels that work the other way and actually increase efficiency as the temperature rises. In technical terms, photon enhanced thermionic emission is a process that harvest wasted heat and solar energy and brings together thermal and solar cell conversion at high temperature levels for the best and cleanest results.

Real world practical solutions like PETE provide for greater sustainability and are a minuscule step towards ultimately lowering earth's carbon footprint. With major players like Green Peace and The Clinton Global Initiative investing thousands of dollars into renewable energy projects, similar to PETE, there's certainly a greater sense of appeasement for green activists.  More importantly, the projects assigned by Doug Band, The CGI, Green Peace, and many others are improving the way we live as human beings.

PETE devices potentially create a more efficient and cost effective solar energy source by creating a technology that helps reduce the risk of building large solar farms that could produce enough energy to even compete with fossil fuel energy. Basically it cut costs and gives solar power the change to compete. By doing this, engineers at Stanford have created a new technology that could have the ability to change the way solar power is harvested and a technology that could shine a new light on an old renewable energy.  

This Great news was brought to you via Guest Post by:Jack Lundee j.lundee@gmail.com  
http://everythingleft.wordpress.com 
http://www.twitter.com/j_lundee

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Interesting Article-Gila Bend-US Solar Future

Not Just Another Solar Deal - Why Gila Bend Could Be Pioneering The Future For U.S. Solar

A major solar farm being built in Arizona by an American developer on American land. It all adds up to a brighter future and more jobs here in the U.S.

Pacific Blue Energy Corp. (OTCBB: PBEC), announced today that the city of Gila Bend, Arizona has shown them a commitment to fast-track a 150 Megawatt solar farm on about 100 acres of land there. Claiming favorable permitting laws, and more importantly... "strong support from town officials and staff" they're going to be able to expedite the Phase 1 approvals for the project in just two to four months. This is an amazing feat considering that many solar installations of this scale can get stuck in red tape and generally sit for at least two years.

Is the U.S. finally getting serious about it's commitment to solar electricity? Maybe this is a sign that we're doing just that. Also, this underscores one of the most important things to know about solar. The fact that the value of adding more solar power to our infrastructure and creating a clean energy economy based on solar and other technologies is favored across party lines.

Yes, we still face an avalanche of problems at the Federal level, and with election cycles in the U.S. coming every two years it's difficult to get politicians to commit to something that may not sit well with their constituents or biggest donors. Still, the path is getting clearer and clearer with every new project. More and more, people from both sides of the aisle are coming together to make these projects work. Why? because they know that solar creates jobs, and solar jobs are high-paying and sustainable - and that means more people paying more taxes. . .

Of course, let's not discount the other benefits of building large scale solar power plants such as this one. The energy this plant produces can power up to 30,000 homes. That means lower electricity bills down the road, and less dependence on foreign energy right away. These two issues are of the highest importance to all voters, and this makes it important to keep improving the processes for getting renewable energy, and particularly solar, zoned, permitted, and developed. It's a sure bet for winning votes.

In a perfect world, the demand for solar and the interest in large-scale deployment in the U.S. would be driven more by awareness of the people, concern for our environment, and for long-term competitiveness with other nations who are currently winning the race to overcome the obstacles created by our dependence on fossil fuels. Nevertheless, we should see the aggressive action by Gila Bend as a sign that the end game of rapid deployment can become a reality fast, even here in the congested, political, U.S. market, regardless of the means or the motivations. It's now up to us to monitor the progress Pacific Blue is making in Gila Bend, and to hold accountable everyone who made the promise of supporting and fast-tracking this project. Indeed, every victory counts, and inevitably leads to another.

More on this, and how the U.S. is stacking up against other countries in deploying solar in a future post. Stay tuned.
-Joe Boyce


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Scott's Contracting