3rd Symposium Small PV Applications Rural Electrification and Commercial Use

Next Symposium on Small PV applications will take place again in the beautiful Ulm (Germany), in June 2013. Straight after this conference, the Intersolar is being organized again in Munich, so it is an excellent combination for those interested in the latest developments of the PV industry but also in the state of the art of small applications for remote and rural areas.

The period for submission of abstracts is open now and will end on January 4, 2013.



This event is held every two years and in the latest edition covered topics as exciting as:

• Success of Rural Electrification by Solar PV systems in Bangladesh
• Field evaluation of PV rural electrification programs in South America
• Rural electrification with Solar Home Systems in the Amazon Region
• PV charging enhancement of SHS using Super-capacitors
• Economic assessment and design optimisation of PV-battery systems in off-grid applications
• And many others!

Main topics for next year conference are:

 
1. Electricity supply for remote rural households away from the national grid (Solar Home Systems)
2. Provision of electricity to public institutions such as schools, clinics, churches, mosques and temples, administration offices, water pumping systems or street lighting.
3. Electricity for industrial use and income generating infrastructure (telecommunication equipment, grain milling, welding, food preservation, meteorological stations or remote sensing)
4. New concepts for integrated “over-the-counter PV products” often called “pico-systems” (solar lanterns, solar radios, mobile phone chargers, etc.)
5. Electricity supply for urban households as backup to increase reliability
6. Components such as charge controllers and batteries or other alternatives for energy storage
7. Policy, financial aspects and market development for off-grid PV (government programs, incentives, testing facilities, etc.)

Categories:

• Components, including energy storage
• Systems
• Costs
• Maintenance, quality assurance
• Capacity building, distribution channels, ownership
• Financing
• Market development
Looking forward to meeting you there!
 

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NREL Report Counts Up Solar Power Land Use Needs

IEEE Spectrum has an update on the land required for solar power plants - Report Counts Up Solar Power Land Use Needs.

The report used land use data from 72 percent of all large solar plants installed in the U.S., and found that the total area requirements for a photovoltaic (PV) plant between 1 and 20 megawatt capacity is 8.3 acres per MW. For larger PV plants, the total area needed is 7.9 acres per MW, while concentrating solar power plants (CSP) need 10 acres per MW. When weighted by generation rather than capacity, the larger PV plants (3.4 acres per gigawatt-hour per year) and CSP plants (3.5 acres/GWh/year) do a bit better than smaller PV plants (4.1 acres/GWh/year).

This isnt the first time NREL has looked at solar land use, though it is the first time they used a whole lot of actual power plants to figure out the numbers. In the past, they estimated that to power all of the U.S. with solar power, it would require 0.6 percent of all the area in the country.

The new report says that a PV plant capable of powering 1 000 homes needs 32 acres. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, there are around 115 million occupied and fully used homes in the country. If we just scale up linearly (which is not, of course, how this would actually work), that means 3.68 million acres to power all of them. Thats equivalent to 5 750 square miles, or around 0.1 percent of all the land the US has to offer.

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