Giant Robot to Build Desert Solar Array

This is cool. The Fraunhofer Institute is going to build a massive solar array in the Sahara desert using a giant robot crane known as IPAnema (“IPA” for “Industrial Parallel Kinematics). They have partnered with a firm called Desertec, whose researchers have determined that utilizing as little as 1% of the Sahara’s daily solar output would power the entire world. The problem is the cost of constructing such a vast array.

Whereas the cost of hiring, feeding and housing a construction crew, not to mention the cost related to the time it would take to build the 2,270 square-mile solar farm, would be daunting, IPAnema can lift and manipulate 7-ton collectors really quickly and with great precision. The robot is operated by means of a series of cables and winches like a giant marionette. It has pinpoint precision and operates much faster than a modern crane, which sacrifices speed and accuracy to account for sway. There’s no sway with the multi-winch-and-cable-driven IPAnema. It does not sleep, it does not eat. It works day and night. That’s all it does! And it absolutely WILL NOT STOP until the job is finished.

According to an article in Popular Science IPAnema will be ready to go in 2015. It will accomplish what would take decades in a much shorter period of time. No one has actually stated exactly how long, but if you watch the video of the model IPAnema in action, you’ll see how revolutionary it’s going to be to the construction and loading industries:

The real IPAnema is going to have to be about the size of a football field.

Iraq also has vast desert areas. If this works in the Sahara, why not in other uninhabited environments with minimal human and animal populations? I’m just saying…

Iraqi-Owned Solar Company

http://iraqsolarcompany.com/

I rarely update this blog but I found this site interesting. It promotes an Iraqi-owned, funded and managed solar energy company whose goal is to eliminate the night darkness throughout Iraq, and also to research and develop products that will be available worldwide. Good luck ISC. I hope it works!
Yahoo Back Link Checker

Breakthrough in Solar Technology

Stanford University researchers have developed a cheaper, vastly more efficient solar cell that can absorb 10 times more energy from the same amount of sunlight that reaches a silicone solar cell. This is cool because one of the biggest stumbling blocks to solar implementation is the cost.

http://news.stanford.edu/news/2010/september/nanoscale-solar-cells-092710.html

These new cells operate on a nanoscale - thinner than wavelengths of light - meaning that they can absorb light in a much smaller area, capture more of it and store it longer. The fragmented surface of the cells causes the light to bounce around within the cell layers, essentially “trapped” inside. The light energy is abosrbed by thin organic film sandwiched between layers, rather than silicon. This organic material is way cheaper to produce than silicon wafers, so what this means is that solar adopters will be spending a lot less money for a lot more energy. Good news, especially for places where financing is at a premium.

A Model for Channeling Sun Power

So there’s a senior apartment complex in Sacramento that shows how much energy off-grid and/or grid-tied solar systems can handle. The Citrus Heights community of Vintage Oaks began the region’s largest solar project in January, 2010 and currently requires only 14 percent of its electricity from the grid.

The company that developed the project, USA Properties Fund, owns other affordable housing communities in California and Nevada and is planning to implement similar solar solutions in the future.

http://www.bizjournals.com/sacramento/stories/2010/09/20/daily32.html

Baghdad is full of apartment complexes, not all of whose residents can afford their power bills. Of those who can, there’s the omnipresent issue of the failing grid. If less than 20 percent of their electricity needs depended on the grid, well, that’s one less headache for a government in turmoil.

Iraq's future?

Solar Solutions and the Military: a Good Match?

Renewable Energy World reports on a wind power firm in Carpinteria, CA that has expanded its workforce primarily with ex-military personnel. Veterans from the Iraq and Afghanistan theaters as well as graduates from military academies, according to executives at Clipper Windpower, possess skills that make them perfect for energy solutions implementation and management, like discipline, engineering, transportation, logistics and more.

http://www.renewableenergyworld.com/rea/news/article/2010/08/finding-the-renewable-workforce-the-value-of-ex-military-hires

The point I’m making is that we already have a pool of skilled technicians in Iraq who can work with Iraq’s solar engineers to expedite solar projects. Doesn’t it seem easy?

The military's already doing it

The risk lies in spreading the work force too thin, since undoubtedly the majority of trained military assets is applied to rebuilding the current fossil fuel infrastructure. Even a small crew, however, could make a difference.

Back from the Dead

School’s out – for the moment. A lot has happened since my last entry – none of it solar.

Dubai Bloomberg correspondent Maher Chmaytelli has reported that Iraq and Syria have agreed to build cross-border oil and gas pipelines, which will provide an outlet for Iraq crude oil to Europe and the US currently not met by the existing Asia-oriented Basrah terminal.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-09-16/iraq-syria-agree-to-build-cross-border-oil-gas-pipelines-official-says.html

Oil traders doubtless see this as a good thing, pointing to declining supplies and production in the west. This means that if the west-oriented pipelines are successful, Iraq will be in a good economic position, particularly since the 2017 yield from Iraq has been predicted to be about 6 million barrels a day, according to sources like market researcher David Kirsch of PFC Energy.
http://af.reuters.com/article/commoditiesNews/idAFLDE68F1YZ20100916

More money for Iraq means potential diversification. Greater economic freedom, coupled with increasingly cheaper prices for solar implementation, signifies a great opportunity for solar Iraq.

There are plenty of other obstacles, however, just as impossibly huge as the fact that “Iraq=oil”. The US has announced that combat operations are over and that the so-called “Operation New Dawn” is “remissioning”, so termed by President Obama. But this doesn’t mean all the daily dangers in Iraq are going to disappear – we’re going to have plenty of continued unrest fostered, first and foremost, by thin, willowy central government, not to mention ethnic tensions that spawn a diversity of terrorist activitities.

Oh, and then there’s the embassy. We have built the largest American embassy in the world: the size of Vatican City – which, I would remind y’all, functions as an autonomous city-state – (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._Embassy,_Baghdad
) in Iraq, at a cost of over $500 million. I’m trying to stay away from political commentary in this blog, so instead of looking at whether this sucks or not, let’s look at the potential benefit from Iraq’s point of view, specifically within the scope of the SEFI blog. What kind of influence will several thousand diplomats under one roof have on the nation? How much policy-making will be attributed to them? How much energy policy-making? How many among them have discussed off-grid solar implementation on a nationwide scale? That is a question to which I would like an answer.

Given that the nation continues to be an extremely unstable place despite economic promise, off-grid solar systems would fare quite well here and either bridge the gap between today’s turmoil and the emergence of a stable society that reinvigorates the grid. Or – like in my little dream world – they could point to a future that crystalizes a major solar push into a permanent part of the new future for the nation.

Update

To the nobody who reads my brilliant idea for a blog, I’m bogged down with school currently, but I’ll get some new content up in here in a week or so.