In the spot where the old Robert Mueller airport used to be, the city of Austin is building, among other things, a solar farm made of these contest-winning, 16-foot-high “sunflower” style solar collectors.
IBM’s researchers have been busily beavering away trying to improve solar power technology, and they’ve just come up with a neat solution that uses a surprisingly simple technique: concentrator photovoltaics. In much the same way as kids use magnifying glasses to focus the sun on things to burn them (we all did that, didn’t we?) the IBM boffins combined a large lens and a photovoltaic cell to focus a record-breaking 230 watts solar energy per square centimeter. That ends up producing about 70 watts of useful electric power, effectively creating a solar cell about five times more powerful than the cells commonly used in solar farms.
A solar farm has opened in Spain that consists of 120,000 solar panels over 100 hectares (247 acres). It also has a peak capacity of 20 megawatts and it can power up to 20,000 homes—making it the world’s largest solar farm to date. The farm is expected to generate an estimated annual income of US$28 million and reduce CO2 emissions by about 42,000 tons a year.
