There are many museums lining the mall in Washington D.C. These museums focus on history. For the past two weeks a museum of the future was placed on the mall as the Solar Decathlon competition took place. It was a village like no other – twenty student designed and built solar homes all striving to [...]
TI is on-site today as a returning sponsor at the 2009 Solar Decathlon in Washington DC. Sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy, the Solar Decathlon brings together 20 university teams from across the globe in a competition to design, build and operate the most energy-efficient and attractive solar-powered home. Tomorrow marks the first official [...]
Once just a glimmer in our eyes, the 2009 Department of Energy Solar Decathlon (SD09) competition is now upon us. In October, twenty university teams from around the world will bring their high-tech houses to the National Mall in Washington DC to show off their skills in super-energy-efficient home design, as well as their ability [...]
With energy usage top of mind, who hasn’t been exposed to commercials stating “the energy produced buy the sun in one minute equals the amount used by the entire population of the planet for one year,” or a similar, hard to define claim. The truth is there’s an incredible amount of energy out there for [...]
Texas Instruments and the 2009 Solar Decathlon
Texas Instruments has long been committed to driving energy innovation. In October, TI will continue its involvement in building a greener future as a returning sponsor of the 2009 Solar Decathlon. This event brings together 20 university teams from across the globe in a competition to design, build and [...]
Capturing the energy from the sun and transferring it to electrical or thermal energy can be used to its fullest potential only if it can be stored. On a cloudy or rainy day or at night, energy needs to be provided to the consumer at any given time or on a continual basis. For this, [...]
In 1970 Senator Gaylord Nelson called for the first Earth Day to be held on April 22nd. The goal was to raise environmental awareness and seek solutions to the environmental degradation that had begun to afflict parts of the planet. Senator Nelson once said “The economy is a wholly owned subsidiary of the environment, not [...]
Have you ever thought about how a solar cell functions and operates? Its function is quite simple: converting sunlight to electricity. Its operation is quite rudimentary. Solar cell is a semiconductor. The primary characteristic of a semiconductor is the presence of a band-gap. This band-gap has a finite energy. In a simplistic view, when sunlight [...]
The solar market is projected to reach grid parity five years from now.
However, the current economic crisis has dampened this explosive growth. This has resulted in a lot of skepticism about this market weathering the storm and fading away as in the past. On the other hand, I attended an iSuppli webinar on Jan 14th [...]
When people talk of solar power efficiency they are almost always referring to the conversion efficiency of the photovoltaic (PV) panel. The PV conversion efficiency is the ability to turn available sunlight into a DC voltage and current. For most mass produced panels the efficiency number is in the teens. Improving the PV efficiency without [...]