Solar panels aren’t cheap – they cost thousands of pounds to install. However these costs are said to be offset by the reduced amount of energy that the household will require once they are installed – with some companies claiming that solar panels will reduce gas and electric bills by up to 70%. So although the up front cost is high, over time the solar panels should pay for themselves thanks to significantly reduced bills.

Around 100,000 households in the UK are said to have solar thermal installations already. Experts believe that this figure could rise to around 1 million over the next decade. This massive increase will in part be fueled by government grants which come into play next year. And with people worried about climate change and the rising cost of bills, there will be no shortage of people looking to install this expensive green technology.

However all is not as it seems. Which? has found that out of 14 companies they looked at, 10 exaggerated the claims about the effectiveness and potential savings of their solar panel systems. They found that a typical system costs around £5,500 to install however it will only cut around £55/year from bills. This means it would take around 100 years to recoup the up-front cost. Complaints to the OFT match Which?’s findings with around 1,000 complaints about the solar panel industry last year alone.

So although solar panels do have bona fide green credentials, it appears that many companies are overplaying how efficient the panels will be. Any for anyone who is hoping to save money on their bills by installing them, it is a case of do your homework carefully as in many cases homeowners are finding that the figures are not stacking up.

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However officials have said that the Prince will only be permitted to fit solar panels to Clarence House if they do not compromise the look of the 180-year old property.

It is believed that it would cost around £150,000 to fit solar cells to Clarence House however the energy savings would mean that this initial cost would be recouped by 2021.

With news of the planned photo voltaic cells leaked, Prince Charles has been accused of being a hypocrite after he used a private jet to fly to last week’s Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen – a flight which will have added substantially to the Prince’s carbon footprint.

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Milan Karki, 18, comes from a rural village in Nepal. The young inventor uses hair as a conductor in solar panels instead of silicon, one of the normal components used in solar panels. Silicon is very pricey whereas hair is not therefore the new solar panels are a lot more cost effective.

Nepal is one of the poorest countries in the world. Many rural areas in the country lack any electrical supply and even in areas with electricity, there may be shortages of up to 16 hours a day.

Milan and four classmates have already made a prototype of the new solar panel. It produces around 9V (18W) of energy and costs around $50 to make.

It is believed that if the new hair solar panels were mass produced, the costs would halve and this would make them around a quarter of the price of solar panels currently for sale. The solar panel is currently capable of charging a mobile phone or a pack of batteries capable of providing light all evening.

Melanin, the pigment in hair that gives it it’s colour, is light sensitive and can also act as an electrical conductor. A kilo of hair can be bought in Nepal for about $1.

Milan says his inspiration comes from British scientist Stephen Hawking who described how to create static energy from hair in one of his books.

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At present, the renewables part of power bills stands at around £55 on average. Subsidising renewable energy further could more than double this figure to as much as £120 per year by 2014. The UK Energy Research Centre has predicted by 2050, the renewable energy subsidy will cost the economy £17 billion a year – around £700 per household.

The UK is pushing hard to find more renewable energy sources as the Government has pledged to cut greenhouse gas emissions from the UK by 34 percent in 11 years and 80
Percent in 40 years. At present, the UK is the only country with legally binding CO2 targets. The UK is facing an uphill struggle with just three percent of electricity currently coming from renewable sources.

To ensure that more people don’t fall into fuel poverty, the Government is also thought to be planning social tariffs whereby the poor and the elderly will not have to pay the full extra subsidy and energy companies will instead by forced to subsidise this cost by adding extra to the bills of better off clients.

To push the green incentive even further, householders may be offered incentives to produce their own energy for example through solar panels. Smart meters may also be introduced to help householders analyse their power use and help reduce it.

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The premise behind the invention is that there are different forms of light around the world – at the equator, the sun may be burning hot however at higher latitudes, the sunlight is a lot weaker. Partly this is because the atmosphere acts as a light filter so the light reaching the ground will vary from place to place, and will also vary according to different atmospheric conditions.

Quantasol is now using a solar cell which makes of use of gallium arsenide (GaAs) rather than silicon which most other solar cells use. GaAs solar cells have already been used in space successfully.

Quantasol take their solar cells and add indium gallium arsenide (InGaAs) to tiny pores across the surface of the solar panel. Each of these pores can be tuned so that they absorb light at particular frequencies that aren’t being absorbed well by the rest of the GaAs cell. This means that the efficiency of the solar panel should increase because the InGaAs pores are able to absorb more of the light in the particular area.

In tests, Quantasol’s new solar cells have broken as 21 year old efficiency record for one type of solar cell. The peak efficiency was measures at 28.3 percent when light 500 times the strength of standard sunlight was shone at the solar panel. Although the result is just one-tenth of a percent higher than the previous record holder, the record has stood for a massive 21 years so it represents a good step forward in solar cell technology.

The main problem of using GaAs in cells instead of silicon is the cost – silicon is a much cheaper material. However Quantasol’s solar cells don’t become overloaded as quickly as silicon solar cells therefore smaller, more efficient cells can be built using Quantasol’s technology.

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Energy grids need to match supply and demand for energy as closely as possible – too much energy and there could be an overload, too little energy and there may be power cuts. Many renewable energy sources such as wind or solar power are notorious for having wildly fluctuating outputs meaning that as more and more renewable energy sources come online, grids are going to have to start being able to cope with these less reliable energy sources.

One solution to this problem is known as the Virtual Power Plant. These virtual power plants consist of many small generators mashed together in the grid to form a unit akin to a power station. The small generators can be a mix including sources such as solar panels, biomass power stations, hydroelectric dams or wind turbines, and can also include the energy from people who have their own renewable energy source in the back garden and are selling their excess energy back to the grid. The amalgamation of all these smaller sources is then treated like a conventional power plant.

This virtual power plant can be created by subtly changing the monitoring systems currently in place in our energy grid. Home users may also be able to benefit by selling their energy to the virtual plant which is currently offering them the best buy price.

Small trials of the system have already taken place in the UK, with further trials set for Spain in the near future.

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Photovoltaic cells are what most people think of when solar power is talked about. Photovoltaic cells are the most popular form of solar power and there are plenty of these types of cells available for residential use.

Howvever BrightSource Energy will be using solar-thermal technology for their energy plant. Solar-thermal energy uses sunlight to produce heat. The heat produces steam which then drives a turbine which generates electricity. A photovoltaic cell, in contrast, generates electricity directly from the Sun’s rays.

Solar-thermal power stations can be built to a large scale far more easily than a solar-photovoltaic power station, and are usually far cheaper to build. As the heat can also be stored, the energy output of a solar-thermal power plant is not as erratic as that of a solar-photovoltaic energy plant. It is also possible to easily fit natural-gas boilers into solar-thermal power plants to ensure that they produce regular supplies of energy, even if gas is not a renewable form of energy.

The one major stipulation for a solar thermal power plant is that it should be built in an area which has a lot of uninterrupted sunshine to ensure that the plant is efficient and produces a good, regular supply of energy. At present, there is only around 500 megawatts of capacity in solar thermal plants at the moment, however with plenty of companies interested in the technology, this capacity is set to increase dramatically in the next few years.

Solar thermal power is not a new idea – in fact, it has it’s roots in China and ancient Greece where the sun’s rays were often focused with mirrors or glass to light fires. A similar technique has also been used to set enemy boats on fire.

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The project has taken over 15 years to complete and it is hoped that the machine will help solve the world’s energy problems.

The machine works by using the world’s most powerful laser to create 192 separate beams of light. These beams are directed at a pellet of frozen hydrogen just 2mm across but costing $40,000 a piece. The pellet must be a perfect sphere to ensure that they collapse properly when the beam of light hits it, causing a violent burst of energy lasing just five billionths of a second.

The beams produce a large shockwave which go through the fuel pellet at a million miles per hour, generating temperatures in the region of 100,000,000 degrees Centigrade causing hydrogen atoms to fuse, producing helium and energy. These sorts of reactions are normally only seen at the core of stars.

At present the laser can only be fired a few times a day as the hydrogen fuel pellet needs to be replaced each time. However scientists are hoping to improve the machine to enable a fuel pellet to be dropped into the fusion chamber and shot mid-air, allowing for the laser to fire 10 times a second meaning the plant can produce energy on a continuous basis. It is anticipated that experiments with the plant will continue until at least 2040.

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In 2006, the Hellisheidi geothermal plant about 30km from Reykjavik, Iceland, came online. Since then, several problems have appeared.

Firstly, local residents found that they had to clean their silverware every couple of days as it was covered in black soot. Before the plant had come along, cleaning would be every couple of months.

Truck drivers in the area found that the rubber in their suspension and steering become hard and prone to breaking – an occurrence that would normally take a lot longer.

After two years, moss near the geothermal plant began to show signs of damage, with large chunks dead or dying.

Some strongly began to suspect that hydrogen sulphide (H2S) and sulphur, which is derived from H2S, were to blame although no research has been done into the effects of sulphur on moss. Mercury was also found in high concentrations in the areas of dead moss.

Steam produced at the plant appears to be the source of the problem. Most of this is water, but 0.4 percent of the steam contains gases of various kinds – 83 percent is carbon dioxide (CO2), 16 percent hydrogen sulphide (H2S), and the remainder other gases. Trace elements in the steam include sulphur, mercury, boron, arsenic and aluminium.

Hellisheidi is a windy, rainy area and the initial environmental reports believed that because of the local weather, most of the H2S would be turned into sulphur which in turn would be washed into the soil. However it appears that some of the H2S isn’t turning to sulphur and it blowing the H2S into Reykjavik, a worry that has caused the Environment Agency to find ways to reduce the levels of H2S.

Although low levels of H2S are not thought to be hazardous to human health, high levels are and little is known about the long-term effects of H2S. The World Health Organisation (WHO) guidelines state that exposure to H2S should not exceed 150 micrograms per cubic metre. Reykjavik has exceeded this level at least once. The Environment Agency are now working on new regulations surrounding the release of H2S.

So is it possible to reduce the levels of H2S released by geothermal energy plants? Yes, but it is an expensive process and not only that, but sulphuric acid or gypsum are the by-products of any of these cleaning processes, both of which are over-supplied on the world market already. Research is currently happening to see if the excess H2S can be repumped underground however research takes time and breakthroughs are not expected in this area in the very near future.

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Wind turbines often aren’t particularly effective when used in a residential situation.

- Firstly, buildings cause turbulence and wind turbines dislike turbulence. Wind turbines much prefer smooth flows of air. Unfortunately, buildings redirect wind causing small eddies and different streams and this can lead to a confused turbine that doesn’t perform brilliantly even when the wind is fairly strong.

- Home wind turbines can be very noisy and can actually cause vibrations. Part of the noise and the vibrations comes from the actual wind turbine however the wind turbines can also help create oscillations and resonance in the building they are standing on.

- If you live in a relatively built up area, other buildings may act as wind breaks so your wind turbine may not get as much wind as it should and therefore cannot perform well.

All these factors mean that wind turbines are actually not terribly efficient with some producing only 5% of predicted performance. On paper, wind turbines for the home may look great but with poor performance, other renewable energy sources such as solar panels are usually the better bet. Coupled with the fact that it can be expensive to actually mount the wind turbine, it may actually not be the top green solution you were looking for.

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