Greg Barker sets out Big Society vision for Small Energy (press release)

New community energy website launched
Climate Change Minister Greg Barker today urged communities to grab the new opportunities to become more energy self sufficient and join the green energy revolution.

In a keynote speech to the Combined Heat and Power Association annual conference, Greg Barker described communities installing their own low carbon energy, like combined heat and power plants, wind and water turbines or district heating networks, as epitomising the vision of the Big Society.

At the conference, he launched a brand new website called Community Energy Online to help communities find out more about how to generate their own energy.

Greg Barker said: “Community energy is a perfect expression of the transformative power of the Big Society. With the right combination of incentives and freedoms, community groups, businesses and organisations can get together to build a cleaner, greener future.

“They can generate their own heat and electricity, and their own profits, and as a by-product, help the UK to save energy and help to cut carbon emissions.”

DECC’s Community Energy Online website has been developed together with community networks, the Local Government Group and industry bodies like the CHPA. It is designed to give communities access to information from different independent sources on generating low carbon heat and power. The website launched today will link together partner websites to create a one stop shop for communities interested in generating energy on a community scale.

DECC has already acted to make community energy more attractive by:
overturning the ban on local councils selling electricity back to the national grid, opening up new sources of income including the full benefit of the feed in tariff; and providing a clear commitment to the funding of feed in tariffs and £860m for the Renewable Heat Incentive in the recent Spending Review.

To access Community Energy Online, visit: http://ceo.decc.gov.ukDECC will shortly be formally consulting on its Microgeneration Strategy and publishing further detail on the Renewable Heat Incentive.

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Funneling solar energy: Antenna made of carbon nanotubes could make photovoltaic cells more efficient

ScienceDaily (Sep. 13, 2010) — Using carbon nanotubes (hollow tubes of carbon atoms), MIT chemical engineers have found a way to concentrate solar energy 100 times more than a regular photovoltaic cell. Such nanotubes could form antennas that capture and focus light energy, potentially allowing much smaller and more powerful solar arrays.

"Instead of having your whole roof be a photovoltaic cell, you could have little spots that were tiny photovoltaic cells, with antennas that would drive photons into them," says Michael Strano, the Charles and Hilda Roddey Associate Professor of Chemical Engineering and leader of the research team.

Strano and his students describe their new carbon nanotube antenna, or "solar funnel," in the Sept. 12 online edition of the journal Nature Materials. Lead authors of the paper are postdoctoral associate Jae-Hee Han and graduate student Geraldine Paulus.

Their new antennas might also be useful for any other application that requires light to be concentrated, such as night-vision goggles or telescopes.

Solar panels generate electricity by converting photons (packets of light energy) into an electric current. Strano's nanotube antenna boosts the number of photons that can be captured and transforms the light into energy that can be funneled into a solar cell.

The antenna consists of a fibrous rope about 10 micrometers (millionths of a meter) long and four micrometers thick, containing about 30 million carbon nanotubes. Strano's team built, for the first time, a fiber made of two layers of nanotubes with different electrical properties -- specifically, different bandgaps.

In any material, electrons can exist at different energy levels. When a photon strikes the surface, it excites an electron to a higher energy level, which is specific to the material. The interaction between the energized electron and the hole it leaves behind is called an exciton, and the difference in energy levels between the hole and the electron is known as the bandgap.

The inner layer of the antenna contains nanotubes with a small bandgap, and nanotubes in the outer layer have a higher bandgap. That's important because excitons like to flow from high to low energy. In this case, that means the excitons in the outer layer flow to the inner layer, where they can exist in a lower (but still excited) energy state.

Therefore, when light energy strikes the material, all of the excitons flow to the center of the fiber, where they are concentrated. Strano and his team have not yet built a photovoltaic device using the antenna, but they plan to. In such a device, the antenna would concentrate photons before the photovoltaic cell converts them to an electrical current. This could be done by constructing the antenna around a core of semiconducting material.
The interface between the semiconductor and the nanotubes would separate the electron from the hole, with electrons being collected at one electrode touching the inner semiconductor, and holes collected at an electrode touching the nanotubes.

This system would then generate electric current. The efficiency of such a solar cell would depend on the materials used for the electrode, according to the researchers.
Strano's team is the first to construct nanotube fibers in which they can control the properties of different layers, an achievement made possible by recent advances in separating nanotubes with different properties.

While the cost of carbon nanotubes was once prohibitive, it has been coming down in recent years as chemical companies build up their manufacturing capacity. "At some point in the near future, carbon nanotubes will likely be sold for pennies per pound, as polymers are sold," says Strano. "With this cost, the addition to a solar cell might be negligible compared to the fabrication and raw material cost of the cell itself, just as coatings and polymer components are small parts of the cost of a photovoltaic cell."

Strano's team is now working on ways to minimize the energy lost as excitons flow through the fiber, and on ways to generate more than one exciton per photon. The nanotube bundles described in the Nature Materials paper lose about 13 percent of the energy they absorb, but the team is working on new antennas that would lose only 1 percent.

Funding: National Science Foundation Career Award, MIT Sloan Fellowship, the MIT-Dupont Alliance and the Korea Research Foundation.
Story Source:

The above story is reprinted (with editorial adaptations by ScienceDaily staff) from materials provided by Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The original article was written by Anne Trafton, MIT News Office.

Journal Reference:
Jae-Hee Han, Geraldine L. C. Paulus, Ryuichiro Maruyama, Daniel A. Heller, Woo-Jae Kim, Paul W. Barone, Chang Young Lee, Jong Hyun Choi, Moon-Ho Ham, Changsik Song, C. Fantini, Michael S. Strano. Exciton antennas and concentrators from core–shell and corrugated carbon nanotube filaments of homogeneous composition. Nature Materials, 2010; DOI: 10.1038/nmat2832
Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead.
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Every building should flaunt energy performance says NG Bailey

The government should launch a policy forcing all landlords to hang giant Display Energy Certificates (DEC) inside their buildings to help kickstart a low carbon retrofitting revolution of the UK's building stock.

That was the stark message from leading green construction firm NG Bailey at the CBI today, which warned the UK is ill equipped to meet its carbon cutting 2020 and 2050 targets.

“Our current policies won’t deliver the goals," said NG Bailey sustainability director at Cal Bailey. "But I think we can achieve a dramatic change in our behaviour, and incentives for landlords, by making energy performance more visible by a simple branding method."

NG Bailey is a founding member of the UK Green Building Council, which is trying to push the refurbishment of non-domestic buildings up the political agenda as part of plans to halve emissions from the built environment by 2020.

At present, only public buildings must prominently display a DEC, however Bailey urged for the legislation to be rolled out immediately to all large buildings over 1,000m sq and then applied to smaller buildings in five years' time. He suggested buildings should display a 1m sq certificate in lobbies or receptions.

The policy could boost the value of better performing buildings, thus financially rewarding any landlords who build to high energy standards, he said, and would be simple and cheap for the government to implement.

However, critics at the event argued Bailey's idea was overly simplistic and failed to take account of the entire carbon footprint of a building, including waste management systems, public transport access and carbon embodied in construction.
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DECC lifts ban on councils selling green energy

The UK government will from next week allow local authorities to sell energy that they produce back to the grid, ending a ban that has been in place for a quarter of a century.

The Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) confirmed today that the ban, which was originally imposed in 1976, would be repealed on August 18.

Energy and Climate Change Secretary, Chris Huhne, who first announced that he would lift the ban last month, said that the change would free up councils to accelerate the roll out of community-scale renewable energy projects.

"For too long, Whitehall's dogmatic reliance on 'big' energy has stood in the way of the vast potential role of local authorities in the UK’s green energy revolution," he said in a visit to Woking Council. "Forward thinking local authorities such as Woking in Surrey have been quietly getting on with it, but against the odds, their efforts frustrated by the law."

The lifting of the ban allows councils to sell surplus energy generated by their onsite electricity projects back to the grid, providing them with an additional source of revenue.

Soon after the announcement, councils began explaining how they might benefit from the reversal in policy. Derby is due to complete a hydroelectric plant at Longbridge with a peak power output of 230Kw by the end of next year and also wants to install photovoltaic panels on two council buildings.

Meanwhile, Hampshire already has three energy from waste plants in place that process unrecyclable waste and generate enough energy each year to power 50,000 homes.

"Having the ability to sell our own generated electricity - instead of through an energy supply company - would really help us to invest in cleaner and more efficient generation technologies," said Councillor Mel Kendal, Hampshire County Council's Executive Member for Environment. "The benefits for Hampshire include ensuring energy security and reducing our vulnerability to future price increases."

The move is the latest step in the government's plan to promote greater uptake of small and community-scale renewable energy projects. However, it also comes at a time when many within the UK's renewable energy industry are frustrated at changes to planning rules that should make it easier for councils to overturn applications for mid-scale wind farms and other renewable energy projects.

A series of industry insiders told the Sunday Times' yesterday that the government had effectively "sanctioned nimbyism" by telling councils that it would roll back central government targets and allow them to have a greater say in planning decisions.

The CBI has also issued a major report today warning that the government's failure to provide greater detail on its proposed low carbon energy policies is blocking billions of pounds of renewable energy investment.

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Bulgaria cashes in on wind energy gold rush

Bulgaria has become the latest Eastern European country to bolster is wind energy ambitions this week, inking two major deals that will significantly boost its renewable energy capacity.

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Tories plan controversial reform to UK renewable energy incentives

The Conservative Party has responded to rumours that it is preparing a majoroverhaul of the UK's renewable energy policy by confirming that if elected itplans to effectively phase out the government's Renewable Obligation scheme.

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Energy Bill receives Royal Assent

The Energy Bill received Royal Assent yesterday, becoming the Energy Act 2010.

The main elements of the new Act are:

Carbon capture and storage (CCS) – delivering a new financial incentive to bring forward four commercial scale demonstration projects on coal-fired power stations and to support the retrofit of additional CCS capacity to those projects should it be required at a later date. Mandatory social price support – creating a framework to mandate energy companies to provide support to the fuel poor, including powers to give greater guidance and direction on the types of households eligible for future support and the type of support they should be given. Clarifying Ofgem’s remit – making it clear that Ofgem must:

Include the reduction of carbon emissions and the delivery of secure energy supplies in their assessment of the interests of consumers

Step in proactively to protect consumers as well as considering longer term actions to promote competition Tackling market power exploitation – giving Ofgem additional powers to tackle market exploitation where companies might take advantage of constraints in the electricity transmission grid.

Other measures are:

Requiring the Government to prepare regular reports on the progress made on the decarbonisation of electricity generation in Britain and the development and use of CCS. Extending the time limit from 12 months to 5 years within which Ofgem can impose financial penalties on energy suppliers for breaches of licence conditions. Allowing the Government to set the period within which energy companies must inform customers of changes to their gas and electricity tariffs. Enabling action to be taken against unfair cross-subsidy between gas and electricity supply.


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