Researchers develop paint-on solar cells

By Simon Lauder

ABC News Online, Thu Jun 30, 2011

Australian researchers have developed solar panels which can be painted or printed directly onto a surface.

The project is one of several initiatives which have the potential to revolutionise solar energy by eliminating the need for bulky panels which need to be attached to buildings.

With help from the CSIRO, University of Melbourne PhD student Brandon MacDonald has worked out how to make solar cells so small they can be suspended in liquid, such as ink.

"We can then apply this ink onto a surface, so this could be glass or plastics or metals," Mr MacDonald told AM.

"What we could do is actually integrate these into the building as it's being made, so you can imagine solar windows, or having it actually be part of the roofing material."

These solar panels will be made of nano-crystals which have a diameter of just a few millionths of a millimetre.

Mr MacDonald says they will use just 1 per cent of the materials needed to make traditional solar panels.

"The problem with conventional solar cells, which are based on silicone and have been around for 60 years, is that they are quite efficient at converting sunlight to energy," he said.

"But in terms of making them it's a fairly costly and time-consuming process and so at the moment solar energy is more expensive than, say, coal or fossil fuels," he said.

"With these inks, and eventually trying to print the cells on a large scale, we hope that we'll make it so that this technology is cost-competitive with traditional energy sources."

Mr MacDonald hopes the new technology will be two to three times cheaper than solar cells currently on the market.

And he is hoping the print-on solar panel will be on the market in about five years.

Third generation

An Australian-based company has already taken a big step towards the large scale marketing of a very similar product.

Solar developer Dysol has struck a deal with steel giant Tata Steel to develop building products, such as steel girders and roofing panels, with solar panels embedded in the surface.

Dysol's founder, Sylvia Tulloch, says the product should be ready to go in two years.

"I think a third generation solar, where we talk about processes that enable us to integrate solar layers into all sorts of everyday products and particularly into building products - so roofs, or walls or windows that have layers on them that generate electricity," she said.

Ms Tulloch says in years to come an entire building could be generating electricity.

"Absolutely, so when you specify your roof, you will specify what proportion of it you want to be generating electricity," she said.

There are several other projects around the world which are on the same track, developing a new generation of solar panel which are easier to manufacture.

Kane Thornton from the Clean Energy Council says the reduced cost will be revolutionary.

"Many people have underestimated that rate at which solar technology has become part of everyone's lives and certainly it's a matter of years rather than decades and I certainly hope it's only a couple of years rather than many years," he said.

Climate change hots up in 2010, the year of extreme weather

Last year was the joint-warmest on record and also the wettest over land, with sea ice levels dropping and drought on the rise

John Vidal, environment editor 

Guardian.co.uk, Monday 27 June 2011

The year 2010 may have been the most extreme in terms of weather since the explosion of Indonesia's Mount Tambora in 1816, when much of the world experienced reduced daylight and no summer, says one of the world's most prominent meteorologists.

A combination of abnormal climatic phenomena resulted in the year being the hottest, wettest, and in many cases also the driest and coldest in recorded history, says Jeff Masters, co-founder of climate tracking website Weather Underground.

According to Masters 2011 is already on track to be exceptional, with a deepening drought in Texas – where 65% of the state is now in "exceptional drought" conditions – and one of the warmest springs experienced in 100 years taking place across much of Europe. It is also the most extreme tornado year recorded in the US, with Arctic sea ice already at its lowest ever for the time of year.

US and UK government scientists declared in January that 2010 had tied with 2005 as the warmest year of the global surface temperature record– the 34th consecutive year with temperatures above the 20th-century average – but, says Masters, new data on other climatic phenomena suggest that extremes were widespread.

Scientists recorded the second-worst year for coral bleaching (caused by raised sea temperatures), the lowest-ever volume of Arctic Sea ice, highly unusual monsoons in China and a series of abnormal storms across the US and elsewhere. Some of the phenomena have been linked to a strong El Niño/La Niña episode, which follows unexplained temperature changes in the Pacific Ocean near the equator. Global tropical cyclone activity, however, was the lowest on record.

According to Masters, 19 countries – covering nearly 20% of the global land area – experienced their hottest recorded years in 2010. "Hot years tend to generate more wet and dry extremes than cold years. This occurs [because] there is more energy available to fuel the evaporation that drives heavy rains and snows, and to make droughts hotter and drier in places storms are avoiding," he says.

"Many of the flood disasters in 2010-11 were undoubtedly heavily influenced by the strong El Niño and La Niña events that occurred, [but] the ever-increasing amounts of heat-trapping gases humans are emitting into the air puts tremendous pressure on the climate system to shift to a new, radically different, warmer state, and the extreme weather of 2010-11 suggests that the transition is already well underway.

"I don't believe that years like 2010 and 2011 will become the 'new normal' in the coming decade. [But] a warmer planet has more energy to power stronger storms, hotter heat waves, more intense droughts, heavier flooding rains, and record glacier melt that will drive accelerating sea-level rise. I expect that by 20-30 years from now, extreme weather years like we witnessed in 2010 will become the new normal," he says.

Climate abnormalities in 1816 caused average global temperatures to decrease by about 0.4-0.7 °C, resulting in major food shortages across the northern hemisphere. It is believed that this was largely caused by a succession of major volcanic eruptions capped off by the Mount Tambora eruption of 1815 – the largest known eruption in over 1,300 years.

2010: a year of extremes

Heat

Temperatures in Earth's lower atmosphere tied with the warmest year on record. Unofficially, 19 nations set all-time extreme heat records in 2010.

Snowmageddon

The atmospheric circulation in the Arctic took on its most extreme configuration in 145 years of record-keeping. Canada had its warmest and driest winter on record, but the US its coldest winter in 25 years. A series of remarkable snowstorms pounded the eastern US with the"Snowmageddon" blizzard dumping more than two feet of snow on Baltimore and Philadelphia.

Sea ice
Arctic Sea ice volume in 2010 was the lowest on record, with 60% missing in September 2010 compared to the average from 1979-2010.

Corals
Coral reefs took their second-worst beating on record in 2010, thanks to record or near-record high summer water temperatures over much of the planet's tropical oceans.

Wettest 

Last year set a new record for the wettest term in Earth's recorded history over land areas. The difference in precipitation from the average in 2010 was about 13% higher than that of the previous record wettest year, 1956. The record wetness over land was counterbalanced by relatively dry conditions over the oceans.

Amazon
The Amazon rainforest experienced its second 100-year drought in five years with the largest northern tributary of the Amazon river – the Rio Negro – dropping to 13 feet (four metres) below its usual dry-season level. This was its lowest level since record-keeping began in 1902.

Cyclones and hurricanes
Each year, the globe has about 92 cyclones – called hurricanes in the Atlantic and eastern Pacific, typhoons in the western Pacific and tropical cyclones in the southern hemisphere. In 2010, we had just 68.

Monsoon
An abnormal summer monsoon helped lead to precipitation 30-80% below normal in northern China and Mongolia, and 30-100% above average across a wide swath of central China. Western China saw summer precipitation of more than double the average.

Heatwaves
A scorching heatwave struck Moscow in late June 2010 and steadily increased in intensity through July, as the jet-stream remained "stuck" in an unusual loop that kept cool air and rain-bearing low-pressure systems far north of the country.

Melting of West Antarctica's biggest glacier acclererates

The Age, June 27, 2011   

West Antarctica's biggest glacier is melting 50 per cent faster than in 1994, adding to a global increase in sea levels, US and UK scientists found.

The Pine Island glacier is losing about 78 cubic kilometrs (30 cubic miles) of ice per year, the researchers at Columbia University in New York and the British Antarctic Survey in Cambridge, England, said today. That's up from 53 cubic kilometes in 1994. The study in the journal Nature Geoscience is based on data from a 2009 expedition.

Scientists are grappling to understand how much Antarctica's ice could contribute to higher sea-levels after the United Nations in 2007 predicted they'll rise by 18 to 59 centimetres this century. Just how much of that will come from the southern continent remains uncertain.

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"The glaciers from the Amundsen Sea region are contributing more to sea-level rise than any other part of Antarctica, so it's imperative we understand the processes involved," Adrian Jenkins, a glaciologist at the British Antarctic Survey and a co-author of the paper, said in an e-mailed statement.

The Pine Island glacier and smaller glaciers that flow into it contain enough ice to boost sea levels by 24 centimeters, according to Columbia.

The regional increase in ocean temperatures of 0.2 degrees Celsius isn't enough to cause the increase in melt at Pine Island, the researchers said.

They sent a robot submarine beneath the floating portion of the glacier and determined that the ice mass had previously been grounded on a ridge. The ice melted free from the ridge, opening room for warmer waters to circulate, they said.

"More warm water from the deep ocean is entering the cavity beneath the ice shelf, and it is warmest where the ice is thickest," Stan Jacobs, an oceanographer at Columbia's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and the study's lead author, said in an emailed statement.