Florida Power & Light (FPL) recently announced the start of construction on its four newest solar power plants.

Today, FPL operates 14 major solar power plants and more than 200 smaller solar installations, totaling more than 935 megawatts of universal solar capacity currently powering customers. The four new plants, which are expected to be operational by early 2019, are:

• FPL Interstate Solar Energy Center, St. Lucie County
• FPL Miami-Dade Solar Energy Center, Miami-Dade County
• FPL Pioneer Trail Solar Energy Center, Volusia County
• FPL Sunshine Gateway Solar Energy Center, Columbia County

“Florida is leading the nation in implementing solar energy affordably,” said Eric Silagy, FPL’s president and CEO.

According to a recent report from GTM Research and the Solar Energy Industries Association, Florida has installed more solar capacity in 2018 than any other state except one.

FPL projects that solar will outpace coal and oil combined as a percentage of the company’s energy mix by the year 2020. FPL is aiming to have approximately 10 million solar panels in operation by 2022 and will be more than halfway to its goal once these four newest plants are completed.

Each of the four new solar plants will have a capacity of 74.5 megawatts for a total of nearly 300 megawatts. In addition to the environmental benefits, FPL’s four new solar power plants are expected to produce estimated net lifetime savings of more than $40 million for FPL customers through fuel and other savings.

The New Solar Installations:

FPL Interstate Solar Energy Center: The newest solar power plant coming to St. Lucie County will join three others along the Treasure Coast that began serving FPL customers earlier this year – the FPL Loggerhead Solar Energy Center (St. Lucie County); FPL Indian River Solar Energy Center (Indian River County); and FPL Blue Cypress Solar Energy Center (Indian River County).

FPL Miami-Dade Solar Energy Center: FPL plans to add more than 1 million solar panels across Miami-Dade in the coming years, starting with the FPL Miami-Dade Solar Energy Center located off Krome Avenue in southwest Miami-Dade County.

FPL Pioneer Trail Solar Energy Center: Known for its beaches and Daytona International Speedway (where FPL operates one of the largest solar installations at any sporting venue in the U.S.), Volusia County will soon be home to a new 74.5-megawatt solar power plant.

FPL Sunshine Gateway Solar Energy Center: Located near the intersection of Interstates 10 and 75 near Florida’s northern border, the FPL Sunshine Gateway Solar Energy Center will give residents and visitors traveling these roads a glimpse of a major solar energy operation at work. Once completed, the solar energy center will be visible from Interstate 75 southbound and Interstate 10 westbound.

 

 

Dr. Andre Taylor achieved remarkable effi ciency by introducing a squarine molecule (ASSQ) as a crystallizing agent, which both donates electrons and enhances the light absorption of the active layer of the cell, properly orienting the PBDB-T donor-acceptor polymer that accepts the donor electron with the non-fullerene electron-acceptor molecule ITIC.

The National GEM Consortium has produced myriad amazing academics and STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) professionals since its inception in 1976, and Professor André D. Taylor of New York University’s Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering Department is among the top on that list.

Dr. Taylor was awarded with prestigious GEM Fellowships for his Master’s degree from Georgia Tech and his PhD degree from the University of Michigan. Both awards were helpful in enabling Dr. Taylor to purse his advanced work in energy and materials design.

Specifically, his research group, the Transformative Materials and Devices Laboratory, develops innovative architectures for energy applications. Dr. Taylor realized that solar cells have great potential as a source of clean electrical energy, but they are not cheap, light, and flexible enough for widespread use. Dr. Taylor’s and his research team at NYU have now found an innovative and promising way to improve solar cells and make their use in many applications more likely.

Most organic solar cells use fullerenes, spherical molecules of carbon. The problem, explains Taylor, is that fullerenes are expensive and don’t absorb enough light. Over the last 10 years he has made significant progress in improving organic solar cells, and he has recently focused on using non-fullerenes, which until now have been inefficient. However, he says, “the non-fullerenes are improving enough to give fullerenes a run for their money.”

Think of a solar cell as a sandwich, Taylor says. The “meat” or active layer — made of electron donors and acceptors — is in the middle, absorbing sunlight and transforming it into electricity (electrons and holes), while the “bread,” or outside layers, consist of electrodes that transport that electricity. His team’s goal was to have the cell absorb light across as large a spectrum as possible using a variety of materials, yet at the same time allow these materials to work together well. “My group works on key parts of the ‘sandwich,’ such as the electron and hole transporting layers of the ‘bread,’ while other groups may work only on the ‘meat’ or interlayer materials. The question is: How do you get them to play together? The right blend of these disparate materials is extremely difficult to achieve.”

Using a squaraine molecule in a new way — as a crystallizing agent — did the trick. “We added a small molecule that functions as an electron donor by itself and enhances the absorption of the active layer,” Taylor explains. “By adding this small molecule, it facilitates the orientation of the donor-acceptor polymer (called PBDB-T) with the non-fullerene acceptor, ITIC, in a favorable arrangement.” This solar architecture also uses another design mechanism that the Taylor group pioneered known as a FRET-based solar cell. FRET, or Förster resonance energy transfer, is an energy transfer mechanism fi rst observed in photosynthesis, by which plants use sunlight. Using a new polymer and non-fullerene blend with squaraine, the team converted more than 10 percent of solar energy into power. Just a few years ago this was considered too lofty a goal for single-junction polymer solar cells. “There are now newer polymer non-fullerene systems that can perform above 13 percent, so we view our contribution as a viable strategy for improving these systems,” Taylor says.

The organic solar cells developed by his team are flexible and could one day be used in applications supporting electric vehicles, wearable electronics, or backpacks to charge cell phones. Eventually, they could contribute significantly to the supply of electric power.

About GEM

The National GEM Consortium provides full-tuition scholarships to exceptional scholars from underrepresented groups, who are pursuing their Masters and PhDs in STEM-related disciplines. GEM also provides its Fellows with paid internships and full-time positions upon graduation with the organizations within its consortium, e.g., IBM, SAP, Intel, Adobe, Amazon, MIT-Lincoln Labs, Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, Aerospace, etc. The GEM’s alumni include myriad leaders in academia and the executive ranks, such as former Xerox CEO Ursula Burns, two of the four female engineering school deans, chaired MIT professor Christine Ortiz, former Booz Allen EVP Reginald Van Lee, and NASA senior scientist Powtawche Williams Valerino.

 

 

Organometallic perovskite absorber layers are regarded as a particularly exciting new material class for solar cells — in just ten years, their efficiency has increased from three per cent to over twenty per cent, an amazing success story. Now a team headed by Prof. Dr. Dieter Neher at the University of Potsdam and Dr. Thomas Unold at HZB has succeeded in identifying the decisive loss processes in perovskite solar cells that limit the efficiency.

At certain defects in the crystal lattice of the perovskite layer, charge carriers (i.e. electrons and “holes”) that have just been released by sunlight can recombine again and thus be lost. But whether these defects were preferentially located within the perovskite layer, or instead at the interface between the perovskite layer and the transport layer was unclear until now.

To determine this, the scientists employed photoluminescence techniques with high precision, spatial and temporal resolution. Using laser light, they excited the square-centimetre-sized perovskite layer and detected where and when the material emitted light in response to the excitation. “This measurement method at our lab is so precise, we can determine the exact number of photons that have been emitted,” explains Unold. And not only that, the energy of the emitted photons was precisely recorded and analyzed as well using a hyperspectral CCD camera.

“In this way, we were able to calculate the losses at every point of the cell and thereby determine that the most harmful defects are located at the interfaces between the perovskite absorber layer and the chargetransport layers,” reports Unold. This is important information for further improving perovskite solar cells, for instance by means of intermediate layers that have a positive effect or through modified fabrication methods.

With the help of these findings, the group led by Prof. Dr. Dieter Neher and Dr. Martin Stolterfoht at the University of Potsdam has succeeded in reducing interfacial recombination and thus increasing the efficiency of 1cm2sized perovskite solar cells to well over 20 {0b7da518931e2dc7f5435818fa9adcc81ac764ac1dff918ce2cdfc05099e9974}.

Story Source:

Materials provided by Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin für Materialien und Energie. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

McCarthy Building Companies has begun construction on the 53-MW Millington Solar Farm project in Millington, Tennessee, which represents a public-private partnership between Nashville-based renewable energy provider Silicon Ranch Corporation, the U.S. Navy, Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), Memphis Light, Gas and Water (MLGW) and the Millington Industrial Development Board (MIDB).

The 402-acre utility-scale solar energy plant will host 580,000 solar panels and represents the largest solar energy project in Tennessee. Construction is scheduled to complete at the end of 2018, at which time the facility is expected to generate enough power for 7,500 homes.

Silicon Ranch Corporation, one of the nation’s largest independent solar power producers, selected McCarthy’s Renewable Energy team as the Engineer-Procure-Construct (EPC) contractor. McCarthy is responsible for the design, procurement, construction, and commissioning of the facility. Developer Silicon Ranch is funding the installation and will own and operate the array for the long-term.

McCarthy is seeking to hire local subcontractors and craftsmen to provide the bulk of on-site work for the construction project in Millington, just as it has done for all other Silicon Ranch facilities it has built. The solar facility’s construction is expected to support more than 300 jobs, and McCarthy will provide local workers seeking utility-scale solar construction experience with on-site training in pile driving, tracker assembly, and panel installation. Area residents interested in working on the project should visit www.McCarthy.com/careers/search, and enter “solar” to find job postings for Millington, TN positions, which include laborer, operator, apprentice electrician and journeyman electrician.

Silicon Ranch Chief Technology Officer Pete Candelaria said, “At Silicon Ranch we take a long-term view of our relationships and responsibilities in the communities we serve, and we are committed to using local service providers and hiring from the local labor pool as much as possible. We are proud to work with McCarthy to execute this vision, and we thank our partners at the U.S. Navy, TVA, MLGW, and the MIDB for making this project possible.”

“TVA cares about Shelby County and this project will bring jobs that will allow us to deliver reliable, low-cost, carbon-free electricity to the 9 million people of the Tennessee Valley,” said Jay Stowe, senior vice president of Distributed Energy Resources for TVA. “Over the next 20 years TVA will invest about $8 billion to support our renewable energy portfolio to help our customers meet their carbon reduction goals.”

As part of the public-private partnership, the U.S. Navy provided a long-term lease of 72 acres of base land at the Naval Support Activity (NSA) Mid-South to accommodate part of the array, while the remainder of the land was purchased from the Millington Industrial Development Board.

“Our Renewable Energy team has been working closely with our Southeast operations and we’ve recently completed or are currently constructing more than 12 solar projects throughout the region, which includes Tennessee, Arkansas, Virginia and Georgia,” said Scott Canada, senior vice president of the Renewable Energy team at McCarthy. “Solar owners like Silicon Ranch understand the value of this infrastructure to local communities, which will provide clean energy for decades to come.”

News item from McCarthy