David R. Mills (born 1946) is a researcher who has been active in solar energy research in Australia since 1975, working at the University of Sydney as a Principal Research Fellow till 2005.
Mills specializes in solar thermal electricity development, which he believes is one cornerstone of the future sustainable energy economy. His work is predominately in the field of solar spectrum selective materials and non-imaging optics. The prime focus of his research is planning 24-hour solar plants to eliminate coal use. [1]
In 2002 Mills became chairman of Solar Heat and Power, an Australian company he co-founded with Professor Graham Morrison (UNSW) and Peter Le Lievre. Solar Heat and Power went on to develop innovative CLFR type line focus solar thermal power systems in Australia, Europe, and North America.
Mills is a former president of the International Solar Energy Society, and was the first Chair of the International Solar Cities Initiative. [2]
He is currently chief scientific officer and co-founder at Ausra Inc. [3]
Energy storage is the capture of energy produced at one time for use at a later time to reduce imbalances between energy demand and energy production. A device that stores energy is generally called an accumulator or battery. Energy comes in multiple forms including radiation, chemical, gravitational potential, electrical potential, electricity, elevated temperature, latent heat and kinetic. Energy storage involves converting energy from forms that are difficult to store to more conveniently or economically storable forms.
Renewable energy is energy that is collected from renewable resources that are naturally replenished on a human timescale. It includes sources such as sunlight, wind, rain, tides, waves, and geothermal heat. Renewable energy stands in contrast to fossil fuels, which are being used far more quickly than they are being replenished. Although most renewable energy sources are sustainable, some are not. For example, some biomass sources are considered unsustainable at current rates of exploitation.
Solar energy is radiant light and heat from the Sun that is harnessed using a range of technologies such as solar power to generate electricity, solar thermal energy including solar water heating, and solar architecture.
Gemasolar is a concentrated solar power plant with a molten salt heat storage system. It is located within the city limits of Fuentes de Andalucía in the province of Seville, Spain.
Renewable heat is an application of renewable energy referring to the generation of heat from renewable sources; for example, feeding radiators with water warmed by focused solar radiation rather than by a fossil fuel boiler. Renewable heat technologies include renewable biofuels, solar heating, geothermal heating, heat pumps and heat exchangers. Insulation is almost always an important factor in how renewable heating is implemented.
A virtual power plant (VPP) is a cloud-based distributed power plant that aggregates the capacities of heterogeneous distributed energy resources (DER) for the purposes of enhancing power generation, as well as trading or selling power on the electricity market. Examples of virtual power plants exist in the United States, Europe, and Australia.
Solar air conditioning refers to any air conditioning (cooling) system that uses solar power.
There are several solar power plants in the Mojave Desert which supply power to the electricity grid. Insolation in the Mojave Desert is among the best available in the United States, and some significant population centers are located in the area. These plants can generally be built in a few years because solar plants are built almost entirely with modular, readily available materials. Solar Energy Generating Systems (SEGS) is the name given to nine solar power plants in the Mojave Desert which were built in the 1980s, the first commercial solar plant. These plants have a combined capacity of 354 megawatts (MW) which made them the largest solar power installation in the world, until Ivanpah Solar Power Facility was finished in 2014.
Renewable energy in Australia includes wind power, hydroelectricity, solar PV, heat pumps, geothermal, wave and solar thermal energy.
Solar power is the conversion of renewable energy from sunlight into electricity, either directly using photovoltaics (PV), indirectly using concentrated solar power, or a combination. Concentrated solar power systems use lenses or mirrors and solar tracking systems to focus a large area of sunlight into a small beam. Photovoltaic cells convert light into an electric current using the photovoltaic effect.
Sopogy was a solar thermal technology supplier founded in 2002 at the Honolulu, Hawaii-based clean technology incubator known as Energy Laboratories. The company began its research on concentrating solar thermal energy to produce solar steam and thermal heat for absorption chillers or industrial process heat. The company has also developed applications that incorporate its solar collectors to generate electricity and desalination. Sopogy's name origin comes from industry key words "So" from solar "po" from power and "gy" from energy and technology. The company has its OEM and IPP sales teams along with research and development located in Honolulu, and in 2006 expanded its manufacturing, C&I and oil and gas sales teams in its Silicon Valley facility. Pacific Business News and Greentech Media reported that the VC-funded micro-concentrator solar power firm was shutting down operations based on statements from its President David Fernandez, however Hitachi Power Systems acquired Sopogy in a private transaction in 2014.
A solar power tower, also known as 'central tower' power plant or 'heliostat' power plant, is a type of solar furnace using a tower to receive focused sunlight. It uses an array of flat, movable mirrors to focus the sun's rays upon a collector tower. Concentrated solar thermal is seen as one viable solution for renewable, pollution-free energy.
eSolar is a privately held company that develops concentrating solar power (CSP) plant technology. The company was founded by the Pasadena-based business incubator Idealab in 2007 as a developer of CSP plant technology. The company aims to develop a low cost alternative to fossil fuels through a combination of small heliostats, modular architecture, and a high-precision sun-tracking system. In October 2017, an article in GreenTech Media suggested that eSolar ceased business in late 2016.
The use of solar energy began in Israel in the 1950s with the development by Levi Yissar of a solar water heater to address the energy shortages that plagued the new country. By 1967 around 5% of water of households were solar heated and 50,000 solar heaters had been sold. With the 1970s oil crisis, Harry Zvi Tabor developed the prototype of the solar water heater now used in over 90% of Israeli homes. There are over 1.3 million solar water heaters installed as a result of mandatory solar water heating regulations.
A compact linear Fresnel reflector (CLFR) – also referred to as a concentrating linear Fresnel reflector – is a specific type of linear Fresnel reflector (LFR) technology. They are named for their similarity to a Fresnel lens, in which many small, thin lens fragments are combined to simulate a much thicker simple lens. These mirrors are capable of concentrating the sun's energy to approximately 30 times its normal intensity.
Areva Solar was part of the renewable energies portfolio of the French nuclear group Areva, headquartered in Mountain View, California, with offices in the United States and Australia. It designed, manufactured and installed solar steam generators for electric power production and industrial steam uses. Before 2010, the company existed as Ausra Inc. In August 2014, AREVA announced it was shuttering AREVA Solar.
Variable renewable energy (VRE) or intermittent renewable energy sources (IRES) are renewable energy sources that are not dispatchable due to their fluctuating nature, such as wind power and solar power, as opposed to controllable renewable energy sources, such as dammed hydroelectricity or biomass, or relatively constant sources, such as geothermal power.
Solar energy – radiant light and heat from the sun. It has been harnessed by humans since ancient times using a range of ever-evolving technologies. Solar energy technologies include solar heating, solar photovoltaics, solar thermal electricity and solar architecture, which can make considerable contributions to solving some of the most urgent problems that the world now faces.
The Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems ISE is an institute of the Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft. Located in Freiburg, Germany, The Institute performs applied scientific and engineering research and development for all areas of solar energy. Fraunhofer ISE has three external branches in Germany which carry out work on solar cell and semiconductor material development: the Laboratory and Service Center (LSC) in Gelsenkirchen, the Technology Center of Semiconductor Materials (THM) in Freiberg, and the Fraunhofer Center for Silicon Photovoltaics (CSP) in Halle. Since 2006, Prof. Dr. Eicke R. Weber is the director of Fraunhofer ISE. With over 1,100 employees, Fraunhofer ISE is the largest institute for applied solar energy research in Europe. The 2012 Operational Budget including investments is 74.3 million euro.
Renewable energy in Mexico contributes to 26 percent of electricity generation in Mexico. As of 2009, electricity generation from renewable energy comes from hydro power, geothermal, solar power and wind. There is a long term effort established to increase the use of renewable energy sources. The amount of geothermal energy used and harvested, places Mexico as number four in the world.
