Showing posts with label first. Show all posts
Showing posts with label first. Show all posts

Saturday, July 9, 2011

First solar park due to power up

8 July 2011 Last updated at 06:46 GMT By Iolo ap Dafydd BBC Wales environment correspondent Dr Glen Peters, who owns the land and the nearby county mansion and art centre, has funded the project

The first solar park in Wales is expected to start converting sunlight into electricity later at the Rhosygilwen estate in Pembrokeshire.

Almost 10,000 solar panels have been imported from the United States and are placed in 12 lines in a six-acre field.

The ?2.5m investment will be onstream three weeks before the UK government lowers the subsidy for large-scale solar energy investors.

The site's owner Western Solar still hopes to double its size.

It is run by Dr Glen Peters who owns Rhosygilwen mansion and art centre with his family.

He said: "There are 10,000 panels here. They are very cutting edge from the States.

"They are thin film, particularly suited to our climate here of largely cloudy skies."

He has planning consent for a development twice the size but had to rethink his plans.

"There was no bank financing available. I then had to take a total act of faith and said 'okay, we will halve the scheme, we will do one megawatt initially' and I basically raided my pension fund."

The development would be enough to power 300 homes.

Other applications for three and five megawatt solar parks at Cynheidre and Ffos Las in west Wales are said to be still in planning.

But while Rhosygilwen has beaten the government's closing of a lucrative loophole, developers like Nigel Payne of Allied Renewables in Swansea are setting their sights lower.

His company hopes to complete three 50 kilowatt solar parks, half the size of Rhosygilwen, by September.

Expansion concern

Another 10 are in the planning stage and, by reducing the size of the output, will still be able to generate a return of 30.7p per kilowatt hour.

"It spreads the feed-in tariff to what it was designed for - not supporting large-scale solar farms where subsidies would be absolutely gobbled up," he said.

The Department of Energy and Climate Change has said from 1 August tariffs would be reduced for large solar panel investors.

Any large-scale solar farms above 250 kilowatts, and up to 5 megawatts, will be able to claim 8.5p per kilowatt hour.

Schemes between 150 kilowatts and 250 kilowatts will be able to claim 15p per kilowatt hour and schemes ranging from 50 kilowatts to 150 kilowatts 19p per kilowatt hour.

Solar installations below 50 kilowatts are unchanged.

The average household installation, less than 4 kilowatts, will still be claiming the highest bracket of 43.3p per kilowatt hour.

With the solar industry increasing over the past 12 months from generating 4 megawatt of power in Britain to 96 megawatts, Dr Owen Guy, Swansea University's senior lecturer in nano technology, said there were some concerns that expansion could slow down.

"It's still available for the small-scale projects. Individuals will be able to install four kilowatt systems on their homes and will still be able to get a good return on their investment," he said.

"But the large scale companies wont be able to make the profit they have been."


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Wednesday, June 29, 2011

Pope Benedict sends first tweet

29 June 2011 Last updated at 09:50 GMT Pope Benedict launches the Vatican's new news and information portal, 28 June The Vatican has suffered from poor communications Pope Benedict XVI has sent his first tweet to launch a Vatican news and information portal on the 60th anniversary of his ordination.

His message read: "Dear Friends, I just launched News.va Praised be our Lord Jesus Christ! With my prayers and blessings, Benedictus XVI."

The Pope, 84, tapped an iPad to activate the portal and send the tweet.

Twitter, Facebook and YouTube are all now being used by the Vatican to spread its Christian message.

Its Twitter account has more than 33,000 followers but "follows" nobody.

Images released by the Vatican showed the Roman Catholic leader seated at a table with officials standing by to help him use the tablet computer.

'News.va, The Vatican Today'

The launch took place on Tuesday GMT but was aimed to coincide with the feast day of St Peter and Paul on Wednesday, which is also the anniversary of Pope Benedict taking Holy Orders.

Pope's first tweet The tweet went out on Tuesday GMT

An article on the ordination led Wednesday's News.va news page, recalling how Joseph Ratzinger, then 24, was ordained on a "radiant summer day" along with 42 other young men.

Under a logo which reads "News.va, The Vatican Today", the new portal offers "an exclusive, multimedia presentation of all the other communications websites of the Holy See", including Vatican Radio, the newspaper l'Osservatore Romano and the Misna missionary news agency.

Pope Benedict's six-year papacy has been bedevilled by poor communications.

Embarrassing clarifications had to be issued over such thorny issues as his 2005 speech about Islam and violence, and his stance on condoms and HIV.

Earlier this month, the Vatican announced plans to set up a new e-learning centre to help safeguard children and victims of sexual abuse by clergy, as part of its efforts to deal with damaging scandals.

Last month the Pope issued new orders to bishops, making clear that any suspected abuse by priests must always be reported to police.

Reacting to the first papal tweet, some Twitter users joked about the iPad, asking if the Pope had a sponsorship deal.

A tweet from another user, Shanna Quinn in Chicago, read: "The pope is on twitter...this probably means my mom will be on twitter very soon."


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Saturday, June 18, 2011

First Chromebook on sale in US

16 June 2011 Last updated at 12:19 GMT Click's Spencer Kelly explains the features of Google's Chrome OS

The first laptop running Google's Chrome operating system has gone on sale in the United States.

The Samsung machine replaces installed software with browser-based apps which store files online.

Google claims that the technology enables a new way of computing, removing the need for features such as anti-virus software or optical drives.

However, many applications available for Windows, Mac and Linux do not yet exist for Chrome.

The Chromebook is available in WiFi only and WiFi and 3G models for $429 (?266) and $499 (?310) respectively.

It is expected to sell for between ?349 and ?399 when launched in the UK in August.

Samsung Chrome laptop Samsung's laptop is the first Chrome powered PC to be released onto the market

A second Chromebook, made by Acer is due to start shipping soon.

Sundar Pichai, senior vice president for Chrome, said at the launch last month: "Most people spend all their time on the web, and for the first time we have distilled the entire computing experience to be about nothing but the web.

"End-to-end, I think your computing experience will be far simpler, safer and faster."

Some early reviews of Google's Chrome OS have criticised the system for its poor usability when offline.

Ruper Goodwins from ZDNet said: "For all the things that are on the web browser, this works really well - better than anything else. But for all the stuff you do on the desktop, it doesn't do very well at all.

"The idea that this doesn't matter - that you're always connected and always online - isn't quite true yet. The idea is very good but it's a little premature."


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Wednesday, June 15, 2011

Single cell is first living laser

13 June 2011 Last updated at 00:42 GMT By Jason Palmer Science and technology reporter, BBC News Cell emitting laser light (M Gather) The single-cell lasers were less than 20 millionths of a metre across A single living cell has been coaxed into producing laser light, researchers report in Nature Photonics.

The technique starts by engineering a cell that can produce a light-emitting protein that was first obtained from glowing jellyfish.

Flooding the resulting cells with weak blue light causes them to emit directed, green laser light.

The work may have applications in improved microscope imaging and light-based therapies.

Laser light differs from normal light in that it is of a narrow band of colours, with the light waves all oscillating together in synchrony.

Most modern forms use carefully engineered solid materials to produce lasers in everything from supermarket scanners to DVD players to industrial robots.

The new work, by Malte Gather and Seok Hyun Yun at the Wellman Center for Photomedicine at Massachusetts General Hospital in the US, marks the first time the phenomenon has been seen in a living system.

The pair used green fluorescent protein (GFP) as the laser's "gain medium", where light amplification takes place.

GFP is a well-studied molecule, first isolated from jellyfish, that has revolutionised biology by acting as a custom-made "torch" that can light up living systems on command.

In the new work, cells derived from human kidney cells were genetically engineered to produce GFP.

Bathed in light

The cells were then placed one at a time between two tiny mirrors, just 20 millionths of a metre across, which acted as the "laser cavity" in which light could bounce many times through the cell.

Upon bathing the cell with blue light, it could be seen to emit directed and intense green laser light.

The cells remained alive throughout and after the process. The authors note in an accompanying interview in the journal that the living system is a "self-healing" laser; if the light-emitting proteins are destroyed in the process, the cell will simply produce more.

"In cellular sensing, we may be able to detect intracellular processes with unprecedented sensitivity," they said.

"For light-based therapeutics, diagnosis and imaging, people think about how to deliver emission from an external laser source deep into tissue. Now we can approach this problem in another way: by amplifying light in the tissue (itself)."


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