The first comprehensive life‐cycle assessment (LCA) for soybean biodiesel produced in the U.S. was completed by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) in 1998, and the energy inventory for this analysis was updated in 2009 using 2002 data. The continual adoption of new technologies in farming, soybean processing, and for biodiesel conversion affects the life‐cycle energy use over time,...

Submitted for the MAR10 Meeting of The American Physical Society Photoluminescence Microscopy of Defects in Ordered GaInP2 ANGELO MASCARENHAS, BRIAN FLUEGEL, NREL — The ternary semiconductor alloy GaInP2 plays a very prominent role in High-Efficiency Multijunction Solar Cells as well as in Solid-State Lighting. The size-mismatch induced strain between the binary components leads to interesting ...

Power quality testing is important to wind power applications for several reasons. The nature of wind turbine generation is different from conventional power plants. Although windfarms are growing in capacity and diversifying in nature in the U.S. and throughout the globe, there is no standard that addresses the power quality of wind turbines or wind farms. The International Electrotechnical Co...

Potential Induced Degradation (PID) is an undesirable property of some solar modules. The factors that enable PID (voltage, heat and humidity) exist on all photovoltaic (PV) systems, but the effect does not occur on all or even most PV systems. According to Dr. Peter Hacke of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), “All c-Si [crystalline silicon] modules have elements of reversible and...

The work presented in this article aims to the calculation of the aerodynamic characteristics of the NREL phase II rotor that is a horizontal axis downwind wind turbine rotor and which is assumed to stand isolated in the space. The Reynolds averaged Navier-Stokes equations combined with the Spalart-Allmaras turbulence model that describes the three dimensional steady state flow about the wind t...

The National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) has been studying the performance of small grid-tied systems since 1992. These 1 to 2 kW systems are designed to ac conduct in-situ technical evaluations of the PV arrays in a high voltage configuration. This paper will concentrate on the performance and reliability of four amorphous silicon systems currently being tested in Golden, Colorado. The ...

Triple-junction a-Si/a-SiGe/a-SiGe solar cells are fabricated in our laboratory using a multi-chamber, loadlocked PECVD system. By improving intrinsic layers, doped layers and using bandgap graded buffer layers for aSiGe component cells, we improved our triple-cell performance and achieved a 12.71% initial efficiency and a 10.7% stable efficiency after 1000 hours of 1-sun light soaking. Samples...