Volume 1, Issue 3-4

If two people meet each other and discuss the matter of certification in the field of sustainable biomass they can use the same words and mean different things. A better understanding what in Europe with the term sustainable biomass is defined, is the aim of this article.

The achievement in the last two decades of controlled fusion in the laboratory environment is opening the way to the realization of fusion as a source of sustainable, safe and environmentally responsible energy. The next step towards this goal is the construction of the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER), which aims to demonstrate net fusion energy production on the reactor scale. This paper reviews the current status of magnetic confinement fusion research in view of the ITER project and provides an overview of the main remaining challenges on the way towards the realization of commercial fusion energy production in the second half of this century.

Solar power from deserts can contribute significantly to a future renewable energy system. The technically accessible solar potential in deserts exceeds the global energy demand by a factor of 20. In the DESERTEC concept, a smart super grid based on HVDC technology interconnects wind, solar and other renewable energy sources with distant consumers on a scale of several thousand kilometres. The large grid averages out the natural fluctuations of renewable energy sources to a large extend. Remaining fluctuations have to be compensated by storage systems. Two competing technologies, CSP and PV, are available for large-scale solar power production in desert countries. CSP technology can be combined with thermal energy storage and water desalination. A large-scale production of solar energy in desert countries has important socio-economic implications. The interconnection of continents by large power grids introduces new economical interdependencies, which can help to reduce the North-South gradient of economic wealth.

Since 2000, total PV production increased almost by two orders of magnitude, with a compound annual growth rate of over 55%. The most rapid growth in annual cell and module production over the last five years could be observed in Asia, where China and Taiwan together now account for more than 60% of world-wide production. Prices for photovoltaic electricity generation systems have more than halved over the last five years making the technology affordable to an ever increasing number of customers worldwide. The photovoltaic industry is in a process to mature and in this course increasing industry consolidation takes place. This process presents a risk as well as an opportunity at the same time, opening more and more markets. Various installation scenarios published during the last three years vary significantly depicting photovoltaic electricity generation from insignificant to a major energy source. With worldwide 50 GW cumulative installed photovoltaic electricity generation capacity installed in September 2011, photovoltaics still is a small contributor to the electricity supply, but its importance for our future energy mix is finally acknowledged.

The current state of the art solution processed organic photovoltaic (OPV) cells are based on the bulk heterojunction (BHJ) architecture, consisting of an active layer, in which the donor and the acceptor material are dissolved in a common solvent. In this report, we show that by sequential processing of the active components and by subsequent annealing a “pseudo-bilayer” can be formed which results in an enhanced nanomorphology for efficient charge generation and extraction. The enhanced nanomorphology arises from the inter-diffusion of the PCBM nanoparticles into a layer of pre-organised polymer P3HT instead of a phase separation that happens at the time of spin-coating and annealing in the case of conventional BHJ devices. To get a further insight into the inter-diffusion process, TOF-SIMS depth profiling and XPS measurements were carried out for different thermal annealing treatments of these pseudo-bilayer devices, which show full inter-diffusion after only seconds of annealing at 140°C. The optimised photovoltaic devices that were fabricated showed an efficiency of 4.1%.