photovoltaics

Nanosolar just put into production the solar industries first 1GW thin-film photovoltaic production tool. The tool shown in the video above is printing thin-film solar panels at 100 feet-per-minute and is capable (in theory) of ramping up to over 2,000 feet-per-minute.

They have been in business for over 30 years, their product SolarWall (the "transpired solar collector") is in use on buildings for the US Military, Wal-Mart, Fed Ex, Bombardier, Ford, GM, etc, they have won multiple awards and has been praised by the United States Department of Energy as "[in the] top two percent of energy related inventions." - why don't they get more coverage?!? Watch the flash presentation and tell me this isn't a serious and practical solution to help mitigate GHG gases and climate change...

southwest looks like Saudi Ariabia of solar power

A post about Southern California Edison's massive investment in solar photovoltaics on commercial rooftops, a much better way to meet California's renewable portfolio standard than SDG&E's Sunrise Powerlink.

Right in the center of Alicante (Spain) and on the tile roof of this parking, I ran into with this spectacular photovoltaic power station of near a hundred of kW...

Margot Gerritsen visits the Palo Alto Research Center again to have a look at the new concentrated solar PV system designed at PARC with Solfocus, a start-up incubated at PARC. It's a clever device that is designed to reduce the amount of silicon needed in PV systems per Watt produced.

Margot Gerritsen, Faculty Member, Department of Energy Resources Engineering, Stanford University,  interviews Scott Elrod, Manager of the Hardware SystemsGroup, Palo Alto Research Center (PARC); about the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center's ventures into the clean technology area. Recently, PARC worked together with the start-up SolFocus on the development of a new type of solar PV system, which is as effective as existing solar PV technology but requires a muchsmaller volume of silicon per unit area.

The third Solar Decathlon attracts 20 universities to erect solar homes on the National Mall in Washington to compete and showcase innovativetechnologies.

Their onsite monitoring systems will collect the relevant performance, usage and fault data about your solar energy systems. The data is automatically communicated over the Internet. See the energy uses of actuall homes here as an example.

This is a cool interactive map of solar panel installation sites in California and Colorado. Click on the dots to zoom in.