Let us rejoice as India cements the beginning of a (hopefully) long relationship with solar with plans for its first polysilicon solar project, its largest solar thermal plant and the world’s largest solar farm. Not bad for a country just recently getting into the game—and perhaps expected, for a country with a potential generation capacity [...]

Since I’m always going on about solar thermal in China, it’s about time I sound off on the experience of using the technology. This is hardly a difficult task, as both my host family in Beijing and my uncle in Fuzhou, a massive seaside city in China’s southern Fujian province, are staunch supporters of solar [...]

Lately, the air quality in Beijing has been astonishingly pleasant. For the past three weeks, when the skies haven’t been a sunny cerulean, they’ve been a rainy shade of gray, more cool than the usual muggy. Even when I was in the neighboring countryside two weekends ago, the difference between the rural and urban air [...]

Having just returned from the countryside, I already miss its bitingly cold, naturally clean water, its lush vegetation, its air free from the brown dust that characterizes Beijing. To be fair, Beijing hasn’t been so terrible lately—the past several days have been a striking blue—although every time a car passes by me on the street [...]

Living in Beijing right now has made me rather ambivalent toward China’s environmental policies. It doesn’t come as a surprise to anyone that the PRC isn’t the poster country for eco-consciousness. Almost everybody drinks their water either boiled or from a bottle, and a blue sky day in Shanghai or Beijing is a rare day [...]

China may not have as advanced a solar program as Germany (although, as Eric’s noted, Germany’s solar subsidies recently underwent a drastic slash) or Spain do, but a few pockets of land both to the north and to the south have become shining beacons of light for the rest of the country.
Take Jiangsu province, for [...]

Last week, I had the fortune to tour a production site of Beijing Tsinghua Solar Co., Ltd., one of China’s biggest manufacturers of solar hot water systems. While the facility itself lies in the brownish, dusty outskirts of Beijing, where the grass grows sparsely and the sky remains a stubborn gray from sunup until sundown, [...]

With so much news coming out about cleantech and renewable energy, climate change, politics and the price of oil, it’s easy to get overwhelmed by “the big picture.” This can be either a depressing or inspiring experience, depending on your general outlook. We here at Getsolar lean towards optimism, and we all share a belief [...]

<a href=”http://news.com.com/Shrinking+the+cost+for+solar+power/2100-11392_3-6182947.html“>Solar Thermal</a> has yet to be given the kind of sexy market makeover that other renewables, like photovoltaics, have received. And why?
Solar thermal is not only the best proven solar technology to date, but also provides the quickest return on investment.
The problem for solar thermal is that it is basically harder to make a [...]