The financial market’s turbulent week is certainly going to have an impact upon the energy sector, and we will get to that soon. Right now the main line of journalists and financial analysts are focusing on the extent and nature of the troubles with a focus on New York financial circles, but the shock waves [...]

Normally I like to write about the latest in the world of solar technology, and I’ll stick to that by pointing you towards this fascinating Economist article about the possibility of a solar cell that makes use of infared light, as opposed to the good old-fashioned visible light spectrum. Way, way too early to tell [...]

Having just returned from watching several events at the Beijing Olympics, I feel that this is a good a time as ever to post some pictures of the Olympic venues I’ve visited. As 80 to 90 percent of the streetlights around the Olympic venues are solar, and solar power provides around 8 million kilowatt-hours of [...]

Ikea announced today that they are investing tens of millions of dollars to research and development of solar panels and other energy efficiency measures. To put this outlay in comparison, the Department of Energy is putting down $24 million for grid integration improvements.
If, as the article speculates, Ikea is selling solar panels in-store in [...]

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 [...]

A couple of weeks ago, we discussed a hypothetical case study: the payback period of a 3.7-kW PV system for a PG&E customer in California. One of our readers pointed out that our analysis relied, perhaps too heavily, on a couple of overly optimistic averages, namely that California-based customers could count on 8.2 hours of [...]

The wizards at MIT have come up with yet another project that is nifty, cool, and eminently practical, with the invention of a simple, homemade $17 solar cooker designed for use in rural areas. The only materials are Mylar coating, yak wool, and bamboo ribs. In many countries across the world people cook with materials [...]

Researchers are finding a lot of promise in a technology that uses glass coated with dye to generate solar power. A pane of glass is coated with a special dye, which shunts sunlight to photovoltaic cells in the frame. Very cool.
The best news about this, though, isn’t just that it’s cool, but that this [...]

There’s no more silicon shortage. Plenty of governments (even if our own is an exception currently) are heavily funding solar R&D. So why, in the year 2008, is solar still not cost-competitive with traditional energy sources? This question has riddled a major solar convention, held for the first time in North America this year and [...]

The past couple weeks, I’ve looked at various options for financing the purchase of a PV system. This week, we’re gonna dig a little bit deeper into the numbers. (Bear with me. I’ll try to make this as clear and as un-boring as possible…).
Bottom line: before buying a system, you’ll want to know what kind [...]