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 [...]

This may be idle speculation, but it’s very exciting and very cool idle speculation. Looks like a rumor of a solar Toyota Prius is picking up some momentum.
I’ll agree with the author of the article on the basics. This isn’t necessarily a large technical innovation - the basic technology to do this is already [...]

After eating Toyota’s hybrid dust for years, GM is scraping together a pretty respectable portfolio to prove its commitment to alternate engine technologies and sustainability. The all-electric Chevy Volt is one item in the portfolio (making its maiden car show appearance, so rumors have it, this coming fall), but the real attention-getter is a 12 [...]

Last week, I sketched a simple picture of the costs involved in installing a 3-kW system in San Francisco. This week, as promised, I’m taking a look at three different financing options. Here we go.
(1) Buy. Obviously, this is the most straightforward option. If you’ve got a enough cash to cover the upfront costs, which [...]

When you’re talking about research into solar power, the sources for scientific investigation can be extremely diverse, as money is flowing in from private industry, governments, and even academia. And the benefits should be seen for years to come.
Stanford University just announced that some of its researchers received $25 million for solar research from a [...]

You may or may not have heard about the market implosion for New Jersey solar installations that occurred earlier this year. The state offers these amazing incentives to individuals, small businesses and corporations to install photovoltaics systems. For individuals, whose private systems pretty much always fall into the state’s first incentive bracket of less than [...]

Following up on Margaret’s post, I’m still holding to my cautious optimism that worries over the solar bill are over-stated; there’s still a lot of time left for this measure to pass, especially when legislators realize the huge damage of letting the bill lapse. Southwestern and Western Senators, at a minimum, are not going to [...]

你好 (ni hao) from Beijing, home to the eponymous duck dish, a treasure trove of cultural sites and relics, and a blanket of smog that would put Los Angeles to shame! Week two of my stay in the “Middle Kingdom” has almost passed, and already I have been surprised by: 1) how many people can [...]