Not too much news in residential or commercial solar technology this week, so this seems like a wonderful opportunity to share that the Guinness world record for distance traveled in a solar car looks vulnerable after an Ontario man rode the famed Dempster Highway all the way up to the Arctic Circle, using nothing more [...]

Is solar right for you? The first of two posts that will help you answer this question.

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 [...]

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 [...]

California signs a new law into action that makes it possible for local governments to offer low interest loans for residential solar installations.

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 [...]

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 could [...]

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 [...]