solar

New solar cells can be printed right onto buildings

The world's largest dye-sensitized solar cell has just made an appearance. These cells have a couple of major advantages over traditional solar cells: one, they're incredibly cheap, and two, they can be printed right onto the materials used to make a building. Right now they’re being incorporated into girders manufactured by Tata steel.

Solar-powered laptop lets you play outside while you work

What's the best way to piss off a computer scientist? Buy her a laptop that only works when it gets enough sun. It's the perfect gag gift for the basement-dwelling, vitamin D-deprived coder in your life.

1 million Bangladeshis use solar as sole source of electricity

It's the fastest expansion of solar power ever, says the government of Bangladesh: From 7,000 households in 2002 to 1 million in 2011. Ninety million of Bangladesh's 150 million people have no access to electricity at all, so access to small-scale solar is transformative for this population.

New map of NYC shows how much you could save with solar

Solar power in New York could meet half of the city's peak energy demands. The city's been fully assessed for solar capability, using a plane-mounted radar system called Lidar that checks out whether rooftops are suitable for solar panels. Turns out a full 66 percent of them are, and the city and its inhabitants could be saving a buttload of money and energy by making use of that fact. If New York could harness all its rooftop potential, it would triple the amount of solar energy currently installed nationwide.

German rooftop solar price *averages* less than $4 per watt

This post originally appeared on Energy Self-Reliant States, a resource of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance’s New Rules Project. Earlier this spring I shared a graphic illustrating the dramatic fall in distributed solar PV prices in Germany, down to $4.11 per Watt installed, for rooftop systems under 100 kilowatts.  As it turns out, the graphic was […]

How we’ll get ultra-efficient solar cells by copying plants' 'quantum biology'

Some day solar cells will be as cheap as house paint, and the renewables vs. fossil fuel debate will seem as quaint as Whigs vs. Jacksonian Democrats. Getting there has inspired all kinds of crazy ideas, and the craziest, perhaps, is to do it exactly like plants do.

Thing is, your average plant turns out to be exploiting tricks of physics that most scientists used to think were only possible inside a lab, under high vacuum, at the intersection of a bunch of laser beams cooling a handful of atoms to near absolute zero.

Google to spend $280 million to give you solar panels — free

The challenge with putting solar on your roof is that even if it saves you money over the long run, you're essentially pre-paying your utility bill for the next ten to 20 years -- and who has that kind of scratch?

That's why SolarCity exists: to pay for and install those solar panels, and then lease them to you or sell you the power they produce, for less than your current utility bill. Google just dropped $280 million on the company because they think this is such a fantastic and, in their words, "safe" investment.

Your tax dollars subsidize the sh*t out of coal

If you're a fan of a certain dried-leaves-boiled-in-water-related political party, you might believe that renewable energy is the recipient of huge amounts of government largesse, and that the first thing we should do once we get our guy or gal into office is slash all that wasteful spending.

But wait! It turns out coal gets way, way more subsidies for electricity generation.

Oregon town gets a lot of solar for a little money

The upfront cost has always been the biggest barrier to solar photovoltaic adoption, and one Oregon town has found an innovative way to help its citizens buy down that cost.