There is nothing wrong with encouraging clean, renewable, domestically produced energy.  But California’s proposition 7 “would, if approved, require California utilities to procure half of their power from renewable resources by 2025″ (ref. Ballotpedia).  Currently California’s public utilities are mandated to generate 25% of their electricity by 2025, and this is an ambitious goal.  Just [...]

Back in April 2006 we posted “The Photovoltaic Boom ,” where we enthusiastically reported the bright future of photovoltaic power.  We thought then, and we believe now, that photovotalic production will increase faster than projections, at the same time as costs will fall faster than expected.  But if photovoltaic power is becoming a commodity, doesn’t that mean [...]

A company that is quietly competing to possibly become the biggest manufacturer of thin film photovoltaics on earth is Optisolar, headquartered in Hayward, California.  Optisolar already has a manufacturing plant at their Hayward headquarters, and has just signed a lease to construct a 600,000 square foot manufacturing plant in Sacramento, California.  (ref. Sacramento Housing & [...]

According to SolarBuzz.com, solar modules of 125 watts (peak) or higher are selling for about $4.80 per watt.  To make a long story short, that price is still way too expensive to compete with regular utility-produced electricity.  If you want to install a photovoltaic system on your home or business, expect a price tag, after labor and [...]

Which of these solutions is more space efficient? 
If you assume 5.0 watts (peak) per square foot for thin film photovoltaic, you end up requiring 4.6 acres per peak megawatt-hour (MWp), about the same as Nevada Solar One’s solar thermal farm (4.7 acres per MWp). Thin film PV panels now have a factory cost of about [...]

If you can’t make rooftop photovoltaics pay financially without feed in tariffs, tax credits, accellerated depreciation, rebates, and subsidized loans - and even with all that it’s still barely better financially than just sticking to natural gas or coal fired grid electricity - how on earth can something like this succeed at the utility scale?

Solar fields in [...]

Finally a design that could work on flat roofs that combines an efficient heat collection plumbing with 2-axis motion for the concentrators.  Heliotron Energy from Greece has a design that puts an array of single-axis concentrators onto a rotating turntable, which gives the concentrators 2-axis capability.
Each concentrator is about one square foot in size, and they each [...]