Posts tagged as:

solar

“Unused Rooftops”: The Future of Solar Power

July 27, 2010

Power sources can be divided according to a lot of different criteria, but one of the most crucial is centralized versus distributed. Coal and nuclear are centralized because no-one wants to use those things at home, and because on a large enough scale they’re highly efficient. Their drawbacks, however, are many. Besides the obvious environmental [...]

Read the full article →

Solar Crosscurrents

January 26, 2010

These are complex times for solar power. After a couple of heady years in which capital poured in, stock prices soared and pretty much everyone got to build new factories, a capacity glut and the Great Recession have combined to knock the bottom out of industry earnings. And now the European countries that had used [...]

Read the full article →

Power Shift

January 22, 2010

Mother Earth News just published a long excerpt from environmental writer Amanda Little’s Power Trip. Here’s an excerpt of the excerpt. The rest can be seen here.

War Without Guns
My venture into America’s energy future began with a trip to a flat, dry and mostly barren town in the gusty prairies of west Texas that [...]

Read the full article →

Nanosolar’s Coming Out Party

September 9, 2009

Back in 2008, Clean Money: Picking Winners in the Green-Tech Boom said the following about a nascent thin-film solar panel maker called Nanosolar:
Nanosolar (Silicon Valley) had the industry buzzing in late 2007 with a CIGS “nano-ink” that costs far less than traditional solar cells while operating at efficiencies close to that of silicon. If Nanosolar’s [...]

Read the full article →

The Pick and Shovel Makers: Silicon Suppliers

July 24, 2009

Adapted from Clean Money: Picking Winners in the Green-Tech Boom
The Pick and Shovel Makers:
On a cold January morning in 1848, a carpenter named James Wilson Marshall ignited one of history’s great mass-migrations by finding a nugget of gold on a farm owned by John Sutter near San Francisco. Wilson and Sutter, no dummies, tried to keep [...]

Read the full article →