THIN FILM SOLAR PANELS

Archive for October, 2009

Ascent Solar says it has achieved two new efficiency marks for its CIGS technology on production lines: 14% for the cells themselves, and 11.7% for integrated CIGS modules.

Vice President Joe Biden just revealed a plan to make Berkeley First available nationwide. Yesterday at his Middle Class Task Force meeting Biden proposed the way to make solar roofs easy for everyone to afford with virtually free solar panels. If you now pay your current electricity bill and own a home, that’s literally all it takes to go solar under municipal tax assessment financing.

That’s because his plan; detailed in Recovery Through Retrofit simply makes the very successful Berkeley First municipal tax assessment financing a Federal program, funded nationwide through the Recovery Act.

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A new Kansas-based company called EcoFit Lighting believes it can make the transition to LED street lighting not only much easier, but also much cheaper.

EcoFit’s design is a retrofit module that slides right into place in existing streetlights, eliminating the need to have a full replacement. The company claims using their product would bring down costs from $700 to $900 (for a complete replacement) to just $400. Savings also come in the form of energy efficiency and extended lifespan as EcoFit’s LED lights are 60 percent more efficient and last six times longer than sodium streetlights. Additionally, as it’s estimated that replacing street lights with EcoFit LED lights would take just five minutes (as opposed to taking up to 30 minutes to fully replace the head), labor costs are also expected to be reduced.

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Homeowners in Southern California could now go solar for as little as $10,000 for about a 3.5 KW - 4 KW solar roof.

If you do solar estimates in Berkeley, you start feeling left out that you don’t estimate solar roofs in San Diego. Rebates for our whole state are decided based on optimum solar conditions. That optimal spot? Southern California.

So if you go solar in Berkeley and install the exact same kilowatts-worth of solar panels as someone in San Diego, you won’t get as good a state rebate from your utility.  They just have better sun down there, and it’s the standard by which all other sun is judged—at least by the California Solar Initiative’s Expected Performance Ratings.

We’ve made up for that by inventing new ways to lower solar costs—like One Block off the Grid (1BOG)— which aggregates homeowners into groups to reduce solar costs.

But now our own San Francisco-based 1BOG is taking aggregated solar purchasing to sun drenched Palm Springs, Palm Desert, Desert Hot Springs and Coachella - the very places that already qualify for the best rebates per kilowatt in the state!

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The Norfolk Southern Railway recently debuted a green transportation option that’s among the first of its kind. It’s currently only a prototype, but is just the beginning of things to come; with plans by 2011 to unveil a long-range locomotive that will produce zero-emissions.

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