Dust,  dirt, and the occasional bird-bomb can chip away at the efficiency of solar panels.  Hand washing is fine for home-scale installations but that can add up to a huge problem for large installations that  cover multiple acres of ground or roofs.  Now scientists from Boston University have come up with a solution: self-cleaning solar panels based on technology used in missions to Mars.

The problem of dust-clogged solar panels is exacerbated by the tendency to site large-scale installations in desert areas, where water for washing is scarce and windswept dust can accumulate for long periods without rain to wash it away. The hunt is on for low cost, high efficiency ways to keep the panels clean without expending more energy in the process.

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The Indian Parliament building, Sansad Bhavan, will soon be installed with solar PV systems, solar heaters and a biomass plant in an attempt to promote renewable energy technologies.

On the behalf of the Parliament, the Punjab Energy Development Agency has invited bids for installing 80 kW solar PV system. The power system would not only provide battery back up for the Parliament building but more than 50 percent of the generated power would be fed to the grid.

Some of the major companies submitting bids for this project are Reliance Industries’ Solar Energy Group, Wipro Ecoenergy and construction giant Punj Lloyd. This is a novel initiative by the Indian government which is trying to initiate a massive country-wide solar energy revolution which could eventually result in ballooning of the total installed capacity to 20,000 MW in the next 12 years.

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If you are a Californian who’s been wanting to put on solar, but your spouse has objections on aesthetic grounds, you now have an alternative. There are now more CSI-approved choices for building-integrated solar (BIPV) modules in the updated list this month at GosolarCalifornia. Expected performance of all the new BIPV is listed at the CSI-EPBB site.

California has just approved the SRS-Energy curved thinfilm tile. These can be added to your terracotta-colored clay tile roof like this…

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Seabrook Farms has signed a 15-year agreement to have over 21 acres of solar panel systems installed and maintained on its facility in southern New Jersey.

With each solar panel producing about 230 watts of electricity, the project will generate approximately 6.1MW of energy annually. That would be about enough to supply 785 homes with electricity each year.

Wes Seabrook, vice president of engineering for Seabrook Farms, was outright in saying that the company made this decision largely for economic reasons: “We did it for energy savings and cost reduction.” Seabrook Farms will save about $300,000 a year as a result of the installation. You may not think of New Jersey as a solar hotspot, but it actually has some of the best financial incentives in the nation for going solar.

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Feed-in tariffs (FiT) have hit the UK and they are predicted to create a big boost for solar energy. A new report by PricewaterhouseCoopers predicts a five-fold increase in demand for photovoltaic (PV) solar panels this year as a result.

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The European Photovoltaic Industry Association (EPIA) released figures yesterday showing that the global solar photovoltaic industry had a record year in 2009. But it is expecting a lot from 2010 as well.

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Ontario’s got a new feed-in tariff, and the largest supermarket chain in Canada, Loblaw, is looking to take advantage of it.

It will be putting solar panels on the roofs of four of its supermarkets to start with, but plans to eventually do so on over 100 of its Ontario stores (if all goes well).

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Creating a revolution in the way energy is produced and shared, distributed solar energy is one of the top clean energy topics of the day.

Chicago utility company ComEd (an arm of the energy giant Exelon Corporation) has a new pilot project in this field that will outfit 100 Chicago-area homes with solar photovoltaic panels and “at least 50 of those with ’smart’ meters, net metering, battery backup and a grid-tied status that enables them to send unused electricity from their solar energy systems back to the grid.”

ComEd Environmental and Marketing Vice President Val Jensen says that the aim is to turn each of these homes into a “mini-utility”. But the project goes far beyond that.

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Total Transit already operates the largest Toyota Prius taxi fleet in the nation, but it has just “cleaned up” its operations a lot more by installing 400 solar panels (at a cost of $750,000) on the roof of its headquarters in Glendale, Arizona.

Total Transit is the parent company of Discount Cab, which you can find in Phoenix, Tucson, Los Angeles or Austin.

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You don’t often see affordable housing and solar power being combined. There have been a couple of projects in San Francisco and San Diego in the past year. But Sunwheel Energy Partners just went way beyond that — it just finished a major solar installation on affordable housing units in San Francisco and it hired the residents to install the photovoltaics.

This great project was part of San Francisco’s larger GoSolarSF initiative (launched by San Francisco Mayor and contributing author on CleanTechnica Gavin Newsome).

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