Solar Energy | featured news

POULTNEY, Vt. (AP) — A college student in Vermont is living in a 96-square-foot house he built to reduce his carbon footprint — and save money.

Wave power is the oft-forgotten cousin of solar and wind power. It has huge potential, but it is not quite as far along as the better known sources of clean power, so it tends to be overlooked. But it shouldn't! To clean up our power grid we'll need all the help we can get. Granted, in many places where wave power would work, offshore wind power would also work, but that might not be the case everywhere (ie. very deep water), and if wave power's cost can be brought down enough, that might not even matter.

Eager for jobs and tax money, Mojave Desert counties welcomed big solar projects. But they may have been too optimistic.

China filed a complaint to the WTO charging the EU with violating rules governing subsidies to its solar components industry.

A unique airplane has just completed a 4,000-mile journey, making the first solar-powered intercontinental round-trip air journey. Traveling between Europe and Africa, the Solar Impulse experimental solar airplane landed in Payerne, Switzerland at 8:30 p.m. local time (2:30 p.m. ET) on Tuesday. The odyssey began two months ago, on May 24. This wasn't a test to see how fast the plane could make the trip, but to assess its endurance and reliability.

The University of California team describes a new kind of polymer solar cell (PSC) that produces energy by absorbing mainly infrared light, making the cells nearly 70 per cent transparent to the human eye.

Earlier in the week, Romney held a news conference at Solyndra, describing the collapse of that federally backed solar-panel maker as proof that the Obama administration was misguided in trying to create jobs with targeted government investments ... But Massachusetts made similar investments when the presumptive GOP presidential nominee was governor of that state, and a small number of those companies have gone bust.

Installers, often working through big-box chains, are taking advantage of hefty tax breaks, creative financing and cheap Chinese-made panels to make solar power accessible to the mass market.

Solar panels prices have kept marching lower this year, extending steep declines seen in 2011 and keeping pressure on hard-hit manufacturers who have struggled to eke out profits, industry experts said.

Republicans probing how a now-bankrupt solar panel company received a $535 million federal loan guarantee excoriated Energy Secretary Steven Chu on Thursday for his decisions on Solyndra at a hearing packed with media and spectators.