Follow this tag to curate your own personalized Activity Stream and email alerts.
Ikea is now offering solar panels and home batteries to its customers in the UK. The Scandinavian furniture chain is partnering with solar firm Solarcentury for the venture, with prices for solar battery storage starting at £3,000 (about $3,970 USD).
The home batteries are designed to work with existing solar panels, or as part of a new combined home solar panel / battery storage system that Ikea is selling.
— theverge.com
The Swedish furniture retail giant first starting solar panels in the UK back in 2013 to grow on a (then) heavily subsidized green energy market but ceased sales in 2015 when the British government announced its plans of cutting solar subsidies by up to 90%. Just a few months later, IKEA returned... View full entry
Let’s say you want to switch to solar—for ecological or economic reasons—but are a renter. Installing solar panels on your roof isn’t really an option unless you get permission from your landlord. Enter Solar Gaps, or photovoltaic solar blinds that can be installed easily, and temporarily... View full entry
Founded at the MIT Sloan School of Management, Sistine creates custom solar panels designed to mimic home facades and other environments, with aims of enticing more homeowners to install photovoltaic systems.
Sistine’s novel technology, SolarSkin, is a layer that can be imprinted with any image and embedded into a solar panel without interfering with the panel’s efficacy. Homeowners can match their rooftop or a grassy lawn.
— MIT News
The product caters to the growing "aesthetic solar" market which tries to attract homeowners that are considering going solar but fear the aesthetic impact of the traditional, bleak-looking dark solar panels on their home's appearance. Just last fall, Tesla CEO Elon Musk revealed a line of glass... View full entry
Designed by Johan Karlsson, Dennis Kanter, Christian Gustafsson, John van Leer, Tim de Haas, Nicolò Barlera, the IKEA Foundation and UNHCR, the photovoltaic panel-powered refugee shelter "Better Shelter" has been named the Beazley Design of the Year, beating out the five other category winners to... View full entry
On a small and skinny lot wedged behind its historic city hall, Santa Monica is trying to accomplish something that has never been done before in California. By 2020, the city hopes to construct a 50,000-square-foot city services building that will meet the requirements of the International Living Future Institute’s “Living Building Challenge” — the most stringent environmental building standard in the world. — latimes.com
"Should the city succeed it will prove that net-zero water is possible in our arid climate, even in a drought — and that if we’re serious about staving off the effects of drought and climate change, we should settle for no less. It will also familiarize code officials with new innovations... View full entry
While solar panels have been subsidized in many cities for a while now, the blocky, rectangular panels aren’t heavily implemented in part because they tend to appear as, well, an addition, rather than a constitutive element of home design. That's about to change, as Tesla has announced a... View full entry
What do you do with a sad, funky, abandoned trolley terminus? Well, if it's the former Williamsburg Bridge Trolley Terminal under Delancey Street in New York City, you make the world's first underground park by virtue of adding some mirrors, skylights, and vegetation. One acre in size, the freshly... View full entry
The solar power industry is about to get a big boost in San Francisco. On April 19, the city’s Board of Supervisors voted unanimously to become the first major US metropolitan area requiring that new buildings install solar photovoltaic (PV) panels on their roofs.
California already mandates that new buildings with 10 floors or less designate at least 15% of their rooftop area (pdf, p8) as being ready for solar panel installation.
— Quartz
"The city of San Francisco now requires that builders actually install solar panels in these areas (at a minimum) starting in 2017. Larger buildings are exempt for now."Curious about other efforts to make American cities reduce their carbon footprint through harvesting solar energy?... View full entry
Renewable energy like solar and wind is booming across the country as the costs of production have come down. But the sun doesn't always shine, and the wind doesn't blow when we need it to. [...]
A company called SolarReserve may have found a solution: It built a large solar plant in the Nevada desert that can store heat from the sun and generate electricity for up to 10 hours even after sundown.
— npr.org
Related stories in the Archinect news:Denver selected to host the 2017 Solar DecathlonA river of solar power: a scheme for the Tijuana riverHow this new gigafactory may popularize residential solar power technology View full entry
When production begins, SolarCity, already the leading installer of residential solar panels in the [U.S.] will become a vertically integrated manufacturer and provider...At a time when conventional silicon-based solar panels from China have never been cheaper, investing in a new type of solar technology is a risky undertaking. However, the potential benefits are huge. The new factory...could transform both SolarCity’s business...and the economics of residential solar power. — MIT Technology Review
The MIT Technology Review profiles the upcoming Buffalo-based SolarCity factory and their ambitious plans that could potentially make solar power technology more widely available to consumers.More news about alternative energy:Cloud-harvesting skyscraper: renderings of proposed new sustainable... View full entry
Need some ideas for designing a solar home or to make your space a little greener? "A Place in the Sun: Green Living and the Solar Home" could be a helpful guide -- and Archinect is giving away 5 copies to our readers.Released this past April, the 228-page hardcover book by green-living writer and... View full entry
SolarCity, the Silicon Valley solar installer, has quietly begun to offer some homeowners a lithium-ion battery pack made by electric carmaker Tesla to store electricity generated by their rooftop photovoltaic arrays. Stem, another Silicon Valley company, will sell or lease a $100,000, 54-kilowatt-hour battery pack to businesses so they can arbitrage the grid by storing electricity when rates are cheap and then using that energy when they’re high. — qz.com
Researchers at the Stanford School of Engineering have succeeded in developing the world’s first peel-and-stick thin-film solar cells.
The idea will allow the cells to be applied to almost any surface, with successful tests having been conducted on paper, plastic and window glass. This opens up significant opportunities for alternative applications for solar technology, previously limited by traditional solar cells, which must be mounted on stiff, often heavy, fixed panels.
— DesignBuild Source
Big news out of Madrid: Team Rhône-Alpes’ Canopea House has won the 2012 Solar Decathlon Europe! At the forefront of the competition since winning the Architecture and Operations prizes, this compact home is topped with a 10,7 kW array of photovoltaic panels that produce enough energy for both floors and a mini EV. — Inhabitat
A simple, yet brilliant, new concept is providing free solar-powered light for thousands of families in poverty-stricken Philippines. View full entry
