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President Joe Biden is using his executive powers Monday to boost the domestic production of solar panels and their parts and will issue a 24-month tariff exemption on imports of the products from several countries. The White House said Biden will authorize the use of the Defense Production Act to accelerate manufacturing of solar panels in the United States as a way to strengthen the administration's efforts to shift the country toward clean energy. — NBC News
Invoking the Defense Production Act (DPA) allows the President to order private businesses to prioritize the production of materials deemed necessary for national defense. Aside from accelerating the domestic production of solar panels, Biden is using the Act to rapidly expand American... View full entry
IKEA U.S. has teamed up with SunPower, a California-based solar technology and energy services provider, to launch a new program called Home Solar with IKEA. Through this collaboration, members of the IKEA Family customer loyalty program will be able to purchase home solar solutions, available... View full entry
Construction has begun on BIG’s CityWave, the building that will complete Milan’s revitalizing CityLife development after previously being announced as a participant in 2019. The Danish studio’s contribution to the €2.5 billion ($2.95 billion) development comes in the form of an East-West... View full entry
The government has decided to move towards achieving 100-percent electrification of railways, as part of efforts to curb carbon footprints, Union Minister Piyush Goyal said on Wednesday.
The railways minister also said he has a mission that in next 10 years, Indian Railways will be running on renewable energy.
— The Economic Times
Announcing the plan, India's Union Minister Piyush Goyal said, "We will be the world's first large railway...nearly [75,000 miles] of track, which will be 100-percent electrified. Imagine how much carbon we will reduce from the entire atmosphere." We are aiming to make Indian Railways world's... View full entry
Earlier this month, the Chattanooga Metropolitan Airport announced that it had hit a much-anticipated milestone in becoming the first airfield in the United States powered by 100% solar energy.
The end result of an ambitious project that started seven years ago, the airport's 2.64-megawatt solar farm was completed with about $5 million of funding from the Federal Aviation Administration.
— Forbes
Abu Dhabi is claiming the title of the world's largest single-site solar project, having hit the go-button on the Noor Abu Dhabi project this week, with a reported capacity of 1.177 gigawatts, eclipsing Dubai's Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum Solar Park – for now at least. The United Arab Emirates doesn't have a great record when it comes to per-capita carbon footprint, but projects like this show that it's serious about addressing the issue head-on. — New Atlas
"According to the Abu Dhabi media office, the project has sufficient capacity to supply 90,000 people and is expected to reduce Abu Dhabi's CO2 emissions by one million metric tons, or the equivalent of removing 200,000 cars from the road," reports New Atlas. View full entry
As noted in a recently published patent application, Tesla is developing a system that would allow the company to improve the aesthetics of the solar shingles even further. [...]
Tesla notes that in prior art BIPV roofing systems, the active solar portions of a roofing module end up being visibly different in appearance compared to inactive parts of the roof.
— Teslarati
Tesla CEO Elon Musk introduced the glass solar tiles as part of the automaker's growing range of energy products back in October 2016. Let's get technical: image from Tesla's patent application to improve the aesthetic performance of its solar roof tiles."Various embodiments provide a new and... View full entry
Their cell generated a current stronger than any previously recorded from such a device, and worked as efficiently in dim light as in bright light.
This innovation could be a step toward wider adoption of solar power in places like British Columbia and parts of northern Europe where overcast skies are common. With further development, these solar cells—called “biogenic” because they are made of living organisms—could become as efficient as the synthetic cells used in conventional solar panels.
— University of British Columbia
While this isn't the first effort to build biogenic, bacteria-powered solar cells, scientists at the University of British Columbia claim to have discovered a novel, highly cost-effective, and much more sustainable way to use the photosynthesis capabilities of certain bacteria to convert light... View full entry
California just sent the clearest signal yet that rooftop power is moving beyond a niche market and becoming the norm.
On Wednesday, the Golden State became the first in the U.S. to require solar panels on almost all new homes. Most new units built after Jan. 1, 2020, will be required to include solar systems [...]. While that’s a boost for the solar industry, critics warned that it will also drive up the cost of buying a house by almost $10,000.
— Bloomberg
Rooftop solar panels are finally becoming an integral part of most new California homes beginning in 2020, however skeptics say that the move will further worsen the state's housing crisis. View full entry
The 10 fastest-growing U.S. solar markets between the second quarters of 2016 and 2017 were Western, Midwestern or Southern states that voted for Trump, with Alabama and Mississippi topping the list. And solar firms are ramping up investments in these regions, signaling their faith that key renewable energy incentives will remain in place for years to come. — Reuters
Despite Trump's disbelief in solar power, the sector is booming in his partisan states. The growth of clean energy, particularly in the regions that showed overwhelming support for Trump, greatly undermines the president's goal of boosting the coal industry. View full entry
Tesla revealed today that it created what it calls the ‘Tesla Tiny House’ to feature its energy products, like solar panels and Powerwall.
The company is bringing the house on tour using a Model X “to educate the public on how to generate, store and use renewable energy for their home.”
The tiny house contains a Tesla mobile design studio and configurator to help home owners configure a solar plus energy storage system for their home.
— electrek.co
Needless to add that the Tesla Tiny House itself gains all its electricity via a solar installation on the tiny roof. The exhibition tour is limited to four major Australian cities for now, but the economic gain could be far from tiny — as the world's leader in capita penetration of rooftop... View full entry
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
While the gapahuk (which in Norwegian means "a simple wooden structure with two or three walls and a roof") is not new, Snohetta's conceptualization of it as a multi-terrain, potentially solar-panelled off-the-grid insta-cabin is. The gapahuk has a purposefully tight layout to make it easy to... 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
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
