Solar Headlines

1) Dartmouth dorms  - LEED silver -- use a combination of geothermal heating and a water-based radiant heating system through PVC pipes in the concrete floors.

2) Napa Valley University 1.2MW pole mounted PV panels on 154.000sqft of unusable flood plain - to provide 40% of the electricity requirements of the college

3) Nevada  - 64MW  Concentrated Solar Power - on 350 acres solar thermal - trough system with fluid heated to 750 deg F. Current cost 10c/Kwh - comparable to a new natural gas fueled generating plant. - with economies of scale such facilities should be down to 7c/kwh within the next 2-3 years.

4) Nevada - 18MW PV systems - pole mounted panels --  largest in the world (prior is Bavaria)

5) Concentrated PV - from a Silicon Valley garage - receiving significant financing --  molded glass panels with reflective surfaces to greatly increase the efficiency of solar cells. Initail market - commercial building probably pole mounted. Drops costs of panel to 55 cents a watt - installation costs bring it to about half of current PV.  Other researchers use various methods -- funnel, fresnel lens --- to concentrate solar energy, or to trap photons in hexagonal - Buckyball spheres.

6) Thin film -- Sharp America CEO -- building market now, commercially viable in 2-3 years. Move away from silicon -to CIS

7) Thin film - South Africa  Copper-Indium-Gallium-Diselenide - less than one micron of CIGS absorbs more than 99% of the incident solar energy - compared to 350 microns of silicon. German companies are major investors - going to produce 500,000 panels  by the end of this year.

8) Builder Victoria Homes in Victorville - CA, going to offer Sun-Tile solar electric systms with stringent energy efficient construction - combines solar power and green design - seen as a competitive advantage. To go into hundreds of homes.

9) Coal burning utility in Kentucky has subsidiary in Indiana to build 100Mw wind farm.

10) J. Craig Venter - private co. that first sequenced the human genome. Just completed 3 year round the world, collected millions of organisms - goal biological breakdown of cellulose waste to economically convert it to ethanol. And another project to modify or devise microorganisms to produce a steady stream of hydrogen.

11) U New Hampshire - high oil content algae grown in ponds with nutrient material from animal wastes, water treatment facilities and agricultural runoff. Some algae are 50% oil –significant increase in the amount of oil per acre compared to soybeans

12) U C Berkeley - also looking to modified algae – to directly produce hydrogen

13) Joint Genome Institute - looking  at the bacteria in termite guts to produce methane.