Science & Technology

Solar rooftop installations just got a lot easier: Lumeta, a subsidiary of construction heavyweight DRI, has developed a solar panel sticker -- the Power-Ply 380. The company says its convenient peel-and-stick solar technology allows it to be installed almost twice as fast as regular rack-mounted panels -- a claim put to the test in the above video.

The panels are half as heavy as concrete roofing tiles and can be tailored to fit on most tile designs -- concrete, clay, profile and flat (added bonus: they come in a variety of colors). As Wired Science's Alexis Madrigal notes, the Power-Ply's main downside is that it loses the sun's optimal angle, thus making the peel-and-stick panels less efficient than some of its alternatives.

Recent Comment by dredg : "Jeremy, the referenced datasheet is the wrong one; here is the right one:..." [read]

Science & Technology

I mean I jst so wnt a hi Kitty sola Charger. It ltz me hlp save d world's NRG n hi Kitty fashiN! So w@ f it costs 2x as mch as a norml sola charger, it cn kip my ph chrgd n my ipod chrgd n its so cute!

teacha typz @ Triple Pundit sA "the people at Sanrio are introducing a concept into the worlds of our generation’s youth: renewables. The brands that already hold significance in young people’s lives are great vehicles to teach them about the environment and sustainability. However, whether this is a conscious effort by the makers of Hello Kitty to influence the way we consume products, or if this is a moment of clever PR work is hard to know for sure." WE dat means.

d nerds sA " I-Power is equipped with large 1200mAh Lithium battery. Also comes with LED to lighten up the environment, it is capable to provide the lighting for 48 hours straight." bt hu givs I wnt it::Triple Pundit

Science & Technology

Amy MacWilliamson

Clap your hands and say "Yeah!" for Eric Olsen, the winner of the 2008 Metropolis Next Generation Design Prize. The architect and college professor took home the fifth-annual prize for his response to this year's theme of water.

The San Francisco-based architect was awarded $10,000 for his project, Solar Water Disinfecting Tarpaulin, which is a vessel for both transporting and purifying water that may be put to good use in disaster areas, developing urban areas, rural regions, or anyplace where clean water is otherwise difficult or impossible to come by. According to Metropolis, "It is lightweight, expandable, and comfortable to wear, allowing a greater volume of water to be carried when compared to traditional vessels."

Science & Technology

While cellular phone use has exploded even in the world's poorest countries, phone companies are finding that reliable electricity is a major barrier to expansion into new markets in regions like Africa. Of course a cellphone is no good if you can't charge the battery with electricity, and in many places where the electricity grid is still nonexistent, the only option is diesel-run generators, which, in addition to polluting and producing CO2 emissions, are costly.

Motorola is looking to solar energy to solve the problem by building kiosks in Uganda that offer free, solar-powered mobile phone recharge services, according to a recent piece in the New York Times Magazine. Each Motopower kiosk is charged by a 55 Watt inverted solar panel, capable of charging twenty phones simultaneously. The project mainly targets women entrepreneurs in rural areas. While customers wait for their phones to charge, they can also browse and purchase available Motorola handsets and SIM cards from the women.

Science & Technology

So we know what it takes to live off grid and how you generate off grid power, but what does living off grid look like? It might be a surprise to some, but some off-grid homes are totally indistinguishable from other houses in the neighborhood (except for the lack of power lines and electricity meters).

Above is the Van Geet Off-Grid Home [pdf], sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy's Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE) Agency. Near Denver, Colorado, the home takes advantage of 300 days of sun to produce lots of its power from a couple of solar arrays, and the home's careful siting makes the most of passive solar and daylighting to minimize the energy needed to run the home. Does it look "off grid" to you?

Science & Technology

We’re pretty avid watchers of Solarcentury CEO Jeremy Leggett here at TreeHugger. From our interview with him back in 2006, to his recent musings on why greed is good for the renewables industries, Leggett never fails to stir up an interesting and impassioned debate. As a former oil man, he is also pretty well qualified to talk about the coming energy crisis and peak oil, and he certainly doesn’t hold back in his latest interview on the Principal Voices website, though it’s not all positive reading. On the one hand, he is as up-beat as ever about the potential for renewable energy, given the right support and the right conditions:

“Here there is good and bad news. Yes, we can run the world on renewables and efficiency. Any self-respecting solar energy company--hooked up with the right partners--can put up zero carbon buildings in a matter of weeks. Around 50% of CO2 emissions come from buildings, directly or indirectly. Meanwhile, as traditional power prices soar, solar manufacturing costs are falling.”

Science & Technology

Well this is a nifty idea -- even if it isn't quite going as expected. Joel Johnson of Boing Boing Gadgets has packed his bags (and they are heavy, he says) full of solar powered gear and gone native. The blogger is currently somewhere in Harriman State Park, one of the largest parks in New York, attempting to blog using only solar power and satellite internet.

The kink in his plans is a missing a connector, so his solar run may be short lived. Power is rapidly depleting on his Lenovo X300 laptop.

Science & Technology

The Race to Reinvent Energy and Stop Global Warming

The Earth's environment has limits. Fred Krupp, president of the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) has long recognized that those limits can ignite economic growth and ecological prosperity at the same time. Earth: The Sequel written by Krupp and Miriam Horn, a journalist and staffer at EDF, begins with a case study of how we can solve global warming and improve our economy by addressing the need for limits.

In the early 1980's sulfur dioxide emissions from coal fired power plants caused acid rain, damaging forests and aquatic life. We had reached the limits of how much sulfur dioxide we could pump into the atmosphere. The knee-jerk reaction to this problem was to create strict 'command and control' regulations that required adding expensive scrubbers to smoke stacks. But this solution was not addressing the problem...