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California, which boasts more than half of the households with solar panels in the United States, on Thursday extended a policy that has underpinned the rooftop solar industry's dramatic growth over the last decade. The 3-to-2 decision by California's Public Utilities Commission at a meeting in San Francisco to extend net metering was a major victory for the solar industry, including companies like SolarCity Corp, Sunrun and SunPower Corp . Net metering allows homeowners with solar panels to sell the power they generate but don't use back to their utility at the full retail rate, sometimes giving them a credit...

The carmaker is sponsoring researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), who have developed a new material [ in the form of a translucent polymer film - which absorbs solar energy which can be stored for days at a time before being released. Produced by MIT professor Jeffrey Grossman, postdoc David Zhitomirsky, and graduate student Eugene Cho, the stored energy can be released by changing the chemical state, likely via a small jolt of electricity. The report - published in the Journal of Advanced Energy Materials - states: "Photon energy is stored within the chemical conformations of molecules and...

NOAA classifies solar storms on a scale of one to five (one being the weakest; five being the most severe). Current conditions are classified at a moderate G2 level, meaning it could have the strength to cause fluctuations in some power grids, intermittent radio blackouts in higher latitudes and possible GPS issues. "There is still a slight possibility that we will see G3 (Strong) storms as effects persist," a bulletin posted on NOAA's website said.

Floridians for Solar Choice, an ad hoc group seeking a carve-out for the already heavily subsidized solar industry in Florida, appears to be running out of sunshine (it wouldn't do to say gas here) in its constitutional amendment petition drive. The group has gathered 271,000 certified signatures to put a constitutional amendment on the November 2016 state ballot that would oblige the state to promote solar power over other forms of electrical power generation and would allow citizens to generate solar power through a solar power company. This generation and sales would not be regulated in any way by the...

Just two weeks before it was set to expire, a tax credit for installing renewable energy systems, such as solar and wind power, has been extended for five years by Congress. The U.S. government's investment tax credit (ITC), which went into affect in 2006, was the main catalyst for growth of solar installations in the U.S. The ITC offers a tax credit equal to 30% of a solar or wind project's costs.

Score one for the new Speaker The new budget deal heading for President Obama’s desk has a lot that’s awful in it, including extensions of lots of taxes and subsidies that are supposedly temporary but are never allowed to lapse. There’s no defending any of this as policy, and many will say this proves Paul Ryan is just another RINO squish like John Boehner. I’m a glass-half-full guy. All that would have been the default stance of any other Congress, and certainly of Obama. Ryan, to his credit, at least exacted a price for keeping these things alive the next...

Solar heat could help generate both electricity and hydrogen fuel at the same time in a system that scientists in Switzerland and the United States call "hydricity." Such a system could supply electricity round-the-clock with an overall efficiency better than many photovoltaic cells, researchers add. There are two ways solar energy is used to generate electricity. Photovoltaic cells directly convert sunlight to electricity, while solar thermal power plants--also known as concentrating solar power systems--focus sunlight with mirrors, heating water and producing high-pressure steam that drives turbines. Photovoltaic cells only absorb a portion of the solar spectrum, but they can generate...

RESIDENTS of a small American town have been absolutely skewered online and found themselves the target of global ridicule after expressing their fears about solar panels. The good folk of Woodland, North Carolina, have rejected a proposal for a new solar farm amid concerns it would suck up all the energy from the sun. The motion to build the solar farm near a power plant was rejected during a recent council meeting due to a bizarre array of fears and distrust expressed by locals, reports the Roanoke-Chowan News Herald.

This town is not too bright about solar panels. A North Carolina town rejected a solar farm proposal after citizens at the Woodland Town Council expressed fears that the panels would take away sunlight from their town. Jane Mann, a retired science teacher from Northampton, spoke at the town meeting with concerns about photosynthesis and was worried plants wouldn’t get enough sunlight if solar panels were installed, the Roanoke-Chowan News-Herald reported. She also argued that solar panels could cause cancer. Her husband, Bobby Mann, claimed that solar farms would “suck up all the energy from the sun” and ruin the...

California has stunned green advocates, by excluding rooftop solar from their renewable energy mandate.According to the LA Times; California’s aggressive push to increase renewable energy production comes with a catch for people with solar panels on the roof: You don’t count.If a home or business has a rooftop solar system, most of the wattage isn’t included in the ambitious requirement to generate half of the state’s electricity from renewable sources such as solar and wind by 2030, part of legislation signed in October by Gov. Jerry Brown.That means rooftop solar owners are missing out on a potentially lucrative subsidy that...

California's aggressive push to increase renewable energy production comes with a catch for people with solar panels on the roof: You don't count. If a home or business has a rooftop solar system, most of the wattage isn't included in the ambitious requirement to generate half of the state's electricity from renewable sources such as solar and wind by 2030, part of legislation signed in October by Gov. Jerry Brown. That means rooftop solar owners are missing out on a potentially lucrative subsidy that is paid to utilities and developers of big power projects. It also means that utility ratepayers...

On November 30th President Obama will join hordes of our ecological betters from around the world at the Paris Climate Summit. Weighty topics of how to save the planet will be discussed and agreements are expected which will further push the cause of eliminating carbon, fossil fuels and everything else we rely on to keep civilization chugging along. One of the leaders in the field of green energy and allegedly reduced carbon emissions has been Great Britain, which makes it all the more odd that just before the big confab kicks off, they’ve , preferring to focus on converting...

The government is going to pull the plug on the solar industry’s key tax credit as evidence mounts that the often touted renewable source cannot compete with traditional energy. “Solar power’s value as a grid resource is limited because we simply can’t count on it to meet peak demand in the evenings,” Travis Fischer, economist at the Institute for Energy Research, told The Daily Caller News Foundation. “In fact, solar power could cause major problems if implemented on a wide scale due to its daytime-only production profile.” Solar power has been on the rise in the U.S. and is often...

Phil PlaitNovember 16, 2015 A new study says that violent space weather that could cost $2 trillion in damage is more common than previously thought In the years 774 and 993, the Earth was attacked from space. Not by aliens, but by a natural event—and it was very, very powerful. Whatever it was, it subtly altered the chemistry of our planet’s atmosphere, creating trace amounts of radioactive elements like chlorine-36, beryllium-10, and carbon-14. And those provide the clue to what the event was: Those isotopes are created when high-energy protons slam into our air. That means the source must have...

According to an Old English manuscript chronicling the history of the Anglo-Saxons, a mysterious "red crucifix" appeared in the "heavens" over Britain one evening in A.D. 774. Now astronomers say it may have been the supernova explosion that sprinkled unexplained traces of carbon-14 in tree rings that year, halfway around the world in Japan. Jonathon Allen, an undergraduate student at the University of California, Santa Cruz, made the connection this week after listening to a Nature podcast. He heard a team of Japanese scientists discussing new research in which they measured an odd spike in carbon-14 levels in tree rings...

Just over 1,200 years ago, the planet was hit by an extremely intense burst of high-energy radiation of unknown cause, scientists studying tree-ring data have found. The radiation burst, which seems to have hit between AD 774 and AD 775, was detected by looking at the amounts of the radioactive isotope carbon-14 in tree rings that formed during the AD 775 growing season in the Northern Hemisphere. The increase in 14C levels is so clear that the scientists, led by Fusa Miyake, a cosmic-ray physicist from Nagoya University in Japan, conclude that the atmospheric level of 14C must have jumped...

New studies flip climate-change notions upside down The sun will go into "hibernation" mode around 2030, and it has already started to get sleepy. At the Royal Astronomical Society's annual meeting in July, Professor Valentina Zharkova of Northumbria University in the UK confirmed it - the sun will begin its Maunder Minimum (Grand Solar Minimum) in 15 years. Other scientists had suggested years ago that this change was imminent, but Zharkova's model is said to have near-perfect accuracy. So what is a "solar minimum"? Our sun doesn't maintain a constant intensity. Instead, it cycles in spans of approximately 11 years....

Home owner insurance companies exempting solar panels and associated equipment from coverage. Have you received notice? Do you care?

Posted : 2015-11-02 16:29 Updated : 2015-11-02 20:33 NK tries out solar-powered bus North Korea's solar-powered bus / Yonhap By Kim Hyo-jin North Korea is operating a solar-powered bus in the western city of Nampo, the North's state media said Monday. "Nampo created a bus powered by solar energy and it is now being used for public transport," the state-run Korean Central Television (KCTV) said, quoting a member of the city's science and technology committee, Jeong In-sung. According to Jeong, the bus uses 32 100-watt solar panels, 50 batteries and a direct-current motor. "It has run 800 kilometers so far,...

No aircraft were allowed to take off from airports in southern and central Sweden due to a massive geomagnetic solar flare storm causing problems for radar systems. Ulf Wallin, press spokesperson at Swedavia, the organization managing Sweden's airports, told TT that airports at Landvetter in Gothenburg and Arlanda and Bromma in Stockholm were affected. "Those airplanes that are in the air are allowed to land at the airports they're going to, but no planes are taking off," he said. The problems began at around 3.30pm on Wednesday. An hour later, traffic had begun to return to normal, but it was...