I thought this was very cool! Please do this in my neighborhood.

azdailysun.com
About 200 households and up to eight businesses in and near east Flagstaff could get solar panels for free as part of a pilot project to turn neighborhoods into power producers.

Arizona Public Service is proposing to buy solar panels and pay local contractors to install them on houses and businesses from Smoke Rise and Doney Park to Lenox Park. “We think it’s important to build awareness within our customer base, and we couldn’t think of a better place to start than Flagstaff,” said APS Chief Executive Officer Don Brandt.

The utility would buy, own and maintain the solar panels on private homes and businesses and receive the electricity — typically equating to about half of the electricity used in a local home.

Homeowners would receive a locked-in 20-year rate on portions of their electric bills for offering to have the 2, 3, or 4-kilowatt solar systems, and allowing easements to access them.

The $14.7 million proposal to generate electricity in this way is novel statewide in that it knocks down to zero the initial price of installing a solar system on a house.

In all, the utility would generate 1.5 megawatts of renewable electricity. That’s enough to supply about 230 homes from Sheep Hill to nearly Sugarloaf Peak, at typical energy use rates for homes in that area.
Continue story at azdailysun.com

Photo: Nicholas_T

More good news for solar power generation here in Arizona! That’s two big solar plants planned in the next couple years.

The Arizona Department of Commerce and Albiasa Solar of Spain will announce Monday a $1 billion solar-thermal power plant will be built near Kingman next year, generating enough power for 50,000 homes at once when it opens in 2013.

It’s the third large Arizona solar plant announced in less than 18 months, although one of the first two has been scrapped and the other won’t be running until 2011.

The Kingman plant will create 2,000 construction jobs and 100 permanent jobs, according to the Commerce Department.

Full Story at azcentral.com

I thought this was a fun project for all you portable gamers out there. Wouldn’t it be nice to not have to worry about charging your Nintendo DS? Personally I seem to lose the charger every time I take it on a trip, so a solar charging DS would be awesome for me. The large amount of surface area on the DS makes it perfect for solar charging, just open it up and lay it down flat in a sunny area. This project uses 4 60×60mm solar cells that together produce 6 volts at 80 ma. This isn’t enough to power the DS but it does make for a nice trickle charge. If you don’t spend all your waking hours playing the DS, this just might be enough to never have to plug in your DS. This would definitely work for me because I don’t use my DS all the time. Instructions on how to make your DS solar powered have been posted on instructables.com.

ASU has begun constructing a solar power plant on top of its Apache parking structure (stucture 1). This installtion is expected to produce around 1.4 million killowat-hours a year or enough to power 115 average homes. Another great benefit is that the top level of this stucture will now be shaded from the sun which is a nice perk in the summer. I’m especially excited about the shade because I park my car in this stucture everday. Check out the picture below of the progress so far. I will post more pictures when the project is completed.

More info Here: asuwebdevil

Most of you probably remember the one laptop per child program where for $400 you could give one to a developing country and get one for yourself? Well for a lot of us folks on a limited budget that was just too much money to help out as much as we would have liked having a new laptop to play with and one given away in our name. For a much more affordable way ($50) to help out those in developing countries, or even our own troops, SunNight Solar has come up with a buy one give one (BOGO) program to help provide a free source of light to impoverished people.

Many people in the developing world don’t have electricity to light their homes and have to spend a lot of their resources on lighting solutions such as kerosene lanterns, candles, and flashlights. SunNight Solar has come up with a flashlight / lantern that is powered by the sun and basically provides free light. Their goal is to give as many of these flashlights away to as many people in need as possible and they have given us an easy way to help them with their goal. For about $50 you can buy one for yourself and give one to an organization of your choice including troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. Their founder Mark Bent an ex-marine started SunNight after spending many years in Africa and seeing how providing a free lighting source would be helpful to so many people. Mark being a man of action decided to found SunNight to help address this important need.

Being a bit of a gadget geek I was happy to see a package at my door the other day with one of these solar powered flashlights in it and who doesn’t enjoy a new toy to play with? I had forgotten that a few months back I signed up to get one of these to test out. The flashlight itself is very light and easy to handle, and although it’s not that small it’s thin enough to easily fit in a pocket. Its six LEDs make for a nice spotlight and easily illuminates the path ahead of you. To conserve on battery power you can turn it down to lower levels of light which give plenty of light to get around in the dark. There is even a lantern mode where it gives off a broad amount of light instead of a focused spot like in the flashlight mode. In this mode it gives off plenty of light to illuminate a small room for many hours. I’ve had mine on for four hours now in the medium lantern setting and it is still going on strong. I have no doubt that it will easily go for the 5 hours that SunNight claims.

The great thing about these flashlights is that you don’t have to worry about buying batteries or remembering to charge them. You just store it in a well lit spot and you will always have a charged flashlight. This is a pretty good solution to give people some light to enable them to get around at night for free. For two years at least, after that they’ll need to replace the batteries.

If you are interested in getting yourself one of these flashlights and giving one away head over to SunNight’s BOGO site. The hardest part is deciding what group to give a free flashlight to.

Watch this news report about Mark Bent and SunNight Solar.

Watch this Video about how SunNight Solar’s flashlight works.