How much electricity can you produce from the roof of your house? Roofray.com is a great site to figure this out and give you a rough estimate of how much solar potential your house has. What you do is put in your address, it brings up a satellite picture of your house, and from there you construct your imaginary solar array. After your array is build it gives you a performance analysis which tells you approximately how much electricity it will produce for you each month. It does this by using your regional characteristics such as average weather and cloud cover and orientation of your array. Lastly it figures how much money you’ll save each month with your array. To do this you put in your monthly electric bill or just an overall average if you like and it tells you how much you’ll save based on your power company’s rate.

I’m sure you’d be much better off with a professional assessment, but this is a fun first step to figuring out how you might benefit from having a solar array installed on your roof to supplement your power. Head over to roofray.com and have a go at it!

Solar Chill from Tucson’s Southwest Solar is a fantastic way to cool your house completely with solar power or for less than fifty cents a day on regular grid power. This really isn’t any newfangled technology or anything, just a really efficient use of evaporative cooling. Evaporative cooling works well out here in Arizona where it is hot and dry but not so much in areas of high humidity like most places out east. Even in Arizona in late July and August it can get a bit too humid for this type of cooling. April thru July  this would be the perfect solution to using little or no power (with solar) to cool your house. According to Bill Cunningham of Southwest Solar, these can be run 24/7 for a month straight and it would only cost around $10 in electricity. The Solar Chill only uses 10-20% the power of a traditional evaporative cooler and just a fraction of what air conditioning uses.

If you live out west in a dry hot region you might consider looking into one of these coolers to save a bundle on cooling costs. To learn more about these coolers check out Southwest Solar’s website and listen to this episode of Freshly Green where they interview Bill Cunningham of Southwest Solar.

These tables show if evaporative cooling might work for you in your neck of the woods…

Any woman would be lucky to have this handmade, flame-worked glass beauty hanging in her window. What’s even better than a beautifull-crafted decorative glass ornament? A useful one that boosts your mood while being “green.”

Our own Tracy Perkins had a article posted on ecosalon about these great solar diffusers! Check out the complete posting here.

These solar diffusers are hand made here in Arizona by Elijah Aller and sold by another Arizona business Strawberry Hedgehog.

This seems like really great news for the state and solar industry in general. Glad to see ASU putting so much effort in researching renewable energy.

Arizona State University is strengthening its commitment to boost Arizona’s economic development prospects in the renewable energy industry by establishing the Solar Power Laboratory to advance solar energy research, education and technology.

Prominent scientists and engineers are being hired to lead the endeavor to improve the efficiency of solar electric power systems while making them more economically feasible.

“The Solar Power Laboratory will further build up the university’s already formidable solar energy research and develop collaborations with the energy industry to accelerate expansion of the state’s economy,” said ASU President Michael Crow.

The effort is a major part of ASU’s response to the Arizona Board of Regents’ Solar Energy Initiative, aimed at encouraging research and development to meet future needs for renewable energy sources, Crow said.

In addition to spurring economic opportunity, advances in solar power systems will help Arizona protect its environment by enabling more widespread use of this clean-energy source, Crow said.

The laboratory will be a collaboration partnering the university’s Global Institute of Sustainability and Ira A. Fulton School of Engineering.

Read the full article at FoxBusiness

Looks like it is really going to happen, this fall ASU will start having solar panels installed on the roofs of many of the buildings on campus. When they are done these panels will produce up to 7% of the school’s electricity. It’s really nice to see ASU taking the lead in this and I hope other Universities follow suit.

Arizona State University plans to spread solar panels across the rooftops of its sprawling Tempe, Ariz. campus, creating the largest solar array at an American university, school officials said.

ASU plans to begin installing solar panels on about 135,000 square feet of rooftop in August, about a third of that available on university buildings. They will provide 2 megawatts of electricity to the university grid - about 7 percent of the school’s energy needs.

That’s enough to power 4,600 computers and reduce ASU’s carbon emissions by 2,825 tons per year.

“We have a tremendous number of buildings that have flat roofs. It’s an ideal place to put these things,” Jonathan Fink, director of ASU’s Global Institute of Sustainability, said.

Read the full story at Forbes.com