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

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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

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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 60x60mm 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.

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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

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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.

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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!

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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…

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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.

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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

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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

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