All About Solar | Green Energy News

July 24, 2005 – Vol.10 No.18

ALL ABOUT SOLAR.

This week’s news...

Here’s your summer reading - Basic Research Needs for Solar Energy Utilization - from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science. It’s about the state of the art and what’s in the pipeline for solar. It’s reader recommended, but beware it’s 6.6 megabytes of full color information on 276 pages of PDF file. Click here with care. http://www.sc.doe.gov/bes/reports/files/SEU_rpt.pdf

Sometimes it pays to hire more brains for your project to keep it moving forward. Prism Solar Technologies has hired Dr. Chien-Wei Han to become Chief Optics Scientist to oversee optics modeling and holographic element research and development.

Dr. Han will help further develop Prism’s patented Holographic Planar Concentrator technology. He’s a Ph.d from the University of Arizona who has done ground-breaking work in the field of advanced holographic diffraction structures. Learn about Prism through Direct Global Power at http://www.directglobalpower.com/

Another company that has hired new brain power is Konarka Technologies that is developing polymer photovoltaic cells using nanotechnologies.

Dr. Stuart Spitzer’s Ph.D is from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and has 37 years of experience in semiconductor research and development. He’s worked for NASA, Bell Labs, Polaroid, and Spansion, a division of Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) and Fujitsu. Visit Konarka at http://www.konarka.com/

No mansions here, but nice homes with zero energy. Treasure Homes and the Sacramento Municipal Utility District have broken ground on the new 32-home Fallen Leaf at Riverbend Community, a Zero Energy Home (ZEH) development.

The homes range from 1,026 to 2,226 square feet of living space and come standard with 2-kilowatt solar systems along with the latest in high-efficiency appliances, heating, cooling and lighting. The solar system and efficiency measures are expected to reduce consumption from the grid as much as 66 percent and reduce monthly gas and electric bills by 60 percent.

Visit SMUD at http://www.smud.org/ , Treasure Homes at http://www.treasurehomes.com/default.html