Israel Electric Corp. has signed contracts to build a $1.3 billion 240 megawatt solar energy project in China.

The facility, to be situated in northern China, will consist of three photovoltaic solar energy arrays. Israel Electric Corp. will not invest equity in the project. (more…)

I recently had an opportunity to hear Richard Perez speak on the question about solar PV: is it too expensive?

I have been exploring the issue of whether solar makes economic sense in the city for quite some time by getting quotes for solar arrays on a city apartment’s rooftop, talking to people in the biz, (more…)

Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) report that they have used carbon nanotubes to concentrate solar energy 100 times more efficiently than regular photovoltaic cells. The researchers, reporting in the journal Nature Materials, said that the nanotubes — hollow tubes of carbon atoms — could form antennas that effectively capture and focus light energy, (more…)

For more than 40 years, scientists have dreamed of collecting the sun’s energy in space and beaming it back to Earth. Now, a host of technological advances, coupled with interest from the U.S. military, may be bringing that vision close to reality.

Despite the enormous promise of solar power, the drawbacks of the technology remain significant. People need electricity every day, around the clock, but there’s no part of the United States that is cloud-free 365 days a year — and no solar radiation at night. You have to find some way to store the energy for those sunless periods, and there’s not yet a large-scale way to do that.

Moreover, the best locations for solar arrays — the deserts of the American Southwest — are far from the centers of population, so even under the best of circumstances you’d have to send electricity many hundreds of miles through transmission lines that don’t yet exist.

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