Nagging little things start to plague your existence .. a sprained ankle one year, a stiff calf every morning the next.  A few too many beers and slowly a spare type starts to inflate uncontrollably around your middle.  Suddenly you’re forty and will never be able to run as fast as you could half a lifetime ago.  Eek!

Wouldn’t it be nice to be a solar panel instead?  Not only could you laze around in the sun all day but once in a while a chap will come along and clean you.  If you’re very lucky, you may be one of the snazzy self-healing solar panels MIT have invented  .. that would really be cool! (more…)

The more affordable solar power becomes, the more people are going to use it. This is simple. Poll after poll has shown that people like solar energy and think we need to use it more, but many people are turned off by high, initial capital costs (even if they’ll get their money back on those in a few years). An innovative solar start-up in Seattle, Washington, Clarian Power, seems to have come up with a good, breakthrough solution to help solve this issue.

Rather than $20,000-30,000 solar systems, Clarian offers “plug-in” solar energy for as low as $600-800 per panel. When you take into account the tax rebates you can get for installing solar power, this price can come down considerably more.

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While it is true that technological breakthroughs happen all the time, most are at the lab research stage. That does not guarantee that any of them will ever actually make it past the “valley of death” as VC funders call it, to actually go into production, so that someone can actually buy them, in the US.

Then, because they are radical new technology, they have to be tested and certified by the state (at least in California, which pays the rebates based on “expected performance”) as able to last 40 years or so. The original crystalline solar developed in the Carter years is the only solar that has been proved to last 40 years, because, in the real world, it has. For at least the next decade, tried and tested solar tech that is on the market now is your best bet.

You also have to consider what the future might hold for renewable energy, politically, in this country.  Rebates and incentives that now lower your costs might soon be a thing of the past. (more…)

Massachusetts earns money to invest in renewable energy with cap and trade auctions as a participating member of the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI).

RGGI  is a 10-state cap and trade program that caps emissions from 233 power plants from Maine to Maryland. It has generated $433 million for renewable investments in the 10 participating states.

RGGI earnings help Massachusetts reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by taking big energy users like the orchard off the dirty fossil grid. So far Massachusetts has earned $106 million in RGGI auctions.

But getting the grant wasn’t easy. It took a professional “green” project manager eight months of researching and fulfilling the arduous grant application process required. (more…)