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Solar geomagnetic index reaches unprecedented low – only “zero” could be lower – in a month when sunspots became more active. Back on December 12th 2009 I posted an article titled: Solar geomagnetic activity is at an all time low – what does this mean for climate? We then had a string of sunspots in December that marked what many saw as a rejuvenation of solar cycle 24 after a long period of inactivity. See December sunspots on the rise. It even prompted people like Joe Romm to claim: The hottest decade ends and since there’s no Maunder mininum —...

WASHINGTON – NASA's new planet-hunting telescope has found two mystery objects that are too hot to be planets and too small to be stars. The Kepler Telescope, launched in March, discovered the two new heavenly bodies, each circling its own star. Telescope chief scientist Bill Borucki of NASA said the objects are thousands of degrees hotter than the stars they circle. That means they probably aren't planets. They are bigger and hotter than planets in our solar system, including dwarf planets. "The universe keeps making strange things stranger than we can think of in our imagination," said Jon Morse, head...

On a strip of California's Mojave Desert, two dozen rare tortoises could stand in the way of a sprawling solar-energy complex in a case that highlights mounting tensions between wilderness conservation and the nation's quest for cleaner power. Oakland, Calif.-based BrightSource Energy has been pushing for more than two years for permission to erect 400,000 mirrors on the site to gather the sun's energy. It could become the first project of its kind on U.S. Bureau of Land Management property, leaving a footprint for others to follow on vast stretches of public land across the West. The construction would come...

In fact, neither clean nor green at all. We are told that Concentrating Solar Power (Solar Thermal) can actually provide power to replace power generated from coal fired sources. While the solar element can provide power for some of the time, the only way they can supply power for the requisite 24 hour period is to have a backup source using a Natural Gas turbine, emitting CO2, and you would be shocked to know just how much CO2 it does emit.

Sandia National Labs recasts solar industry with MEMS PORTLAND, Ore. — Sandia National Labs has harnessed silicon's natural tendency to grow into islands and used micro-electro-mechanical systems techniques to free those islands into the world's smallest solar cells. Sandia claims the micron-sized solar cells are as efficient as their wafer-sized big brothers, but consume only one hundredth the amount of semiconductor. Rather than force solar cells to grow across an entire wafer in a perfect crystalline lattice, and throw the whole wafer away if any imperfections develop, Sandia National Labs has found that smaller is better. Measuring just 100 microns...

Yesterday, Dec. 22nd at approximately 0455 UT, magnetic fields around sunspot 1036 erupted, producing a C7-class solar flare. NASA's STEREO-A spacecraft was almost directly above the sunspot at the time of the blast and recorded this extreme ultraviolet movie: The shadowy wave racing away from the blast site is a "solar tsunami"--a swell of hot, magnetized plasma about 100,000 km high packing as much energy as a million megatons of TNT. The tsunami petered out before it went more than halfway around the sun, but another manifestation of the blast is still going. The eruption hurled a faint coronal mass...

The Mojave Desert—last seen on our virtual pages when the SpaceShipTwo was unveiled—has leapt into the news again today, thanks to Senator Dianne Feinstein's legislation which will stop 13 solar plants and wind turbines from moving in. It'll certainly be a hindrance to California's plans of generating a third of their electricity from the renewable energy made from the million acres that had been slated for the eco-friendly wind-traps. Feinstein's reason for blocking the move is due to the national monuments which were promised to the area a decade ago, the land having been donated by an environmental group. Sure,...

SAN FRANCISCO — When the sun is relatively inactive — as it has been in recent years — the outermost layer of Earth's atmosphere cools dramatically, new observations find.

New sunspot 1035 is growing rapidly and it is now seven times wider than Earth. This makes it an easy target for backyard solar telescopes. ... The magnetic polarity of the spot identifies it as a member of Solar Cycle 24--the cycle we've been waiting for to end the deepest solar minimum in nearly a century. One spot isn't enough to end the lull, but sunspot 1035 could herald bigger things to come.

The Public Service Commission voted 4-1 Tuesday to allow Tampa Electric to purchase solar energy from a West Palm Beach-based company in 2011 and charge its customers premium prices for it. The agreement allows Energy 5.0 to build a 25 megawatt plant next year and sell its electricity exclusively to TECO for a fixed price over the next 25 years. TECO will be allowed to charge its customers an estimated 52 cents a month beginning in 2011 to pay for the solar power,. The cost to customers would drop to 19 cents a month in 2035, and could be lowered...

California is making waves today by announcing a first-of-its-kind space-based solar project that will transmit energy down to earth from space. According to estimates from developers, the project will generate enough electricity to power 250,000 homes per year. SolarFeeds.com: California’s biggest energy utility PG&E has announced that they would purchase 200MW off solar power that will be beamed from space by 2016.

<p>The Washington Post put ClimateGate on the front page, top left in Saturday’s edition. It’s also the top story at washingtonpost.com. The headline is "In e-mails, science of warming is hot debate." The website summary: "E-mails stolen from British research center show climate-change leaders noting flaws in their own data and seemingly scheming to muzzle critics."</p>

After years of over promising and under delivering, the solar Industry is finally starting to show some interesting developments which have the potential to make solar power as cheap as fossil fuel on a cost-per-watt basis within five years. Getting us to that state, called grid parity, would require solar companies to produce power for around $1 a watt. Is it possible anytime soon? Many analysts think so and the target date being touted around is 2015. The reason for this fresh optimism is a mixture of technological development and simple economics. Traditional conductive materials make up 40% to 50%...

About a year from now, if all goes well, a box about the size of a loaf of bread will pop out of a rocket some 500 miles above the Earth. There in the vacuum it will unfurl four triangular sails as shiny as moonlight and only barely more substantial. Then it will slowly rise on a sunbeam and move across the stars. ... In principle, a solar sail can do anything a regular sail can do, like tacking.

If a major disaster struck and you couldn't live in your home would you have a place to go? Don Kubley claims he has an answer. It's called the InterShelter™ and Kubley said it could provide safe shelter for everyone within two hours. The solar dome's President and inventor spoke before Congress and now FEMA is considering the InterShelter™ as the emergency shelter of choice across the nation. It can withstand winds up to 200 miles per hour and temperatures from 120 degress Fahrenheit down to 70 degrees below. All you need is a screwdriver, a wrench and a step...

Dye-sensitized cells get a double boost from nanowires and optical fiber. Dye-sensitized solar cells are flexible and cheap to make, but they tend to be inefficient at converting light into electricity. One way to boost the performance of any solar cell is to increase the surface area available to incoming light. So a group of researchers at Georgia Tech has made dye-sensitized solar cells with a much higher effective surface area by wrapping the cells around optical fibers. These fiber solar cells are six times more efficient than a zinc oxide solar cell with the same surface area, and if...

Japan's Tokai Challenger solar vehicle has taken victory against a strong international field in the 2009 Global Green Challenge. After covering almost 1860 miles (3000km) in four days across Australia's baking red center, the entry from Japan's Tokai University crossed the finish line at 3.39pm local time. The team's run was nearly flawless, reporting only a single flat tire with just over 100 miles of the course to race and the win breaks a string of four consecutive victories by the Dutch Nuon team, which is currently battling it out for second place against University of Michigan Solar Car Team....

The Florida solar panel plant cost $150 million to build. A field of orange trees makes more sense. The state of Florida is completing the final touches on a solar panel plant that cost $150 million to build and will only power 3,000 homes. Barack Obama will visit this solar-paneled cash dump next week. The AP reported: The Desoto Next Generation Solar Energy Center will power a small fraction of Florida Power & Light’s 4-million plus customer base; nevertheless, at 25 megawatts, it will generate nearly twice as much energy as the second-largest photovoltaic facility in the U.S. The White...

M. Speaker: I rise in opposition to the rule and in opposition to the underlying bill. And to explain why, I’d like to walk through a little history and a little math. Let’s begin with history and two important years: 1978 and 1839. In 1978, the Wall Street Journal carried this headline: “Solar Power Seen Meeting 20 percent of Needs by 2000; Carter May Seek Outlay Boost.” Oddly, the same paper carried a headline in 2006 making the same promise this time for all renewable fuels – only this time by 2025 – but I digress. (view newspaper headlines) Billions...

A federal plan to bring renewable energy retrofits within the reach of middle-class homes, announced Monday by President Joe Biden, gave a jolt to local pilot programs with the same goal. The Recovery Through Retrofit report that Biden unveiled is in part a plan to let homeowners dodge hefty financial barriers to retrofits such as installing solar paneling on their roofs, U.S. Department of Energy spokeswoman Jen Stutsman said. The program shares that aim with Berkeley FIRST, a pilot program launched a year ago that allows property owners, over a 20-year period, to finance the large upfront expense of installing...

Reporting from El Centro, Calif. - Across the desert flatlands of southeastern California, dozens of companies have flooded federal offices with applications to place solar mirrors on more than a million acres of public land. But just as some of those projects appear headed toward fruition, environmental hurdles threaten to jeopardize efforts to further tap the region's renewable energy potential. The development of solar-power facilities in the desert has been a top priority of the Obama administration as it seeks to ease the nation's dependence on fossil fuels and curb global warming. In addition, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has urged that...

<p>Global Warming: President Obama warns of planetary doom at the U.N. if we fail to pass cap-and-trade legislation. Meanwhile, a former warm-monger predicts decades of cooling as the sun stays nearly "spotless."</p> <p>The president had hoped to address Tuesday's United Nations climate change summit in New York with a finished cap-and-trade bill. Failing that, he hoped he'd at least have a version of the Waxman-Markey bill that has passed the House on his desk before the Copenhagen talks in December to cobble together a follow-up to the failed Kyoto Protocol.</p>

AMARGOSA VALLEY, Nev. — In a rural corner of Nevada reeling from the recession, a bit of salvation seemed to arrive last year. A German developer, Solar Millennium, announced plans to build two large solar farms here that would harness the sun to generate electricity, creating hundreds of jobs. But then things got messy. The company revealed that its preferred method of cooling the power plants would consume 1.3 billion gallons of water a year, about 20 percent of this desert valley’s available water. Now Solar Millennium finds itself in the midst of a new-age version of a Western water...

Climate: As alternate-energy champ Spain's green economy slides into recession, a German professor says if American "climate illiterates" don't follow, the Copenhagen climate conference will fail. And the bad news is? King Canute, the Viking king of England, Norway and Denmark, was the legendary king whose sycophantic followers praised his power and wisdom. As the story goes, he once stood on the shore and commanded the waves to halt. Rather than exercising his ego, he in fact was giving his followers a lesson in reality — the power of man over nature is finite and inconsequential. In December, the world's...

Have you ever wondered how many solar panels we would need to power the world? I mean, liberals are always touting solar power as the cure for our energy problems. Well, The Land Art Generator Initiative, has done some math, and determined that based on today's usage, we would need 366,375 square kilometers of land, with nothing but solar panels, to meet today's energy needs. That means you would have to cover every square inch of the state of New York and every inch of the state of Minnesota. How much would we need to meet future energy needs? Well,...

Global Warming: President Obama warns of planetary doom at the U.N. if we fail to pass cap-and-trade legislation. Meanwhile, a former warm-monger predicts decades of cooling as the sun stays nearly "spotless."The president had hoped to address Tuesday's United Nations climate change summit in New York with a finished cap-and-trade bill. Failing that, he hoped he'd at least have a version of the Waxman-Markey bill that has passed the House on his desk before the Copenhagen talks in December to cobble together a follow-up to the failed Kyoto Protocol. Not only did that not happen in the cool summer of...

A proposed solar energy project in the California desert that caused intense friction between environmentalists and the developers of renewable energy has been shelved. BrightSource Energy Inc. had planned a 5,130-acre solar power farm in a remote part of the Mojave Desert, on land previously intended for conservation. The company, based in Oakland, Calif., said Thursday that it was instead seeking an alternative site for the project. The Wildlands Conservancy, a California environmental group, had tried to block the solar development, as had Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, who proposed that the area become a national monument. The land...

Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar recently announced plans to cover 1,000 square miles of land in Nevada, Arizona, California, Colorado, New Mexico and Utah with solar collectors to generate electricity. He's also talking about generating 20% of our electricity from wind. This would require building about 186,000 50-story wind turbines that would cover an area the size of West Virginia not to mention 19,000 new miles of high-voltage transmission lines. Is the federal government showing any concern about this massive intrusion into the natural landscape? Not at all. I fear we are going to destroy the environment in the...

I'm looking at my electrical bill and was wondering if it might be worthwhile for me to investigate either solar or natural gas co-generation systems to reduce the monthly bill. Are there any freepers who have walked this path and can give advice? I live in Colorado where NG is locally produced and relatively cheap and I get 6 hrs of sunlight per day on average.

Climate Change: A team of international scientists has finally figured out why sunspots have a dramatic effect on the weather. It shows the folly of fearing the SUV while dismissing that thermonuclear furnace in the sky.Mankind once worshiped the sun. Now the world studiously ignores it as nations prepare to hammer out a successor to the failed Kyoto Protocol, which expires in 2012, in Copenhagen in December. Something is indeed rotten in Denmark. Our own government is committed to fighting climate change whether it be though Son of Kyoto or our own growth-capping, job-killing cap-and-trade legislation known as Waxman-Markey. Despite...

A BID to build the world's largest solar power station in Victoria is in doubt after the company involved was placed in receivership. The $420 million project, planned by Solar Systems, was to have produced power for about 45,000 houses and has provided work for 150 people, Fairfax reported. Administrator Stephen Longley of PricewaterhouseCoopers said he hoped to have news for the workers by the end of the week. "We are assessing Solar Systems' operational and financial position with a view to continuing operations on a reduced scale over the next three months in order to provide us with sufficient...

In 2008, Spain accounted for half the world's new solar-power installations in terms of wattage, thanks to government subsidies to promote clean energy. But late last year, as the global economic crisis worsened, the government dramatically scaled back those subsidies and capped the amount of subsidized solar power that could be installed. Factories world-wide that had ramped up production of solar-power components found that demand for solar panels was plummeting, leaving a glut in supply and pushing prices down. Job cuts followed. "The solar industry in 2009 has been undermined by [a] collapse in demand due to the decision by...

A California solar company will get a huge boost from the government today. Vice President Joe Biden is expected to announce more than half a billion dollars in federal loan guarantees.

Japan is getting prepped to drop $21 billion on a solar power station in space. The whole deal is being put together by Mitsubishi Electric Corp. and industrial design company IGI Corp. The plan involves a gigantic solar panel floating around in space, soaking up a gigawatt of energy and beaming it to Earth without the use of cables. And they hope to have it ready to rock within four years.

Subtle connections between the 11-year solar cycle, the stratosphere, and the tropical Pacific Ocean work in sync to generate periodic weather patterns that affect much of the globe, according to research appearing this week in the journal Science. The study can help scientists get an edge on eventually predicting the intensity of certain climate phenomena, such as the Indian monsoon and tropical Pacific rainfall, years in advance. An international team of scientists led by the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) used more than a century of weather observations and three powerful computer models to tackle one of the more...

In addition to putting solar panels on “Mama Sara’s” roof, the activists put them on the “Senator Barack Obama School” in Kogelo Village as well. These activities were combined with a 20-day workshop to teach Kenyan youth “how solar photovoltaic panels generate electricity, about their installation and maintenance and the fabrication of self-assembling solar lamps and their marketing potential,” according to Greenpeace. The workshop involves youth from the Kibera Community Youth Program as well as community members of Nyang’oma Kogelo — 25 people in total. A thankful Mama Sara said: “I am very pleased that my home has been improved...

This image of the sun shows no sunspots continuing to be the case The sun seems to be back to its slumbering ways as we head towards the fall 2009. During the spring and summer months, sunspot activity, one measure of the sun’s energy output (another is the 10.7cm radio flux), was quite active. In July, the strongest flare in two years erupted from a spot that was rotating across the face of the sun. July was the third month in a row with heightened activity; this suggested a trend which would at last fall in line with projections...

Environmentalists, or opportunists, depending on your viewpoint, had been forcing the Bush administration to list the fuzzy white polar bears on the Endangered Species List. This would have allowed the environmentalists to force the United States to adopt a Kyoto type carbon emissions program without ever having a vote in Congress. They were using the bears to push their agenda. The discussions were covered under many venues so there should be no doubt that this was at least one of the objectives. The logic goes that the IPCC says man’s CO2 is warming the world so Arctic ice will melt...

*SNIP* "About every 30 seconds there is a soft buzz as a motor moves the mirrors a little higher; by midday they will be looking straight up. It's so quiet out here one can hardly fathom how much work is being done: Each of the 760 arrays of mirrors can produce about 84,000 watts—almost 113 horsepower. By 8 a.m. the oil coursing through the pipes has reached operating temperature. A white plume is spewing from a cooling stack. Half an hour later, the sound of the turbine inside the generating station has reached a high-pitched scream. Nevada Solar One is...

Mahdi Jonny, an electrical engineer with the Joint Projects Management Office, 2nd Brigade Combat Team, 1st Infantry Division, checks the wiring on a series of solar panels on the roof of the New Iraq Health Clinic in Gazaliyah, Aug. 12. Photo by Sgt. Joshua Risner, Multi-National Division – Baghdad. BAGHDAD — The roof of the New Iraq Health Clinic here in the Gazaliyah district looks a little different from the buildings surrounding it. Two rows of solar panels, collecting the bountiful Mesopotamian sunlight, now provide the building's power through solar powered battery systems. The addition is part of an ongoing...

Gov. Tim Pawlenty took a break from his emerging national campaign schedule Thursday to talk ethanol, agriculture and crack Ole and Lena jokes to farmers under a big top at Farmfest. With a down-home message tailored to his rural audience, Pawlenty extolled the economic benefits of Minnesota-produced alternative energy and decried the expense of government-funded social welfare programs. "We've got to build more transmission lines," Pawlenty said, referring to transmitting electric power from wind turbines, whose towers are popping up in western Minnesota. "We got to get that stuff built." He defended corn-based ethanol, a fuel promoted and subsidized by...

Tessera Solar plans to plant 34,000 solar dishes — each one 40 feet high and 38 feet wide — on 8,230 acres of the Mojave Desert in Southern California. Although the lengthy licensing process for the Calico solar farm remains in the early stages, several environmental groups are already raising red flags about the massive project’s impact on such protected wildlife as the desert tortoise, the Mojave fringe-toed lizard and Nelson’s bighorn sheep. Calico is one of dozens of industrial-scale solar farms planned for the Southwest that have divided environmentalists over the need to promote renewable energy while protecting fragile...

Trial deployment being started to test the waters Interest in solar power remains high -- as do the costs associated with deploying the technology.  The field is an interesting case; costs have been progressively dropping as efficiencies have been rising.  However, there's also concerns about materials and potentially easier to harvest alternatives such as wind and nuclear energy to consider.  Ultimately, major adopters could help to tip the scale in solar power's favor by offering the kind of funding needed to create mass production on the massive scale needed to drop cost. One such major adopter may soon commit to...

New Jersey's biggest utility is outfitting 200,000 utility poles with solar panels, part of the state's embrace of a try-anything strategy that has made it the nation's second-biggest producer of solar energy behind California. New Jersey's $514 million program will double its solar capacity to 160 megawatts by 2013, and will be funded by utility customers. Costs will be defrayed slightly by a 30% federal tax credit, roughly $1 million a year in proceeds from the sale of solar renewable energy credits. In addition, solar energy fetches higher prices in the state's deregulated market, because it's produced at peak times....

Energy Policy: Obama announces his energy team without mentioning a green source of renewable energy that could create jobs, reduce carbon emissions and reinvigorate a vital manufacturing sector — nuclear power.The domestic auto industry isn't the only uncompetitive industry that seems to require life-sustaining transfusions of government cash to stay in business. Alternative energy sources have relied on such subsidies, called "investments," for years. Yet in President-elect Obama's announcement of his energy team, we were told "the foundations of our energy independence" lie in "the power of wind and solar." Except that for these alternative sources there's been a severe...

Soldiers serving with the 2nd Heavy Brigade Combat Team patrol the streets of a well-lit Kadamiyah, June 12. The lights installed are powered by the sun and don't rely on the national power grid. Photo courtesy of 1st Infantry Division. BAGHDAD — U.S. Soldiers took a look at the lights illuminating the streets here and improved that concept with even newer technology. Although solar-powered lights were present before the 2nd Heavy Brigade Combat Team  arrived in Baghdad to support Iraqi Security Forces through partnership, the leadership felt there were not enough lights and individual lights did not produce enough illumination."We...

Energy: While members of Congress take vacations their constituents can no longer afford, a country prepares to end its dependence on foreign oil by extracting supplies from shale rock. It's not the U.S. It's in the Middle East.Jordan imports 95% of its oil. Unlike the U.S., the desert kingdom plans on doing something about it. It does not, however, plan to cover its flat open spaces with solar panels or wind farms. It's going to do something the Democratic Congress has refused to do — get oil from its abundant shale rock. On Sunday, Maher Hjazin, head of the Jordanian...

And Chinese solar stocks take off. Read » Reuters has the full details of the package, which is expected to make China a leader in solar installations: The Ministry of Finance said the government will subsidize 50 percent of investment for solar power projects as well as relevant power transmission and distribution systems that connect to grid networks. For independent photovoltaic power generating systems in remote regions that have no power supply, the subsidy will rise to 70 percent, the ministry said in an announcement on its website (www.mof.gov.cn). Grid companies are required to buy all surplus electricity output from...

FORT HUACHUCA — One of the first things a group of post Brownies did with a solar oven was bake brownies. Members of Brownie Troop 2181 have decided their community service project will involve solar ovens. The girls’ goal is to buy five of the ovens for needy families. “We want to help people who don’t have a lot,” 6-year-old troop member K.J. Engasser said. The recently formed troop is working with Baja Arizona Sustainable Agriculture, a nonprofit education organization in Sierra Vista that promotes sustainable food production and sustainable methods of cooking, such as solar ovens That the Brownies...

On June 28, 2009, the House of Representatives, by a narrow margin (219-212), passed the Waxman-Markey bill. The so-called “cap and trade” bill has been sold as a system for cutting greenhouse gas emissions in the struggle against global warming. There’s a full-court press on the U.S. Senate to pass its version of “cap and trade”...The Obama administration’s EPA sees the increasing evidence against global warming as a threat to their agenda and has taken desperate measures. About a week before the House vote on “cap and trade,” the Washington, D.C.-based Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) released some EPA e-mails, demonstrating...