Al Ritter’s power bill was pretty high this month. But not as high as it might have been.
Ritter, a retired Air Force electrical engineer, lives in San Antonio — a city hit hard by the great Texas drought of 2011, the worst in the state’s history. Temperatures have regularly topped 100 this summer, and the earth is baking. In the Ritters’ front yard, the cedar elm, starved for water, is losing its leaves several months ahead of schedule. Keep reading →
In an ever tightening solar market, the weak may only have a few more months to live, warned MiaSolé VP Marketing Rob DeLine in an interview with AOL Energy.
“Cost is king. If you don’t have a path to a cost structure that allows you some breathing space you’re going to have some trouble,” he said. Keep reading →
“It looks too ugly and it’s too expensive.”
Those are the two impediments to domestic solar, according to David Field, President & CEO of California-based OneRoof Energy. Keep reading →
In a world of heightened tension between Democrats and Republicans intensified by a seemingly endless fiscal crisis, the Solyndra bankruptcy has been a crisis of its time, prompting shock and escalating rounds of blame.
Republicans blame the Obama administration for heavy government spending and fiscal imprudence while Democrats point out that it was in fact the Bush administration that initially singled Solyndra out for government financing. Caught in the scapegoating is a saturated solar manufacturing sector that is struggling to stay afloat as prices for PV panels drop and renewable tax credits run out at the end of the year. Read more on renewable energy financing: After Solyndra: Renewable Energy Financing 3.0. Keep reading →
US demand for wind, solar and other renewables jumped in the last 12 months in response to falling installation costs, government incentives, and mandates from states for the adoption of increasing proportions of renewables in the energy mix.
While these top picks for renewables development do no necessarily reflect amount of projects or dollars invested, they give a sense of where the renewables sector is headed. Keep reading →
Topaz Solar Farm Will Not Meet DOE Loan Guarantee Deadline http://t.co/mKrB5Bjf @FirstSolar
A technology that gets a lot of hype–and federal US dollars–but produced only about 0.1% of the world’s electricity in 2010, solar has become the planting ground for young entrepreneurs hoping to make the technology more affordable and more attractive to consumers.
Some have devised unique financing plans, while others have simply attached panels to personal devices like motorcycles and boats. Keep reading →
The story of Solyndra, the Silicon Valley solar technology start-up that received half a billion dollars in loan guarantees from the federal government only to go belly-up two weeks ago, has much to offer policy junkies and devotees of the eternal partisan showdown on Capitol Hill.
The drama, in this context, is typically framed with images of a boosterish President Obama visiting the company’s whitewashed manufacturing plant in early 2010, touting its value as an emblem of his nascent green economy, and then, more recently, with images of newly unemployed Solyndra workers wandering out of the company’s facilities — or F.B.I. agents filing in. Keep reading →
A major challenge facing research and development of renewable energy technologies is securing funding for risky new ventures.
Solar, wind, biofuels, and other firms have been turning to increasingly innovative financial mechanisms to raise funds from persistently risk-averse lenders. While some of these efforts have borne fruit, not all companies have managed to convince the market that financing their projects is worthwhile. Keep reading →
With the news today that Solyndra executives plan to plead the fifth and stay silent during hearing on the company’s fall to bankruptcy, speculations ran wild on what exactly they might be hiding.
In a move intended perhaps to subdue the uproar, Solyndra issued an official statement this afternoon. Keep reading →
