I haven’t written much about the California solar company Solyndra, which recently went bankrupt after receiving over $500 million in taxpayer money as part of the Department of Energy’s program of loan guarantees for renewable energy companies. Short story: the sudden demise of the California-based company—which went out of …
Solar Power
Hit “Print” for Solar Panels
Ah, solar panels: so clean, so elegant—and so bloody expensive. Covering your roof with photovoltaics may save you money in the long run, but it requires the installation of a lot of heavy and expensive equipment up front. Thin-film solar panels, printed on sheets at industrial scales, are slowly making inroads, but suppose you …
How Excited Should We Be About China’s Green Energy?
An interesting debate showed up in my Twitter feed today. A few followers of China’s green energy policies have taken climate skeptic Bjorn Lomborg’s recent opinion piece in the Washington Post to task for using some information that undersells what China has accomplished.
I hadn’t read Lomborg’s article, which ran on April …
A New Scorecard Ensures That Clean Tech Stays Clean
I’m just back from the Fortune Brainstorm Green conference, wanted to note a new ranking of global solar companies coming from the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition (SVTC). It’s not a ranking of the best solar panel companies, or the ones with the biggest sales. Instead, SVTC has analyzed which solar companies do the best job of minimizing …