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More than 40 years ago, scientists discovered that one of the proteins involved in photosynthesis, called Photosystem 1 (PS1), continued to function when it was extracted from plants like spinach. Then they determined PS1 converts sunlight into e...

"Michael Grätzel is a man with a mission. As the inventor of a low-cost solar cell, he wants to help the world avoid an energy crisis by harnessing the power of the Sun. His translucent Grätzel cells use a combination of titanium dioxide and organic dyes to convert sunlight into electricity, providing a cheaper and more environmentally friendly source of energy than silicon solar cells."

"To see the future of solar power, take an hour-long train ride inland from Shanghai and then a horn-blaring cab trek through the smog of Wuxi, a fast-growing Chinese city of five million. After winding through an industrial park, you will arrive at the front door of Suntech Power, a company that in the few years since its founding has become the world's largest maker of crystalline-silicon solar panels. Solar panels cover the entire front face of the sprawling eight-story headquarters. Nearly 2,600 two-meter-long panels form the largest grid-connected solar façade in the world. Together with an array of 1,800 smaller panels on the roof, it can generate a megawatt of power on a sunny day. It's expected to produce over a million kilowatt-hours of electricity in a year--enough for more than 300 people in China. In 2001, when Suntech was founded, all the solar-panel factories in China operating at full capacity would have taken six months to build enough panels for such a massive array. Suntech's first factory, which opened in 2002, cut that time to a little more than a month. Today, the company can make that many panels in less than one 12-hour shift. By the end of this year, the workers could be done by lunchtime. Suntech's production capacity has increased from 10 megawatts a year in 2002 to well over 1,000 megawatts today. Chinese solar manufacturing as a whole has increased its capacity from two megawatts in 2001 to over 4,000 megawatts."

The most efficient form of solar technology today is (arguably) extreme concentrated photovoltaics, essentially solar panels placed under a magnifying glass, but the problem with these systems is heat. Concentrated sunlight can melt silicon solar panels unless you include specialized cooling systems. Cooling technology costs money, and the panels require expensive tracking mechanisms to follow the sun through the day. MIT's new solar system bypasses the heat and traching problems all together.

The incandescent lightbulb that wastes 90% of the electricity as heat is dying, we all know that. But a new breakthrough in solid state lighting might also kill compact fluorescent lightbulbs (CFLs) faster than some expected. Scientists at Purdue University have figured out how to manufacture LED solid-state lights on regular metal-coated silicon wafers (more details below). What this means is: much lower costs.

The type of solar energy capture system you put on your home depends on your needs. If you want to go full tilt and generate usable electricity from your home's rooftop - and even possibly contribute power back to the larger grid - tried-and-true photovoltaic arrays might be just the ticket. A typical installation involves the panels, which are constructed of many individual silicon-based photovoltaic cells and their support structures, along with an inverter, electrical conduit piping, and AC/DC disconnect switches.

It looks like a scene from an old episode of The X-Files: As a red-tailed hawk circles overhead and a wild pronghorn sheep grazes in the distance, a dozen people in dark sunglasses move methodically through a vast field of golden barley, eyes fixed to the ground, GPS devices in hand. They're searching for bodies. In this case, however, the bodies belong to the endangered blunt-nosed leopard lizard, and the crew moving through the knee-high grain are wildlife biologists hired by Ausra, a Silicon Valley startup that's building a solar power plant for utility PG&E on this square mile of central California ranchland.

Solar energy is necessary for our transition to a sustainable economy, but a recent study in Geophysical Research Letters suggests that the industry may be harming the environment. Nitrogen Triflouride (NF3), a greenhouse gas used by the semiconductor industry to clean the chambers where silicon chips are produced, has 17,000 times the globe-warming capacity of CO2. Now researchers believe that emissions of the gas are up to 4 times higher than previously thought-perhaps as high as 16 percent.

The benefits of non-silicon photovoltaic materials are many and varied. Some are transparent, permitting the face of a wristwatch to generate power, the power source having zero footprints. Some, such as Dye Sensitised Solar Cells printed by G24i in the UK, generate electricity at narrow angles of incidence and even with polarised eg reflected light. DSSC designs can use light of all visible frequencies, not just sunlight.

SunPower Corp., a Silicon Valley-based manufacturer of high-efficiency solar cells, solar panels and solar systems, inaugurated its second solar cell fabrication facility, referred to as cell Fab 2, in the Philippines earlier this week.

The other process, called surface metallization, shrinks the size of the wires, or "fingers," on the front of cells. Instead of using the typical screen printing method, 1366 Technologies engineers have built a machine that's able to make the silver wires using electroplating and to place them on the cell. Shrinking the fingers from the typical 120 microns to 30 microns reduces shading on the cell and allows manufacturers to put more fingers on a cell to improve performance, Sachs said. The company also expects to be able to replace silver with copper to reduce cost, he added.

Wireless microcontrollers from silicon designer Jennic in Sheffield are being used to dramatically reduce power consumption in real world environments.