solar

This story should be enough to – at the very least – give Chevrolet Volt detractors pause: a solar-powered home that pays its owner delicious double dividends. An Orlando, FL man used the cash from selling solar-panel-generated electricity back to the grid as a down payment for ...

The name Peder Norby should be familiar to anyone who's been involved with BMW's all-electric MiniE program. The driver of MiniE #183 has put 36,000 sun-powered miles on his EV and has long been a strong proponent of getting more people to make the shift to electric vehicles. His latest target? ...

The Federal Transit Authority has awarded $117 million to 46 transit projects across the nation. The projects were selected from 266 applications to the competitive 2011 Sustainability Initiative. Criteria for choosing these projects included their ability to reduce U.S. dependence on oil and to ...

Electric vehicles can work hard, as the 2012 Redstone-Sun Cup (not pictured) should prove when it roars off as part of next year's Baja 1000 in Mexico. The challenge is not just to race across rough desert terrain – without roads – for 1,000 miles, but to "spur the best and the ...

Fro the second year in a row, Tokai University can lay claim to the winner's laurels in the 2011 Veolia World Solar Challenge, a sun-powered race challenge in Australia that winds over 1,800 miles between Darwin and Adelaide using only 5 kWh of on-board energy and the rest beamed in directly from ...

What's the greenest way to get from point A to point B? Is it by airplane or train? How 'bout by bus? Or is a grid-charged electric vehicle the greenest mode of transport? Well, the answer depends on the length of the trip. Is it 350 miles? If so, then a bus seems to be the greenest means to get ...

Oftentimes when we cover Robert Llewellyn, it's his plug-in-centric show Fully Charged that's in the spotlight. However, this time 'round, it's Llewellyn and his Nissan Leaf that come into focus. It's no secret that Llewellyn is a plug-in fan and that he is truly brilliant at conveying his ...

The oft-outspoken chief executive officer of Tesla Motors, Elon Musk, is chomping at the electric bit again. While speaking at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in San Francisco recently, Musk, a 40-year-old billionaire recently profiled by Bloomberg Risk Takers, shared an enthusiastic vision of ...

Volkswagen is getting ready to open its pocketbook in a thunderous way. Financial Times Deutschland reports that VW will turn its eye for renewable energy to the sea, wind and sun, joining in on VW group partner Audi's ongoing renewable energy projects. VW will reportedly dish out two billion ...

What do you need to generate a lot of electricity from photoelectric solar cells? A lot of surface area. What is a lot of the surface of the United States covered in? Roads. Put those two ideas together, and the idea of turning the nation's highways into solar farms doesn't sound too odd, does ...

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) continues to support a wide variety of alternative energy project and has finalized a $967-million loan to support construction of the Agua Caliente Solar Project in Yuma County, Arizona. This is a big one. Once complete, the 290-megawatt photovoltaic facility ...

Running an electric car on the power of the sun is many an EV enthusiast's dream. Ford isn't the first company to combine EV charging with solar energy, but it is trying to make it as easy as possible to go from driving on imported oil to using extremely local energy. Through a new partnership ...

Over the course of the next two years, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) will invest $50 million into its SUNPATH (Scaling Up Nascent Photovoltaic At Home) program. The DOE says this multi-million investment is to assist the U.S. in reclaiming its competitive edge in solar manufacturing. ...

General Motors has invested $7.5 million and taken an undisclosed stake in Sunlogics, a global solar energy systems provider. This significant lump of cash will help Sunlogics establish facilities in Michigan and Canada. Additionally, GM Ventures says it signed commercial agreements with ...

Infineon Raceway, formerly Sears Point Raceway, is a 2.52-mile track located near Sonoma, CA. The course features a complex series of twists and turns, dramatic changes in elevation and is host to one of only five NASCAR races run on road courses. All this fuel-burning action doesn't mean the ...

Mark Hildebrandt developed a fondness for solar energy back in the 1970s. Over the years, it became his vocation. So, it's fitting that he counts on the sun to charge his Chevrolet Volt, right? Hildebrandt, owner of Sunventrix Solar in Saline, MI, says that: