Centerblue.org

This is a story I’ve been watching carefully, and now it’s official: a Silicon Valley start-up has succeeded in printing out thin sheets of solar panels for the cost of $1 per watt. That makes solar power cheaper that coal.

The company, called Nanosolar, has some powerful backers including Google–and it already has an 18 month backlog of orders. It basically prints films of solar panels on an aluminum type substance that is thin and flexible. These films can be deployed anywhere relatively easily.

So now the technology has proven that it is possible to out-do dirty fossil fuel–the only thing that remains is the will power and the investment dollars to make it happen fast. How about diverting some Iraq dollars to a far better cause than butchering people who don’t want us there, and getting a new president who gets that we need to immediately break our fossil fuel addiction?

You can help make it all happen in November 2008.

Deep in an Australian desert, an entrepreneurial renewable-energy company called EnviroMission is building a 1600 foot high solar tower that when activated will produce enough electricity to power 100,000 homes, the equivalent of a small city.

The concept is simple and based on the fact that hot air rises. The tower is surrounded by a two mile wide transparent canopy sloping up towards the tower that will superheat the nearby air. The tower itself will act like a vacuum, sucking the air up to the top at high velocity. The tower’s interior will be lined with wind turbines, which will generate the electricity.

Brilliant, but simple. An even taller half mile high tower is being planned for China, and EnviroMission is scouting the American Southwest for another location.

It’s innovations like this that will cut our oil dependence and global warming emissions, one step at a time.