Good article today from our friends at MJ about the state of the solar power industry after all the hoopla regarding the Solyndra funding issue and other items that have dragged down national discussion of solar power development. Check it out and comment below with your thoughts.
The past couple of months have been grim ones for anybody who favors federal support of renewable energy. First, Solyndra declared bankruptcy, providing gleeful conservative skeptics with weeks of anti-solar headlines. Then this week Beacon Power, a flywheel storage company, followed Solyndra into bankruptcy, and an Energy Department watchdog told Congress that the DOE had been ill-equipped to quickly distribute the $35 billion in new funding it got from the 2009 stimulus bill.
So today let’s take a break from the gloom and look instead at some good news on the federally funded renewable power front. A couple of weeks ago, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) announced a “game changing” new development in solar panel fabrication. It’s not sexy: It’s called the Optical Cavity Furnace, and it’s a new way of manufacturing solar cells that uses optics rather than radiant or infrared heat. There are a couple of big benefits to this new technology.
