2010 may well become known in the renewable and environmental community as the year of the solar battles. Battle is definitely brewing in California, with the main focus at the moment on Brightsource. Just before the new year, Senator Feinstein introduced a new bill that she hopes will help balance preservation of the Mojave desert with recreation and renewable energy development.

We created for you a map of all large scale solar projects, existing and proposed, as well as study zones for potential projects, in the Southwest of the U.S.

View Solar in the Southwest of the U.S. in a larger map

Check out FirstLook for an attractive interactive display of wind and solar resource data at http://firstlook.3tiergroup.com/ .

Hawaii's Parker Ranch is one of the largest cattle ranches in the US, and one of the few that also ranches the sun and wind. Parker ranch uses solar and wind energy for their water pumping systems. We talked with Michael "Corky" Bryan, who has the fascinating title of "Vice President of Livestock". To him, this is just a fancy title for a cowboy. Corky shows us around the solar and wind ranch. If footage is a little shaky at times it is because we did a lot of the talking in his large white pickup truck, of course.

As many other organizations in the Bay Area, Stanford is gradually increasing its solar energy resource. Energy engineer Scott Gould leads the solar initiatives. Scott talks about various solar projects on campus, including one that partly supplies the president's house with electricity. Also in this interview an explanation of why Stanford has not done more.

The interview was organized and conducted by students in my Energy 102 class at Stanford for their term project. The main interviewer is Kenji Tanabe.

I love this interview with Scott Elrod, manager of the hardware systems group at the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC, for short). PARC, under the creative and enthusiastic leadership of Elrod, has ventured into the clean technology area. Recently, PARC worked together with the start-up SolFocus on the development of a new type of solar PV system, which is as effective as existing solar PV technology but requires a much smaller volume of silicon per unit area.

In this first interview, we discuss solar energy, PARC’s interests in this area, and Elrod’s pet projects.

We visit Scott Elrod (PARC) again to have a look at the new concentrated solar PV system designed at PARC with Solfocus, a start-up incubated at PARC. It’s a clever device that is designed to reduce the amount of silicon needed in PV systems per Watt produced.

I like this Palo Alto Research Center and will visit them again to look at other innovative designs.

Alternatives can help create a sustainable energy future. The most promising long-term alternative energy sources are wind and solar: there is plenty of it, greenhouse gas emissions are low, and the required surface area is relatively small — especially when compared to biomass. In this talk, SmartEnergy’s Margot Gerritsen says we also can’t afford to dismiss nuclear energy if we want to lower harmful emissions.

This talk was part of the “End of Oil” debate, at Stanford University in March 2006.