Biggest U.S. Solar Panel Farm Opens

clipped from www.reuters.com LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - The biggest photovoltaic solar panel array in the United States opened this week at a U.S. Air force base in Nevada and the biggest array that sells power to an electric utility began operation in Colorado, companies involved said. A 14-megawatt solar farm covering 140 acres opened at Nellis Air Force Base near Las Vegas, Nevada on Monday. It will generate 30,000 megawatt hours a year and will supply about a quarter of the electricity used at the air base. About 12,000 people live and work on There are bigger solar farms in the United States, but they are concentrated solar thermal projects that use mirrors to heat water rather than to use panels to convert sunlight to electricity. The Alamoso solar project in the southern part of central Colorado, near the border with New Mexico, will generate about 17,000 megawatt hours each year, enough no-emissions power to serve about 1,500 homes.

Start-Up Sells Solar Panels at Lower-Than-Usual Cost

clipped from www.nytimes.com

Nanosolar, a heavily financed Silicon Valley start-up whose backers include Google’s co-founders, plans to announce Tuesday that it has begun selling its innovative solar panels, which are made using a technique that is being held out as the future of solar power manufacturing.

The company, which has raised $150 million and built a 200,000-square-foot factory here, is developing a new manufacturing process that “prints” photovoltaic material on aluminum backing, a process the company says will reduce the manufacturing cost of the basic photovoltaic module by more than 80 percent.

Nanosolar, which recently hired a top manufacturing executive from I.B.M., said that it had orders for its first 18 months of manufacturing capacity. The photovoltaic panels will be made in Silicon Valley and in a second plant in Germany.

Nanosolar has focused on lowering the manufacturing cost

Nanosolar

claims to be the first solar panel manufacturer to be able to

sell solar panels for less than $1 a watt

Would You Marry for Money? (And If So, How Much?)

Tell the truth, would you marry for money?

clipped from blogs.wsj.com Robert Frank’s wealth column ooks at the growing number of men and women who want to tie the knot for assets, rather than love. According to a survey by Prince & Associates, a Connecticut-based wealth-research firm, the average “price” that men and women demand to marry for money these days is $1.5 million. The survey asked people nationwide: “How willing are you to marry an average-looking person that you liked, if they had money?” The column sites an infamous personal ad posted on Craigslist this summer, in which a twentysomething New Yorker who described herself as “spectacularly beautiful” wrote that she was looking for a man who made at least $500,000 a year. She’d tried dating men earning $250,000, but that wasn’t “getting me to Central Park West,” she said. (One investment banker replied that since his money would grow over time but her beauty would fade, the offer didn’t make good business sense.)

Arctic Is Screaming; Global Warming May Have Passed Tipping Point

clipped from www.foxnews.com An already relentless melting of the Arctic greatly accelerated this summer, a warning sign that some scientists worry could mean global warming has passed an ominous tipping point. One even speculated that summer sea ice would be gone in five years. Greenland's ice sheet melted nearly 19 billion tons more than the previous high mark, and the volume of Arctic sea ice at summer's end was half what it was just four years earlier, according to new NASA satellite data 2007 shattered records for Arctic melt in the following ways: 552 billion tons of ice melted this summer from the Greenland ice sheet A record amount of surface ice was lost over Greenland this year Alaska's frozen permafrost is warming White sea ice reflects about 80 percent of the sun's heat off Earth Earth has hit one of his so-called tipping points "At this rate, the Arctic Ocean could be nearly ice-free at the end of summer by 2012, much faster than previous predictions."