Month: April 2017

The first 100 days: No foreseeable impact to solar homeowners in the near future. A couple months ago, we wrote a blog that made some educated guesses about how the solar industry would (or would not) change under the new administration. We surmised that while Trump’s Energy First plan focused on rejuvenating fossil fuels, the renewable energy was not immediately threatened because of its job creation – a cornerstone of President Trumps campaign. We did not directly touch on predicting environmental impact at the time, which is a separate topic itself. However, our original notion that renewable energy sector will not change much. Over the next week or so there will be a litany of reviews and critiques of Donald Trump’s first 100 days in office. What started out as a mistranslation during FDR’s first term, the first 100 days of a presidency has been a litmus test for a sitting president ever since. While there is a wide base of policies and promises that will be subject to scrutiny, this article will focus on the impact Trump’s first 100 days will have on solar owners and the renewable energy market. These first 100 days began with a whirlwind of executive orders. It seemed that drastic change was on its way, and fast. Shortly after the first week however, the pace of the orders began to taper off and after...

This is the first post of a three part series covering the topic of How Solar Panels Work.  In our line of work, we cover many curious questions about the technology of solar panels. So we breakdown the energy conversion process to give homeowners a better understanding of the power being converted from their rooftops. How it started: The space program gave rise to the solar panel Solar power may seem like a new cutting edge concept, but people have been using energy from the sun for hundreds of years in many different form. However, solar panels as we know them today were invented by Bell labs in 1954. While the invention garnered attention the solar panel didn’t really reach prominence until its use in the space program. In 1958 solar panels began being utilized for satellites because of their ability to extend the life of missions by providing a form of energy generation in the vacuum of space. Nearly a decade later researchers began working on “terrestrial applications” to see if solar panels could work for us here on earth. Many prominent companies like General Electric and IBM also entertained the idea. But one problem still persisted, it was too expensive. The price and efficiency would not become commercially viable for another 25 years, but like much of our home technology today it had its humble beginnings in the...