I’m in Huntington Beach this weekend taking a little r&r and didn’t realize how much of the housing here is built like the townhomes above: with an urban feel — tightly together with at least 2-3 levels.  These townhouses are located on 19th Street in Santa Monica and called Green on 19.  Three are already sold with the remaining two ready to go.  Green on 19 was designed by Jesse Bornstein to provide modern living while supporting the global community’s need for energy efficiency. 

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Martin Eberhard calls it "Solar Synergy" — his own phrase for the benefits derived from having an electric car and a home that's powered by solar photovoltaics.  Eberhard was a founder of Tesla and he just received his shiny new Founders' Series Roadster.  It's an incredible car, don't you think?  Eberhard explains the synergistic benefits to having a 5.2 kW photovoltaic system (dead link removed) and all-electric Tesla Roadster (dead link removed).

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Not unlike John F. Kennedy’s goal to land a man on the moon, Al Gore challenges the nation to produce every kilowatt of electricity through wind, sun, and other earth-friendly sources within 10 years.  Here are some links …

[+] The (Annotated) Gore Energy Speech [NY Times]
[+] Former V.P. Lays Down a Green Gauntlet [WSJ]
[+] Gore sets ‘moon shot’ goal on climate change [AP]

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It seems like there’s a new, cutting-edge technology in the limelight everyday and today is no exception.  You’ve heard of CSP — concentrated solar power, right?  Well Sopogy has been in R&D for several years perfecting their MicroCSP technology.  They developed the above pictured application for commercial, industrial, and small utility uses.  MicroCSP takes traditional, large scale, open faced, desert, parabolic trough CSP panels and shrinks them down to 25% of the size.  The trough is between 12 and 18 feet long and is meant for distributed energy solutions from 200 kW to 20 MW.  It can be used on-site, too, whether on a roof or adjacent to a building. 

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The innovators of this new technology, if they get it into production, may just be the green building revolutionaries of tomorrow.  At the end of the week, MIT engineers published research of new technology showing that the sun’s energy could be harvested from a large area, such as a window, and concentrated at the edges by solar cells.  With this so-called luminescent solar concentrator, the potential for low-cost electricity seems almost within reach.  Technically, here’s how it works: 

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Earlier this week, GM announced that they were adding the world’s largest, rooftop, solar photovoltaic power installation to its car assembly plant located in Zaragoza, Spain (a factory that manufactures Opel vehicles for sale in Europe).   When the project is completed in the fall of 2008, the solar installation will have 85,000 solar panels covering about 2,000,000 sf of roof space.   Bloomberg further reports that the $78.5 million installation will avoid about 7k tons of emissions per year.

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