While just in the laboratory stage of development, the creation of an 80% efficient photovotaic material at Idaho National Laboratories is fantastic news. (Currently photovotaics top out at 40% efficiency.)

The major hitch for this technology at the moment is that there is no way to capture the energy from the cells. The developers do have a theoretical path forward to solve this problem, and it is their next task.

Today, Nanosolar announced the availability of solar panels at a cost of just $1 per watt.

Apparently while everyone else in the industry was off finding ways to make solar panels more efficient (an essential task, for sure), Nanosolar decided to see what breakthroughs they could make in the areas of manufacturing. The results are stunning.

To put this one-dollar-per-watt announcement into perspective, the current cost of solar panels is, at best, over $4 per watt. So an array that formerly would have cost $50,000 might now run just $15,000 (there is equipment involved beyond just the panels) and pay for itself in 15 years. This beats the pants of the old payback period, which was: never.

Unfortunately, their production capacity is already allocated out for the next 18 months, but we’re going to have to take a more serious look at incorporating this type of technology into our home sooner rather than later, me thinks.

Let the revolution begin!

[Update 2007.12.24: I’ve heard an unsubstantiated rumor that the cost of panels will now be 90 cents/watt. (No mention of this on the Nanosolar site.) Here’s a good overview video of Nanosolar’s thin-film technology.]

A press release from LED Lighting Fixtures today announced they had received confirmation from NIST that their prototype “PAR 38 self-ballasted lamp” produces as much light as standard 65-watt incandescent bulb (658 lumens) while consuming just 5.8 watts of power.

As pricing is still unavailable it’s hard to say if this is finally the bulb that will make LEDs practical for the general public.

I continue to be quite confident LEDs are the future of lighting and dearly wish we had just skipped development of mercury-laden compact-fluorescent bulbs and had put that effort behind LED technology.

Since we hope/plan to have solar panels one day (which produce DC voltage) and since LEDs operate most efficiently on DC power, we’re hoping to run DC wiring to our outlets and ceiling fixture in anticipation of one day making the switch to more DC powered fixtures and appliances.

In a previous post about using Bullfrog instead of buying Solar Panels, I used 5% as the amount by which energy costs would increase each year. I also noted that it was probably unfair to apply this rate to Bullfrog since the costs of wind power and especially solar power would likely decline over time.

Oddly enough, energy prices seem to have dropped for both Toronto Hydro AND Bullfrog Power. I didn’t make careful note of the energy cost breakdown last time, so here it is for future comparison:

Other than the rate for power from Bullfrog, the energy pricing information comes from Toronto Hydro’s web site. In addition to the above amounts there is a flat ‘customer charge’ of $12.68 ($13.44 with GST) per 30 days.

So the standing question is whether you can afford a small markup to your electricity bill to know that your power usage is coming from low-impact hydro, wind and solar sources, instead of nuclear, high-impact hydro, and coal? It seems like a ridiculously small price to pay, to me.

Today an article in Reuters indicated that annual solar panel production will double for the next two years!

As I’ve previously discussed here, I think solar panels are not the best value for your sustainable dollars (yet). But I do think few technologies have as much potential to disrupt the way we think about… anything powered.

It’s hard to imagine what sort of changes a society would go through when power generation is so widely distributed. And since there will be no need for it to travel long distances, we should probably expect to see a rise in DC appliances. The only reason I know of to use AC is that DC can’t travel over a wide distribution network.

I may be overly optimistic, but I think the article underestimates how quickly solar will be adopted. To me, most people seem keen to both end their relationships with their utility companies and implement technologies that make them more self-sufficient.

I now think we might just have solar panels on our own house as early as 2010. (Edit: Reading that now, it probably is overly optimistic: 2012.)

We’ve talked about Bullfrog Power here before, but we have only just today signed up with them. (Ooops.)

We just had that down as one of those small tasks we’d take care of once the house was built which was going to get underway any day now for the whole year. But since we’re now officially on house-building-hiatus, our plans have been getting shifted around.

Another task we put off last year was replacing our awful, scary fridge because we thought “We don’t want to have to move a brand new fridge into storage, when we could just dispose of this one when construction starts, and buy a new one when we’re ready to move in.”

This fridge was so old it proudly boasted an Energuide rating of 1742kWh/year. But that was when it was new. We had put a UPM EM-100 usage meter on it (~$25 @ Canadian Tire) and found it was actually running at a rate of almost 2400kWh/year. You would think the fact that our old fridge used almost $250/year in electricity would be incentive enough to get rid of it right away, but for some reason waiting just a couple more months seemed like a good idea at the time (and the next time, and the next time).

Our new fridge (18.2 cu.ft.) is a fantabulous Whirlpool ET8FTEXRQ (note to marketing: not the catchiest name) and uses just $39/year or 412kWh of electricity. So, our electricity bill just came down by about 40%! We selected this particular fridge because it is the close cousin of the 21 cu.ft. ET1FTEXRQ which is currently the top rated fridge at Consumer Reports.

A call to Whirlpool’s “Customer Experience Centre” (yes, it’s an awful name but the staff there were top notch) revealed that, mechanically, the ET1 and ET8 are the same fridge, just different sizes. In case you go looking for it yourself, you should know that the ET8FTEXRQ has been replaced by the ET8FTEXSQ. I did not call them to ask what the difference was.

We made the semi-mistake of buying it from Lastman’s Bad Boy because they had a great price on the fridge we wanted, but I’ll blog about that experience another day.

We had gotten our hopes up pretty high, thinking that we were actually going to be able to build this year, despite the amount of time we had already lost. Also because the general contractor who initially said they thought they could do the job for ‘budget + 10-15%’ came back with a number closer to ‘budget + 80%’.

Even then we weren’t completely convinced we weren’t going ahead: we realized that perhaps we could do it if we could subsidize the mortgage with a rental unit in the basement. This would remove a big part of the functionality of the house we had designed, but it seemed like the only avenue we had to travel if we wanted to build.

The problem with this plan, of course, is that it meant spending even more money (on finishing the rental unit in the basement) to be able to afford the already-over-budget house. We eventually came to the realization that we would be moving outside our financial comfort-zone to proceed with building this year. Plus if we did get into a position where we had to sell the house, we’d never be able to get what it was costing us (once you factor in the what we paid for the land + construction cost).

And there was another issue: when our build-plans started going sour in May, we decide not to put off having kids until after the house was built because we were worried something like this might happen. So part of our urgency to build right now was that we would want to move in to the house in February/March just around the time the baby was born.

While the builder thought this might be possible, we figured that was probably wishful thinking on both our parts. (Possible: I’m sure it is. Probable: I’m sure it isn’t.) We really didn’t want to be stuck somewhere other than a place we call home in those first few months.

We also heard from the junior-architect something we hadn’t heard (or at least can’t remember hearing) before: For 3 months after construction ends there is an enormous amount of fine particulate in the air that acts like “sandpaper for your lungs.” (Oh perfect. That’s where we — and our baby! — want to live. In winter, with the windows sealed shut. Cozy! Just us, our lungs, and the sandpaper.)

Indoor air quality is very important to us since Stacey has asthma. We’re trying to find ways to reduce off-gassing from the building materials as well. By waiting until next year, we’re hoping to have the time to let the house air out some before taking occupancy.

The junior-architect suggested we’d really want to get a secondary high efficiency air filter for the first 3 months, but I think we could reduce the time necessary to clean the air by going in a couple of times per day with a high-pressure air compressor and blasting the walls, floor, etc. to get the dust into the air and thereby into the air-filter.

So, that’s where we are at: waiting for a better time to build. It was also mentioned to us that a report released in the U.S. was predicting that housing starts would drop 50% (!) in 2008. If this does happen, its effects could extend north, and lower construction prices here.

ColorCharts.org hosts a ridiculously useful online tool that will match one manufacturer’s color to an identical (or very similar) color made by any other manufacturers.

Researchers as the University of Denmark have developed a new way to cool using magnets. The technique is completely silent and 60% more energy efficient than traditional compressor-based refrigerators.
The first prototypes, however, will not be available until 2010.

We’ve been big fans of Aerogel (aka “Solid Smoke”) for many years and have even considered making some of our own as a fun project.

If you haven’t heard of it, Aerogel is the lightest solid known to man. If you were ti take a fish tank full of Nitrogen gas (pure nitrogen is slightly heavier than air so it will just sit in an open-topped tank) you can ‘float’ Aerogel blocks on the surface of the nitrogen. It also happens to have remarkable insulation properties.

The last we heard, Aerogel had a small defect that prevented it from being used widely: it was quite fragile. But the fine folks at Aspen Aerogels have apparently gotten that problem solved and now offer a wide range of Aerogel products, including some specifically for building construction.

We’ve dropped them a note to ask about pricing. It would be incredible if we could actually manage to incorporate this material into the shell of the house.