MakeHeat

SEBRING – A year ago Roger St. Laurent decided he was going to make his carbon footprint smaller.He started off by adding two solar panels to heat his water. Soon his cost saving ambitions grew and he added 22 solar panels to power his entire house.His last electric bill was $6.47.”Its unbelievable,” said St. Laurent, a retired Sebring resident.”I told my wife was this a good idea or what.”His 2,800 square-foot Sebring home is an energy saving machine. In the family room, beside the solar panel circuit board, hangs St. Laurents first zero balance electric bill.

via Resident goes solar, electric bill drops to nothing.

” A new technique developed by engineers for producing power-conducting plastics could slash the cost of making solar panels, say researchers.

With mounting concerns about global warming and energy demand, plastics could represent a low-cost alternative to indium tin oxide (ITO), an expensive conducting material currently used in solar panels, according to the researchers.

‘Conductive polymers (plastics) have been around for a long time, but processing them to make something useful degraded their ability to conduct electricity,’ said Yueh-Lin Loo, associate professor of chemical engineering at Princeton University, who led the research team.

‘We have figured out how to avoid this trade-off. We can shape the plastics into a useful form while maintaining high conductivity,’ Yueh-Lin Loo added. …” Read full story at:
http://sify.com/news/plastic-electronics-can-slash-cost-of-solar-panels-news-international-kednkcidcjd.html