By Dan Holohan

I once asked a friend how he had managed to become so financially successful. “I study what knuckleheads do,” he explained, “and then I do the opposite.”

Here is a recipe for complete and utter disaster. It contains wicked acts people in the heating industry have actually done, or have, on certain days, at least considered doing. Use it wisely. To be successful, study it well, and then do the opposite.

1. Have all your price quotes end with the numbers 666.

2. When the woman of the house comes downstairs to see how you’re doing, smile sweetly and say, “That’s a lovely dress you’re wearing, Mrs. Cleaver.”

3. Replace a steam boiler, but don’t flush out the old wet returns.

4. Never perform a heat loss calculation. Heat loss calculations are only for people who have had no real world experience. It’s always better to guess.

5. Get either of these vanity license plates: ICHEATU or ROBUBLND

Read the entire list.

By: Jonathan Hiskes

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have essentially shut down an innovative program that helps Americans green their homes. Here’s more on the story:

Jeanine Cotter, CEO of California solar installation company Luminalt, has a good explanation of what keeps homeowners from investing in rooftop solar and retrofits that cut energy waste. In her experience, people trust the technology. They’re eager for improvements that will save them money on monthly bills. The real barrier is the credit shortage caused by the mortgage crisis.

“The biggest impediment is upfront cost,” she said in an interview. “It used to be that people were concerned that the technology wouldn’t work. Now that Wal-Mart, Macy’s, and Safeway have solar arrays on their roofs, people have a lot of confidence in the technology. And they trust that over time they will get a more than adequate return on their investment.

“But for homeowners and contractors, the regular credit markets are not as robust, to speak mildly, as they once were. Credit is tight for small businesses. Credit is tight for people trying to get equity out of their homes. So all of the traditional ways that people would be able to make home improvements aren’t available anymore.”

That’s why Property Assessed Clean Energy (PACE) is so useful. By using government credit to borrow money from the private sector, the financing tool gives homeowners access to much-needed credit. By tacking the cost of improvements onto property tax bills, it spreads out payments over time, letting them keep pace with electricity bill savings.

This is also why it stings so much that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac prohibited the nation’s first PACE programs in letters to lenders.

When Cisco DeVries, the Berkeley mayor’s chief of staff, designed PACE three years ago, it was a local-government innovation that offered what private finance markets hadn’t: a workable loan product for home-energy projects. Now two corporations from the finance industry are undermining the local solution.

As countries around the world seek ways to balance supply and demand of energy, so-called “smart grids” and related home automation sensor technologies are stepping up to fill the need. Bluetooth low energy technology promises to change the way we think about power consumption.

Imagine creating a network of tiny wireless sensors in your home that monitors energy costs and controls electrical appliances to save energy and reduce cost. That’s the idea behind the concept of a “Smart Grid” – a two-way monitoring system that allows consumers and utility providers to better control electricity supply and demand. Making that type of intelligent network a reality is closer than you might think.

It’s no secret that, over the past few years, increasing demand for electricity has strained electrical grids to the point of near or total failure. High-profile blackouts, like the August 2003 blackout that crippled New York City or the blackout that disrupted services in Italy and Switzerland just a month later, and overworked systems like the one in California, have made consumers and utility companies painfully aware of the need to reduce energy consumption.

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SunPower Corp., a Silicon Valley-based manufacturer of high-efficiency solar cells, solar panels and solar systems, announced today that it has produced a full-scale solar cell with a sunlight-to-electricity conversion efficiency of 24.2 percent at its manufacturing plant in the Philippines. This is a new world record, confirmed by the US Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Lab (NREL), for large area silicon wafers.

“This new world record demonstrates SunPower’s ability to extend our lead in manufacturing the world’s highest efficiency solar cells,” said Bill Mulligan, vice president of technology and development for SunPower. “Our patented and proprietary, high-efficiency solar cell technology drives down the cost of solar energy by increasing the energy production from each solar panel.”

Improved cell efficiency reduces the levelized cost of energy by increasing the energy production from each wafer manufactured into a SunPower solar cell. For the same reason, increased efficiency reduces the cost per watt and cost per kilowatt-hour for feedstock and materials, depreciation and other manufacturing expenses, installation time, land and system operations, and related maintenance.

“As we celebrate SunPower’s 25th anniversary this year, I am thrilled to see the company achieve technology milestones that were inconceivable only a few years ago,” said Dr. Richard Swanson, SunPower founder and chief technology officer. “SunPower’s research and development and engineering teams have increased cell efficiency by a full four percentage points over the last five years while radically driving down manufacturing costs. We are extremely proud of their continued success.”

By: Patrick McCully

The big hydro industry always used to consider the “new renewables” as Mickey Mouse technologies that could never match the billions of kilowatt hours humming through the lines linked up to world’s megadams.

But times have changed. Big Hydro is learning that lots of small projects can add up to a lot more juice than a small number of very big ones.

In 2002, new installations of wind power worldwide exceeded the capacity of new big hydro for the first time ever. Wind power engineers installed more megawatts than their big hydro competitors three times over the following six years. And in 2009, it looks like wind power blew (so to speak) big hydro right out of the water.

Solar installations are rising even faster than wind, but from a much lower level. Solar installers added nearly half as many panels in 2009 as the year before, making solar the world’s fastest growing power source.

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