Solar lights look just like regular lights on the outside… but are way cooler on the inside. Each solar light has its own mini solar panel, which transforms sunlight into energy during the day while powering the solar light at night. This makes solar light installation easy, because no wires are needed! All you have to do is stake or cement it into the ground.

Because of their easy setup, solar lights are often used in gardens, giving them the name solar garden lights or solar yard lights. In addition to pathway lighting, solar lights are also great for accent lighting and spotlights.

And contrary to popular belief, solar lights are not expensive. New advances in photovoltaic and light technology are making solar garden lights cheaper than ever. Factor in the savings from your free electricity and no cost installation, and it’s easy to see why solar lighting is a great investment.

Ready to start landscaping and saving money? The first step is to purchase your solar lights. Like everything else these days, many of the best deals are found online, so that’s where we recommend you start. Once the solar lights arrive, you can unpack and install them in less than fifteen minutes.

Now wasn’t that illuminating? ☺

By Arlie Krigel

All about Solar Ovens

Solar ovens are an inexpensive, easy, and fun alternative to conventional cooking. Also known as solar cookers, solar ovens require no electricity and are used around the world by citizens in developed and developing countries alike.

A good solar oven can cook just about anything on a sunny day, from a sizzling hot stir-fry to a slow-cooked stew. But even a simple solar oven can bake brownies or bread. All it takes is some recycled cardboard, old pieces of foil, and a healthy dose of patience and sunlight.

How solar ovens work

Solar ovens use shiny reflectors to direct sunlight into dark boxes and pots. There, the light is trapped and transformed into heat. Although several hundred different versions use these principles, three main types of solar cookers exist.

• Solar Box Cookers: The simplest, most common solar ovens. Often made out of cardboard boxes and foil-lined reflectors, these solar cookers reach low to medium temperatures of around 200 to 350 degrees Fahrenheit. They’re the most similar to real ovens, since they heat up slowly and have room for multiple pots and pans.
• Parabolic Solar Ovens: The hottest, most dangerous solar ovens. More like stoves than ovens, these complex solar cookers use a parabolic shape to reflect all sunlight onto a single point, creating an intense heat of over 600 degrees Fahrenheit. They heat up quickly, but require frequent readjustment and are difficult to construct.
• Solar Panel Cookers: A combination of box and parabolic cookers. Lightweight and portable, these solar ovens are ideal for backpacking and small spaces. They use foil-lined cardboard walls to reflect sunlight into dark pots, which are then enclosed in inflated oven bags to build up heat.

Ready to start cooking? Make or buy your own solar oven

In just a few hours, you can build your own powerful solar oven out of recycled household materials like cardboard, foil, plastic bags, and glue. But if building makes you wary, there are also many great commercial solar ovens available for purchase too.

Happy cooking!

Solar power usage is growing in the United States, Europe, and Australia, but what about developing areas that don’t even have access to basic electricity? Now that University of NSW PhD student Nicole Kuepper has developed a cheap and simple way of producing solar cells in a pizza oven, these areas might get a chance to use solar power too.

Photovoltaic cells are generally expensive to produce and require large manufacturing plants. But Kuepper’s technology needs relatively low-cost items such as ovens, ink-jet printers, and nail polish. Her iJET solar cells also use a low-temperature process.
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How does driving an unsustainable fuel hog around contribute to the adoption of solar power? While some purists might point out that RVs are great fuel hogs and a waste of energy, nevertheless, they do offer an educational opportunity to help spread the acceptance and familiarity with solar power.
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This project is a bit more technically oriented than most of the other projects we have featured so far. It comes from the book Solar Energy Projects for the Evil Genius by Gavin D. J. Harper. These projects demonstrate a wide range of topics that are related to solar energy. The book has 50 projects in it ranging from the practical, such as the solar powered cell phone charger we have excerpted here, to the educational, like one demonstrating concepts connected to solar energy such as a crystal growing (using a sugar solution) which illustrates the concept of growing silicon crystals for manufacturing solar cells, to the esoteric, with an ammonia-based solar-powered ice maker.

Gavin also shared his thoughts about Evil Geniuses, solar power, and more in an interview with EcoGeek.org as part of the EcoGeek of the Week series, which was also presented here on Green Options. The following project is an excerpt from this book:

It’s the same old story—just when you want to talk on your cellphone, the battery goes flat and the conversation is irretrievably lost! Invariably, you haven’t got your phone charger on you, and even if you did have it wouldn’t be an awful lot of help as the chances are there is no power for miles around . . . At the Centre for Alternative Technology, U.K., there is a solar-powered phone (see picture at right); while this is powered by clean green energy, it can’t claim to be very portable!

In this project, we are going to build a circuit that will provide a supply capable of powering either a cellphone or PDA charger. A PDA is about the limit of what you can charge using small cells, a laptop charger is probably a bit ambitious.

One of the problems with trying to build this circuit is that finding a suitable connector for many mobile phones is a real problem. While Nokia makes life easy by providing a simple jack that can be readily obtained from many component suppliers, many other manufacturers rely on proprietary connectors which are nonstandard and awkward to source.

For this reason, we have based this project on hacking a cellphone car charger.

There are two schematics here for projects that tackle the project from slightly different angles. The first method involves creating a solar array that will provide above 12 V—regulating this supply to 12 V, and charging the device via a hacked “car charger” (Figure 1). The other device is suitable for where a USB type charger is available—this is ideal for USB mp3 players, PDAs and mobile phones, most of which now come with a “data” lead. We have an array of solar cells, which charges a couple of batteries when there is spare power; a voltage regulator then turns this into a clean 5 V, which can be used to drive the device (Figure 2). The advantage of this circuit is that even if there is not a lot of sun— or it is night-time, you can pop a couple of freshly charged batteries in (maybe from your solar charger?) and things will start working.

Standard charger wiring diagram (Figure 1)

Car chargers are designed to allow you to plug your phone into your vehicle’s cigarette lighter or accessory socket. They are cheap and readily available; however, they rely on having a car present to allow you to charge your phone!

There are a couple of ways of making this project. You can either build the project as a box into which you plug your car cellphone charger, or, if you are a little more adventurous, you can take apart the cellphone charger and integrate it properly into the box. The plus side of keeping the two pieces separate is that you can use the car cellphone charger as a stand-alone item, or, you can power it from the “solar box.” The plus side of integrating it all together is that it makes for a neat, stand-alone project and the two parts cannot become separated.

USB Charger wiring diagram (Figure 2)

Note: A note on cigarette lighter sockets—the usual wiring scheme is that the casing of one of these sockets is connected to the negative terminal of the battery.

Excerpt from Solar Energy Projects for the Evil Genius: 50
Build-It-Yourself Projects by Gavin D.J. Harper, copyright McGraw-Hill,
2007.

Kids today. You let them play with a LEGO MINDSTORMS kit and what do they do? They build a solar powered AC outlet and 12 volt DC power port. At least, that’s what some enterprising students at New York City’s Little Red School House and Elizabeth Irwin High School did in the courtyard of the Brooklyn Ecoeatery restaurant.

The Off-Grid Outlet has a tracking mechanism to make sure that it always points towards the sun. The outlet’s users can control the solar panel using switches, and can watch the relationship between the panel and the energy captured via embedded displays.

So who will actually get to make use of the roving outlet?
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Two groups of Pensacola kids are off to Washington, D.C., after taking top honors in the National Energy Education Development Program (NEED). Among the achievements that helped get them there: s’mores baked in a solar oven and Blackout Wednesdays in which students turned off classroom lights and relied on sunlight instead.

The Suter Energy Savers, a team of fourth-graders at Suter Elementary School, won at the elementary level for their work on 28 conservation projects in all. Their efforts included collecting $200 worth of recyclables, distributing flyers at area coffee shops urging customers to switch to compact fluorescent lightbulbs and making s’mores in a solar oven.

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One of the most common arguments against large-scale use of renewable energy is that it cannot produce a steady, reliable stream of energy, day and night. Ausra Inc. does not agree. They believe that solar thermal technology can supply over 90% of grid power, while reducing carbon emissions.

“The U.S. could nearly eliminate our dependence on coal, oil and gas for electricity and transportation, drastically slashing global warming pollution without increasing costs for energy,” said David Mills, chief scientific officer and founder of Ausra.

You may be wondering, how will we have electricity at night or during cloudy weather?
Will we use large banks of batteries or burn candles?

The ability to utilize solar thermal technology after the sun sets is made possible by a storage system that is up to 93% efficient, according to Ausra’s executive vice president John O’Donnell. (more…)

Problems with silicon-based solar electricity (PV)

In the world of solar electricity generation, the price and shortage of silicon have been barriers to wider adaptation of solar photovoltaic (PV), especially as demand continues to rise. Solar PV’s efficiency in converting sunlight to electricity has also been criticized. That’s why non-silicon-based alternatives are especially attractive. I spoke with Gregg Clevenger, CFO of Infinia Corporation, on Monday (February 11) to find out what his company is up to and why renewable energy advocates are all atwitter about it.

According to Gregg, “We set out to address climate change and went back to ground zero with our Stirling engine product, to develop it into a design that is simple enough to be mass-produced widely and to generate solar electricity at 20-30% of the cost of solar PV.”

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Las Vegas, Nevada - The current period of sustained growth in the American Southwest is putting tremendous demands on important resources like water, wildlife habitat, and, with the light beaming from the top of Las Vegas’ Luxor Hotel as a reminder, electricity. Nevada currently gets about 90% of its electricity from fossil fuels, and the majority source fuel is natural gas. As natural gas prices are predicted to rise, a debate is stirring about whether the state needs to build new coal-fire power plants to meet current needs, or whether it should tap its renewable resource potential. For that reason, Acciona Energy could not have picked a better time than today to dedicate their new 64 MW concentrating solar power plant (CSP) in Boulder City, Nevada, less than thirty miles from the Las Vegas strip. And with a star-studded collection of speakers like Ed Begley Jr., NASA astronaut Dr. Sally Ride, and Apple co-founder and tech whiz Steve Wozniak, the Spanish-based Acciona dedicated the facility in true Las Vegas style.

The 300-acre site in Boulder City uses parabolic trough collectors to generate electricity. The 760 mirrored troughs track the movement of the sun’s path, and their 184,000 mirrors face the sky and concentrate the sunlight to a large metal and glass receiver in the middle of the trough that holds circulating oil. The oil travels to heat exchangers, which heat water and create steam that spins a turbine.

At 64 megawatts (MW) of generation capacity, Nevada Solar One is the largest CSP plant to be built in 16 years and it makes Nevada the largest per capita producer of solar power in the country. After roughly a decade of little growth for the industry, CSP is coming back strong, as is further evidenced by today’s announcement by Abengoa Solar that they will be building a 280 MW concentrating solar facility in Arizona.

The absence of any new CSP over the last 16 years leaves many people scratching their heads and asking themselves, why? (more…)