Solar trees

When design meets nature:

“One of the clues towards our future survival is the concept of bio-mimicry, where we study nature, learn from its intelligence and copy it one way or another.”

Read the full story on CNN.com

Municipal Solar Power Plants

At Nanosolar^TM, they believe that meaningful scale for solar will come from power plants. These power plants consist of rows of solar panels and will feeding electricity directly into the municipal power grid. For example a few MW municipal solar power plant requires about some acres of land and serves a city of several thousand homes. So with a solar power plant in each of hundreds of cities, a GW of power is delivered locally to where it is needed. In a plants like these, solar panels are mounted onto rails above the ground so that grass and flowers can continue to flourish, because rainwater can drop through between adjoining panels. Moreover in dry regions, the panels even benefit the ecosystem by increasing the moisture level in the soil. In addition municipal plants integrate very naturally into the existing landscape as well as the existing electricity grid. By feeding power directly into the distribution grid, they avoid the transmission grid, and also avoid the expense of a substation for down-transforming transmission voltage to municipal voltage.