Did you know that many scientists would like to discover light-catching materials in order to transform more of the sun’s power into carbon-free electrical power?

A new study described in the magazine Applied Physics Letters in August this year (released by the American Institute of Physics), explains how solar energy could potentially be collected by using oxide elements that include the element selenium. A team at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, California, inserted selenium in zinc oxide, a relatively affordable substance that could make more effective use of the sun’s power.

The team discovered that even a relatively small quantity of selenium, just 9% of the mostly zinc-oxide base, significantly increased the material’s effectiveness in absorbing light.

The primary author of this study, Marie Mayer (a 4th-year College of California, Berkeley doctoral student) states that photo-electrochemical water splitting, that signifies employing power from the sun to cleave water into hydrogen and oxygen gases, could possibly be the most fascinating future application for her efforts. Utilizing this reaction is key to the eventual creation of zero-emission hydrogen powered automobiles, which hypothetically will run only on water and sunlight.

Journal Research: Marie A. Mayer et all. Applied Physics Letters, 2010

The conversion effectiveness of a PV cell is the percentage of sunlight energy that the photo voltaic cell converts to electricity. This is very important when discussing Photo voltaic products, because enhancing this efficiency is vital to making Photo voltaic power competitive with more conventional sources of energy (e.g., non-renewable fuels).

For comparison, the very first Photo voltaic products converted Read the rest of this entry

Click on video to see United First Financial co-founders' story

In February of 2008 my husband and I met with our financial planner and he presented us with information about United First Financial® and the Money Merge Account^™ program.  We were impressed with what the software could do to help us pay off debt quickly, but we felt that the price tag of $3500 was too high of a price to pay, even though we were told at the time that the software program would pay for itself within a few months.  We decided at that time against purchasing the Money Merge Account and went on with our lives as normal, not making much headway to eliminate debts.

Four months go by and now it’s June. One day on the radio we heard an advertisement about a new program that let you purchase solar power electricity through a lease program and have it pay for itself in 10 years through the reduction in your electric bills. We also learned that there were solar tax credits and solar tax incentives from our city and the federal government.

Because of the solar tax incentives and “going green” is the right thing to do, my husband and I decided that we wanted to look into having solar power electricity installed for our home.

For over a month we had seven different solar Read the rest of this entry