Edison Puts Roofs to Good Use

by Andrea Millar — April 12, 2008

Although solar power presents practical challenges, it remains an extremely compelling avenue of producing clean energy. Once you start thinking in solar terms, a sunny day can seem like a wasted opportunity for tapping that big goldmine in the sky. But finally, power company Edison, boasting a 17% renewable energy source margin, has developed plans to skim some of the sunlight off that beautiful southern California sky by installing large-scale solar panels on the rooftops of buildings. By using 2 square miles of paneling on leased space, Edison hopes to produce 250 megawatts to power 162,000 homes.

It isn't clear yet how much support Edison is getting from state agencies to fund this project--present estimates still place the generation of solar power above fossil fuels in cost--but it is clear that the production needed to supply a project of this scale will mean big dollar signs for the solar industry. Ideally, a job this big will in turn drive the cost of production down. And with gas prices still rising, that means a better chance for price parity in the near future, and further development funds allocated to solar technology.

A point of interest in the Edison retiling project is the type of photovoltaic cell used; one of the issues of present-day solar projects is its dependence on polysilicon, a dwindling resource. Naturally, there are plenty of people tackling this, including San Jose-based Nanosolar, which bases its power-gathering capabilities on a film of copper, indium, gallium, and selenium. From a glance at their blog, they didn't land the Edison deal, but they made enough people in Germany excited with their innovation to cement a project overseas.