Solar-Geek Gathering Grows

Noah Kaye, director of public affairs at the Solar Energy Industries Association, wrote in an email today that last week’s Solar Power 2006 Conference & Expo in San Jose lured more than 7,000 registered attendees. “Turnout at Solar Power 2006 shattered our expectations,” he wrote. That’s a far cry from the 1,100 who attended last year, and it doesn’t even include the additional 2,000 who attended the public night October 17.

Those numbers make Solar Power the largest solar conference in the world so far, with Dresden’s European Photovoltaic Solar Energy Conference and Exhibition—which previously claimed the title—boasting 6,500 attendees this year. It’s another sign that some see California as the next big market for solar, while worrying that the German market—by far the largest today—could be shrinking as the payment solar-power owners earn for delivering electricity to the German grid drops 5 percent each year.

Want to know more about the conference? Here’s a slideshow of the exhibit hall, and here are the stories I wrote from San Jose:
Three Huge Solar Trends
SunPower to Launch Large Panel
Solar Gets Home Financing
Google Goes Solar
Khosla Touts Centralized Solar
Schwarzenegger Likes Cleantech

Want to compare it to the Dresden conference? Take a SolarWorld factory tour, check out a Q-Cells party, or read my stories:
Solar: 3 Reasons for Optimism
Q&A: Creating as SolarWorld
ErSol Buys Into Thin Film
Blitzstrom Buys More Thin Film
Sun Cools New Refrigerator
Solar Energy for the Poor
Clean Energy Goes to the Movies

Five Googles?

At Solar Power 2006 in San Jose, Khosla Ventures founder Vinod Khosla said the first state to pass "real" clean policies will attract entrepreneurs and new businesses. "[They will bring the] biggest boom in job growth and the economy that we will see, because energy is far larger than the Internet," he said. "We will see five Googles in the first state to implement these." Who will become the first Poogle (power Google) or Cloogle (cleantech Google)?

jon stewart on net neutrality

Still funny.

Power Hungry

Several readers have asked me where they can get Energizer's Energi To Go chargers. Here's the deal: only the cell-phone chargers are on sale right now. Energizer originally planned to put the audio and gaming packs on retail shelves this month, at the same time as the cell-phone chargers, but the company says the launch has been postponed. Energizer's trying to enhance the efficiency of those packs so they will be smaller and require fewer batteries, a spokesperson said. The company hasn't announced a new launch date. As for the cell-phone chargers, here's a list of where you can buy them.

Bored by Apple

When Intel CEO Paul Otellini introduced Apple Computer's marketing guy Phil Schiller on stage at the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco, I thought, "Cool. Wonder what Apple has to say." After all, it was the first time an Apple ambassador showed up at IDF. Instead of an interesting talk or even some amazing demo, Phil went on and on about what Intel-inside machines Apple launched this year. My eyes glazed over. A history lesson. But Paul didn't disappoint. He laid out an aggressive product offering timeline for the next five years.

Holy Hybrid!

Honda unveiled a clean diesel engine today that it says will be as clean as a gasoline engine. In a story for Red Herring, I wrote that such technology could turn up the heat in what one analyst has called a “holy war” between diesels and hybrids. But a Red Herring reader, Ranjit Mathoda, pointed out that the two technologies aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive. "Why not a diesel engine with a hybrid power train?" he wrote in an email. Good point. General Motors told me last year it was testing a diesel-hybrid Sprinter Van, although nobody has announced plans to commercialize diesel-hybrids. As Mr. Mathoda wrote in his blog, diesel-hybrid technology isn't cost-effective right now. Still, the potential is certainly exciting.

Play with Fire

We at Red Herring are thinking about creating a running tally of laptops that burst into flames as a result of faulty batteries from Sony. Ever since Dell recalled 4.1 million laptop batteries in mid August, stories about dangerous laptops have kept on coming. The latest is an incident at Yahoo and features, yes, a Dell laptop. Oh wait. I just read about a Lenovo ThinkPad caused a stir at LAX when its owner ran out of a plane during boarding because the laptop was smoking--it later caught fire. Three airlines--Korean, Quantas, and Virgin Atlantic--now bar passengers from using laptops unless they take off the battery packs and use the power outlets near their seats.

Better NAND

The king of memory chips, or Samsung, if you prefer, is proud to unveil a 32-Gigabit NAND chip that uses high-k dieletric and design to boost performance. The company says this chip can make 64-Gigabyte memory cards possible. That means more storage for your movies and songs. Speaking of entertainment, everyone is speculating what Apple Computer will unveil tomorrow at a product launch dubbed "Showtime." Eydie did a nice piece about Apple's march into the living room, so check it out.

Solar for the Poor

Our intrepid energy reporter Jenn Kho is in Germany this week for the world's largest solar conference, where she has uncovered cool stories about turning sunlight into electricity. Her latest is about a discussion on making solar energy affordable for developing countries (see Solar Energy for the Poor). An intriguing proposition, no? Some of the fast-growing developing countries also are energy-hungry, so turning them away from conventional power-generating technologies is a good idea. Think of China's massive Three Gorges Dam, for example. Not that industrialized nations such as the United States shouldn't do the same, of course.

Intel: Labor Day is Over

A day after a long Labor Day weekend, Intel CEO Paul Otellini said he plans to cut the company's workforce by 10,500, or 10 percent, before the middle of next year and slash cost by $2 billion 2007 and $3 billion in 2008. These are the latest cost-saving measures he had promised Wall Street, which responded by saying, basically, "Yeah, that's nice, Paul. But really, you need to do more."

If It's Good Enough for PS3 ...

... it's good enough for a supercomputer. IBM, forever trying to find new outlets for its Cell processor, is building a supercomputer that will sport Cell and AMD's Opteron. The machine, called Roadrunner, is destined for a U.S. government lab, and it would faster than the world's reigning supercomputer, IBM's own Blue Gene L. So either way, IBM wins. Speaking of Cell and PS3, is it any surprise that Sony is delaying the game console launch, in Europe for now? It's like watching Prez Bush mispronouncing words--you know it's going to happen again and again.

WiMax on a Train

CalTrain "Baby Bullet" locomotive at 4th & King, originally uploaded by party of the third part.

Forget Snakes on a Plane.

Soon commuters in the San Francisco Bay Area will be able to enjoy high-speed wireless on the train.

Caltrain said last month that it has become the first rail line in the United States to test wireless broadband service on trains traveling up to 79 miles-per-hour.

The commuter rail service, which zips commuters between San Francisco and Silicon Valley, worked with Intel and Nomad Digital to test a high-speed wireless service based on WiMax, a long-range cousin of the popular WiFi wireless technology.

With the ‘proof of concept,’ completed, Caltrain said it will now work on the engineering required to make access available along 50-miles of rail line. Caltrain estimates the project will cost less than $334,000.

As a result, the train may soon have driving beat two ways: you can drink and watch streaming video.

Kill Your Television (It's Time to Buy a New One)

televisions-000820, originally uploaded by rabinal.

Like old-fashioned tube TVs? Too bad. A great piece in the New York Times on the end of an era.

"The end of picture-tube TVs is accelerating faster than a lot of us expected," said Randy Waynick, a senior vice president for Sony Electronics. The company, which offered 10 tube models two years ago, will pare that number to two next year, both of them wide screens. "Picture-tube TV sales reductions were far greater than forecast," Waynick said.