solar panels
lborkowski | April 24, 2013For this Workers' Memorial Week, the National Coalition for Occupational Safety and Health (National COSH) has released "Preventable Deaths: The Tragedy of Workplace Fatalities," a report that tells the stories of six workers killed on the job and promotes solutions to prevent other workers from sharing similar fates. The report notes that in 2011, 4,609 workers were killed, and construction was the deadliest industry sector, with 721 worker fatalities. The report tells the story of one construction worker killed on the job:
One day in April 2009, Orestes Martinez (29) and two co-workers…
purepedantry | March 2, 2009One of the impediments to the adoption of a solar alternative to fossil fuels is that solar panels are relatively expensive to make. A big benchmark to making them competitive is to get their cost of production per Watt produced comparable to energy produced by fossil fuels.
A company in Arizona, First Solar, claims to have broken the $1/Watt barrier for producing solar panels using panels made from cadmium telluride (CdTe). I am definitely impressed, particularly because the company aims to read "grid parity" with fossil fuels, meaning that they will be cost-competitive even without…