Innovative Residential Solar Financing
It used to be that if you wanted solar panels on your roof, you had to come up with the capital upfront, and that’s tens of thousands of dollars. Few people could afford that, even if they knew they would be saving money over the long term. But thanks to the innovative financing model of companies like SolarCity (who’s now the biggest residential solar installer in the U.S.), you can now go solar-powered and lease the system with money that you’d pay for electricity otherwise; basically, you get solar panels and your electricity bill goes down. Google has provided funds to finance these leases.
Software Used to Optimize Wind Farms
We can squeeze more out of the wind by designing better wind turbines and making them bigger, but we can also use sophisticated software to optimize all the variables. After all, you can’t really just guess what the best position for each wind turbine is, and once they are installed, they’re not moving, so you better make sure that things are optimized before the first shovel goes in the ground. It’s an elegant way to get more out of the technology that we already have; the very same wind turbine, if positioned in an ideal spot, can produce a lot more clean electricity over the many years that it is in operation.