GE

Cutting the cost of solar power isn't all about a better solar cell.

General Electric today announced two research projects to make installation of solar panels easier by standardizing the components, such as racking systems for solar panels. The $5.9 million in research is part of the Department of Energy's SunShot Initiative to dramatically cut the cost of solar photovoltaics.

The price of solar electric panels has steadily gone down and is poised to fall more in the face of a global price war in solar. But as much as half of the cost of solar is … Read more

General Electric announced yesterday it will spend $600 million to build a solar factory in Colorado, giving it the means to re-enter the solar business in force.

The company said the factory in Aurora will have the capacity to produce at an annual rate of 400 megawatts, or enough to power 80,000 U.S. homes. It will create 355 jobs in Colorado after completion and another 100 solar-related jobs at GE's research facility in upstate New York.

Production will start early next year of solar panels with cadmium telluride thin-film solar cells, the same thin-film material used by … Read more

General Electric and Nissan, keen on advancing plug-in vehicles, are looking for ways to make electric cars part of a home energy system.

The two companies on Friday signed a two-year research collaboration to speed up deployment of electric vehicles, an extension to an agreement announced last year.

One project focuses on tying electric cars' batteries into GE's energy management system. Nissan is already developing a Nissan Leaf battery charge point, which can provide backup power to homes.

The research will look at whether stored energy can automatically supply a house during peak times, when electricity rates are higher. … Read more

WASHINGTON D.C.--Best Buy plans to start selling home energy management products in stores later this year, creating a channel to introduce consumers to emerging grid technologies.

The consumer electronics retailer in late October will start a trial in which three stores will have dedicated areas to demonstrate and explain a range of home energy technologies, said Kris Bowring, senior director and platform lead for home energy at Best Buy, at the GridWeek conference here yesterday.

The choice of products has not yet been finalized but there will be a variety, ranging from simple whole-house energy monitors to a … Read more

Too busy to keep up with the tech news? Here are some of the more interesting stories from CNET for Wednesday, September 7.

• Police are looking into the case of the missing iPhone. The news of this keeps unfolding.

• HTC sues Apple for using Google patents. "HTC will continue to protect its patented inventions against infringement from Apple until such infringement stops. We believe that we have an obligation to protect our business, our industry partners and our customers, who love using our products," Grace Lei, HTC's general counsel, said in an e-mailed statement to CNET.

•Even … Read more

General Electric is making a foray into green buildings by investing in Project Frog, which uses various technologies to speed up new building design and construction.

GE Energy Financial Services will be one of four companies to invest $22 million in Project Frog, GE said today. The other three are venture capital companies: Claremont Creek Ventures, Greener Capital Partners, and RockPort Capital Partners.

The money will be used to expand Project Frog's sales, and GE will install one of the company's prefabricated buildings at the GE Learning Center in Ossining, N.Y.

Project Frog uses software and construction … Read more

First Solar, GE Energy Financial Services, and Verve Energy announced today a partnership to build Australia's first utility-scale solar plant.

At 10 megawatts, Greenough River Solar Farm will be the largest operating solar plant in the country, and the solar energy it generates will be put to a very specific use.

All of its energy will go toward supporting a seawater desalination plant in Western Australia currently under expansion.

The Southern Seawater Desalination Plant in Binningup, Australia, which is run by the WA Water Corporation, has signed a 15-year contract to purchase all of the solar energy generated from … Read more

Web giants and mega-size cloud-computing providers garner most of the attention when it comes to highly tuned and optimized data center designs. In April, Facebook shared the specifications for the servers it builds as part of an effort its calling the Open Compute Project. More recently, Facebook engineers have written about testing an extreme multi-core chip design from Tilera. Google has long been known for taking unique approaches to server and data center operations and design, although the company is generally secretive about the specifics.

This sort of hyper-optimization around scale was supposedly going to rapidly drive all computing to … Read more

The term "thin and light" has a flexible meaning in the laptop world. Currently, to be truly thin, a PC must be in the same range as the MacBook Air. Still, plenty of thicker 13-inch laptops still exist that would have been considered thin a few years ago, but seem merely normal today. The Asus U31SD-A1 is just that sort of laptop. Its thickness is more akin to a 13-inch Apple MacBook Pro, but Asus' laptop lacks an optical drive. We reviewed a nearly identical Asus U31JG laptop a few months ago, noting that it was a solid … Read more