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On earth, people are beginning to use the sun's light to power their houses, office buildings, and even gadgets. Now, outside of our planet, the sun's energy is going to be utilized for something else--space travel.

If NASA can successfully implement solar sails, which have been referenced in some sci-fi books of the past, using the sun's energy for space exploration may become a reality this summer.

The NanoSail-D team shows off their solar sail, after a deployment test in April.

(Credit: Science@NASA)

According to a report by NASA Science, the Marshall Space Flight Center and the Ames Research Center have teamed up to make history, by deploying its first solar sail, the NanoSail-D.

The solar sail, made of aluminum and space-age plastic, has the ability to harness the radiation of the sun for movement. Since outer space is frictionless, the sail could potentially accelerate forever, traveling much faster and much farther than a rocket running on fuel. Travel back to Earth would require a turn of the sail.

This technology isn't the first of its kind. In 2005, The Planetary Society launched a solar sail spacecraft, hoping to be the first successful launch. However, later that day, there was no confirmation that the craft, names Cosmos 1, had entered orbit, and the mission was deemed unsuccessful.

If NASA's spacecraft makes it into orbit, it will unfurl the solar sail from its pod, and "use solar pressure as a primary means of attitude control and orbital maneuvering," said Sandy Montgomery of the Marshall Space Flight Center, housed in Huntsville, Ala.

NASA said it means big things for space travel. According to Montgomery, the speed of the solar sail would make it feasible for a spacecraft to leave our solar system in a decade, instead of the 30 years it took for the Voyager missions to get to the edge of the solar system. In theory, rockets would be used for short missions and sails would be used for longer missions.

The power of the sun has also been used on NASA's recent mission to Mars. The Mars Phoenix Lander gets its energy to explore the planet from two solar panels built into the robot.

The NanoSail-D will travel to space onboard the SpaceX Falcon 1 rocket, launching from the Pacific Ocean as early as July 29. It will be brought on board in a 10-pound suitcase, and if successfully unfurled, it will measure at 100 square feet.

The sails will not harness enough energy to carry passengers in space, but Montgomery said with solar sails at thousands of square feet, "a number of interesting scientific missions are possible."

MENLO PARK, Calif.--If you want to make money as a venture capitalist, the consumer Web offers the highest, most consistent returns, according to Steve Jurvetson.

The low costs required to start these companies is a big part of the appeal, Jurvetson, a partner in Draper Fisher Jurvetson, said in an interview at the Nordic Green conference here this week. By contrast, biodiesel start-ups need millions to get through the experimental stage and then tens of millions to go into pre-production.

Networking also works well with Web companies. A successful word-of-mouth campaign that costs almost nothing can propel growth rates. Skype in a few years collected more than 309 million members. Again, this is something a solar company can't do. If Facebook had to climb on your roof for three days, erect several panels of solar-sensitive glass, and hand you a bill for $20,000 before you could use their product, it wouldn't be that big.

Historically, some consumer Web companies have also figured out ways to exploit inefficiencies in existing versions of similar products. When Hotmail came out, people generally paid for e-mail software. Now it is just a free service supported by ads. Phone service is transforming from a separate expense to a service included in an overall data package. (DFJ was an investor in Hotmail and Skype.)

So laugh all you want at Web 2.0 business plans. They do seem to work. But often, isn't easy to pick the ultimate winners. Veoh Networks seemed to have all the right elements, but it got eclipsed in video sharing by YouTube. Still, you can even make money on a second-tier company.

Interestingly, there's recently been an emergence of companies trying to merge Web functionality with alternative energy. Sungevity, for instance, has come up with a way to give consumers a solar estimate over the Web. Typically, that takes an appointment with a technician.

On other notes, Jurvetson, who sits on the board of Synthetic Genomics, outlined why biological processing may prove superior to thermochemical processing when it comes to making biofuels (Synthetic Genomics creates designer organisms that can metabolize light or waste products into energy or other things). Basically, it comes down to evolution. A metabolic pathway in a microbe may have evolved over millions of years. "I would bet on an evolutionary algorithm over a man-made one," he said.

Microbes often operate at room temperature, so processing, potentially can be more energy efficient.

Fat Spaniel Technologies, which makes software that lets you know how much power you're getting from that new solar system, has raised $18 million in another round of funding.

The company has created software with an intuitive interface that monitors the amount of electricity that a solar, wind or another alternative energy system generates, how much it saves in carbon dioxide emissions, and other information. The software (along with an associated service) effectively lets consumers and business owners justify their investments. Additionally, if the power coming from a solar panel drops suddenly or an battery pack stops working properly, Fat Spaniel's Insight Manager will ping someone in operations that a problem may have occurred. The data tabulated by the company can also be used to apply for energy credits. In California, the state audits the performance of commercial-sized solar systems above 50 kilowatts before it awards credits.

Chris Beekhuis

(Credit: Fat Spaniel Technologies )

It also brings a video game mentality to energy savings, founder Chris Beekhius has noted. Once you can see what you're wasting, you'll save more, he has said. (The company's name comes from his dog.)

Fat Spaniel has 1,000 installations in 12 countries so far, but most of the installations have been in the U.S., Beekhius said. Customers include Wal-Mart Stores and SunEdison, a utility specializing in green electricity. Fat Spaniel plans to use the funding to expand sales and marketing to international markets. Spain in particular, which has been growing rapidly, will be a target market.

In Fiji and Vanuatu, cellular companies have installed the software to track solar panels installed on remote antennas. Most of the company's customers are businesses, although it also has some residential customers. Fat Spaniel competes with Natural Logic.

Earlier, Fat Spaniel, which is one of the companies you see quite a bit at green tech conferences, raised $9.2 million. The investors include Applied Ventures, the venture arm of Applied Materials. Applied is expanding rapidly into the solar business by selling equipment and building factories for solar cell production.

You can store energy in chemical batteries. Pentadyne Power stores it in moving objects.

The Chatsworth, Calif.-based company has created and sells uninterruptable power supply (UPS) for data centers and large power consumers that stores energy kinetically. A 25-pound mass spins in a vacuum chamber at a high speed. When a utility needs a jolt of electricity, kinetic power is converted to electrical power. When it's not needed, the mass just spins to conserve its energy.

The company uses a relatively small mass to avoid potential mishaps (imagine what would happen if a large mass came unstuck from its moorings) and efficiency gains can be made through speeding up rotation.

"Kinetic energy equals mass times velocity squared. So doubling mass doubles energy storage, but doubling the rotational speed increases energy storage exponentially," the company's Web site reads.

The mass also levitates on a magnetic field like high-speed trains. This reduces mechanical failure as well as friction. The system has advantages over batteries because, among other reasons, maintenance is lower and the performance does not degrade over time, according to Pentadyne.

Utilities and data centers buy UPSes to keep their own power output level and prevent surges.

The power coming from the company's VSS+dc power supplies does decline from when it first provides energy to when energy is no longer required. That is, it puts out more energy in the first five minutes it is engaged than twenty minutes later. (Batteries do the same thing but generally have longer staying power.) To increase power, utilities can add more power supplies.

Energy storage devices, along with clean coal, are part of a market that is attracting investors but also eluding any easy answers. Conventional batteries improve with performance over time, but not at a regular rapid pace like semiconductors. Utilities are also clamoring for UPS devices because renewable energy sources like solar power fields and wind farms don't produce power at level, regular rates. Thus, everyone is looking for new ways to solve this problem.

Another notable company in the field of UPSes is Deeya Energy, which has a device called a flow battery. In flow battery, new electrolyte flows through the battery and the old stuff moves out, thereby eliminating the charge cycle.

Ben Rosen (who funded Compaq way back when) and Rustic Canyon Partners are investors in Pentadyne.

An astronaut fixed a torn solar panel on the International Space Station on Saturday in a risky procedure that involved riding a robotic arm to the damaged area in order to install cufflinks on the torn wing, according to the Associated Press.

In an emergency mission, spacewalker Scott Parazynski rode the 90-foot robotic arm to the far end of the shuttle complex as the crew extended the wing to its full length. He then clipped a hinge wire and, guided by fellow spacewalker Douglas Wheelock, installed the cufflinks. The 2.5-foot-long rip had occurred while astronauts were unfurling the new array on Tuesday, but NASA officials weren't sure how the damage was incurred, Reuters said.

The International Space Station is a research facility that is in orbit 240 miles above the Earth's surface. The station uses the solar panels to generate its electricity by capturing sunlight and converting it into power.

Check out this CNET News.com gallery for more photos of the International Space Station and the ripped solar array.

Update: Suntech Power Holdings, an aggressive, rising star in the solar world, said in a conference call yesterday that it hopes to build plants in the U.S. to help it break into the market here.

"We are currently in discussion with the governors of three different states who have been recruiting us to build factories," said Roger Efird, president of Suntech America, the company's U.S. subsidiary, according to a report on Greentech Media. Efird was speaking on a conference call for the Solar Energy Industries Association. More details will likely emerge on November 15 when Suntech reports earnings.

The factories could employ up to 1,000 people in the states in the next few years, Efird reportedly said.

Update: In a phone interview with News.com, chief strategy officer Steve Chan said that they company is in the decision making stage. "The question is how to get to the point where the costs make sense," he said. Suntech might not move to the stage where construction begins for one to two years.

BOSTON--When it comes to bragging rights and solar power, Google's on top: it has the largest corporate installation of solar-powered electricity yet.

But that apparently is just the beginning. The search giant is also considering other forms of renewable energy, according to Robyn Beavers, the director of environmental programs at Google. Google intends to generate 50 megawatts of electricity from renewable forms for its operations by 2012.

Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin charge a plug-in beneath its solar-powered car port.

(Credit: Google)

Beavers spoke at the Conference on Clean Energy here on Monday where she outlined a number of initiatives that Google participates in aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

Those include the 1.6 megawatt solar installation at its corporate headquarters in Mountain View, Calif. In addition to panels on building roofs, Google has constructed a car port with solar panels as a roof, under which people can charge up plug-in hybrids.

Asked whether Google was considering wind power, Beavers said she couldn't say. But she didn't leave much doubt that all forms of renewable energy are actively under consideration.

"Wind, solar, geothermal, fuel cells--you name it, we're looking into it," she said.

Corporate buyers are prized customers for the thousands of clean-tech start-ups that have cropped up over the past few years. Wal-Mart's decision to invest in solar has been a closely watched move and indicator of solar power demand.

Renewable energy projects like solar, wind or biomass can be financially interesting to businesses because they typically allow companies to get a contract with fixed energy prices, which acts as a hedge against rising rates.

In the case of Google, which consumes a lot of electricity to power its operations and data centers, its investment in solar electricity will pay for itself in seven and a half years. Its consumption from the grid has been reduced by 30 percent and its bills cut down a lot more than 30 percent, Beavers said.

GreenVolts, which is commercializing technology from the national labs to better concentrate sunlight, has received $10 million in funding.

The company, based out of San Francisco, has a concentrating system for photovoltaic panels that effectively lets its put the power of 625 suns onto a solar panel. The high concentration levels thus allow it to shrink the real estate required for a single power plant. As a result, the power plants can be built closer to the consumers--i.e. people living in the city or suburbs--which in turn cuts down the cost of transmission lines.

Several other companies are working on concentrators for photovoltaic panels and some have received far more money. SolFocus, which can bring you the power of 500 suns, has raised $52 million. The GreenVolts concentrator is more efficient, the company claims, because it casts minimal shadows onto the solar panels, among other reasons. The concentrator also rotates with the sun. Greenvolts licenses its basic technology from the national labs.

The company has a contract to build a two megawatt facility in Tracy, California for Pacific Gas & Electric by the fourth quarter of next year.

GreenVolts? Series A round of funding was led by Greenlight Energy Resources and included Avista, a solar company.

GreenVolts CEO Bob Cart came up with the idea of going into the solar biz after sailing around the South Pacific. There, he helped locals fix solar panels discarded by sailors who had passed through earlier. Distributed power sort of struck him as an interesting opportunity.

If you run the dryer in the daytime and live in California, expect to pay for the privilege in the future.

Peter Darbee, CEO Pacific Gas & Electric, said the utility is currently running a smart meter trial at 25,000 homes and one of the goals is to figure out how to price peak power. Electricity demand is highest in the afternoon and PG&E is trying to figure out much the utility will have to charge for the power to curb demand. By curbing demand, PG&E can cut back on greenhouse gas emissions and, possibly, cut back on power plant construction.

So far, the early data indicates that the answer is high.

"It will require a significant amount of price premium for peak power to shake that behavior," he told an audience at the Dow Jones Alternative Energy Innovations Conference taking place in Redwood City this week.

To this end, the utility is applying to the state's public utility commission for permission to impose a price hike for peak power. Darbee further added that he is confident that the PUC will "approve a rate delta that is pretty sharp."

Texas and other states are experimenting with ways to curb peak power. In Texas, Centerpoint, a utility, is offering customers discounts if homeowners allow the utility to install sensors that will prevent energy-gobbling appliances like dryers from working during the daytime.

PG&E and others are also installing interfaces to household gas and electricity meters so that homeowners can analyze how much power they are consuming. PG&E's current meters can give homeowners a snapshot of energy use every 15 minutes. That may be sped up to a real time snapshot, Darbee added.

Some consumers may object to these plans, claiming that it involves government intrusion into the market, but look at it another way. PG&E is just trying to analyze what the market will bear. (This is my opinion. Darbee didn't say that, by the way.)

Other gems from Darbee:

Wind can only probably account for 15 percent of California's electricity, and 20 percent at the theoretical best. Wind tends to die down during the hottest part of the day here, so there's an imbalance. The utility will spend $14 million on an experiment to see if wind power generated in British Columbia can be transferred here. If it works, the amount of wind power could increase significantly.

PG&E likes solar thermal power too. It has already signed a contract for 550 megawatts of solar thermal power with Solel, an Israeli company that is increasing the size of its solar thermal fields in the Mojave Desert. (Solel has been out there for two decades.). The utility will announce new contracts with new companies in the very near future, he added. Many expect some of that new business to go to Ausra or Brightsource Energy.

Solar thermal energy now costs about 10 to 12 cents a kilowatt hour, Darbee said, and will likely drop to 10 cents or less. Electricity from a gas-fired plant goes for around 8 cents. "We're coming into the range of conventional generation," he said.

Don't expect a cap-and-trade system for carbon to be installed in the U.S. for at least 18 to24 months. You need a new president first, probably, he said. Even if a cap system is installed in two years, we won't see the effect for five years from now, he added.