I hope the new infusion of capital at Twitter allows them to hire some more staff and improve their abysmal customer support organisation.     

Last July the OpenSolar Twitter account (@opensolar) was suspended.  I was told that I had cross-posted duplicate updates across multiple accounts.  In fact, I had done no such thing.  Twitter just arbitrarily shut down the account due to a bug in their own system.   When I tried (on 5 different occasions) to raise a support ticket protesting their action - my tickets were immediately "Resolved" and then "Closed" the moment after I created them.   That's some quality support. 

I *did not cross post anywhere else.*  I was completely floored at being suspended.  It was particularly difficult because I'd spent the previous six months acting as an honest broker - making posts about misinformation and lies that were being spread on the web and places like Twitter by those who sought to greenwash or fool people.   For all my efforts, Twittter was able to singlehandedly destroy this reputation with a click of a button.  Or more likely, a bug in their system.

I can handle a computer bug here and there.  But a useless support organization that fails to address issues like this and worse even - tries to shepherd users through various steps only to get nothing back in return is too much to handle.  FAIL.  For me, this was a "Click off" moment when I really started to wonder why I had been investing so much time and effort using Twitter in the first place. 

I went through various stages - anger, denial, delusion, contempt, defeat and indifference. Today I tried raising another ticket with Twitter support and got back an automated message from them saying they'd be sure to try to look into it within the next 30 days.  Yeah, sure guys.

So to all the legions of "social media gurus" who appear to crop up out of nowhere, like fungi on a dewy grass - I say, think twice before investing too much of your time in Twitter, or Facebook or any single large new media entity.  You may think that you're "establishing your online identity" or something but the reality is that at any moment they can arbitrarily take that away from you for no good reason and you often have no recourse.  I guess you get what you pay for. If it happened to me, it could happen to you.

Happy Tweeting.

In June, the OpenSolar team embarked on a road trip across the southwestern United States along fabled Route 66.  The route takes you through the epicenter of solar thermal power plants in the Mojave desert region, including the original SEGS plants at Kramer Junction, Harper Lake and Daggett.      



Central station solar thermal is hot these days and there are gigawatts of Mojave desert solar projects signed up and currently under development.  But the SEGS plants at Kramer Junction and Harper Lake are still "collectively known as the world's largest solar site with a generating capability of 310 megawatts". 

The nine original plants were built by solar power pioneer LUZ from 1984-1991 and "have generated more than 11,000 gigawatt-hours and produced more than 1.7 billion dollars of revenue over the past 22 years."  The plants remain profitable today but the business climate for solar in the US has not always been so kind.  Luz filed for bankruptcy in 1991.



Florida based FPL Energy currently operates the plants and offers public tours once a week.  Drop in unannounced though and you'll have to get creative if you want to see much.  Meanwhile, Luz has re-emerged from the dead as Luz 2 - aka Brightsource Energy and are currently developing a bigger and better concentrated solar thermal plant nearby.

For the solar enthusiast, visiting these original SEGS plants feels like a religious pilgrimage.  The plants are quiet, clean and beautiful.  This is Erin Brockovich country so the abandoned, arid desert conditions are a little creepy, but seeing these solar power plants in person is inspiring.  You will be astounded by how much solar potential we have in the southwest United States.  Some argue that the large footprint of a solar power plant makes it inefficient in terms of land usage, but the reality is that there is NOTHING here.  It's an endless, barren land that few organisms can survive in amidst the harsh climate. 

Covering the entire Mojave desert region with massive solar plants would be a boon to the dismal local desert economy and would establish the United States as the world leader of solar power.  It could ultimately help save the rest of us from ourselves, but if the licensing history of SEGS (3-7,8,9-10,11-12), or recently proposed initiatives to stop solar development in the Mojave are any indication - we may end up spinning our wheels into oblivion. 

With so much at stake, well meaning citizens and politicians in the southwestern United States need to take a hard look at themselves and their own hypocrisy.  Is saving a few desert tortoises or "keeping Route 66 looking like it did in the 1930s" really worth the millions of casualties and displaced people around the world that we are sure to encounter if we don't act soon to address global climate change?

"The term "Smart Grid" refers to the networked application of digital technology to the energy delivery and consumption segments of the utility industry..." 

Today we released an update to our California Solar Initiative data navigator.  The new version is much more efficient and provides additional ways for you to visualize the residential solar industry in Calfornia.

Some of the biggest changes include the introduction of treemaps to navigate the vendor landscape and heatmaps to see where they're active across the state. 

The treemaps allow you to see the dominant solar companies in California in a single glance.  You can browse by the most popular installers, sellers, manufacturers, models or cities.  Click on a company at any time to see all of its completed solar installations that received funding through CSI since 2007.

We hope that you'll find this interesting information.  This week, our development team is hard at work getting our initial solar platform release ready for our alpha testers to take a spin next week.  If you're interested in seeing what it's all about - direct message @opensolar and I can send you an invite.

Check out our CSI Browser and let us know what you think!

Shortly after launching the Open Solar blog, I got a message from @kenoatman informing me that the ads we were serving included links to the "earth4energy scam".  I checked the site out and agreed that we did not want to be associated with it.  I updated our ad code to block any ads that linked to earth4energy and was quite pleased with myself.  Score one for the white knights of the Internet.

Well - not so much.  You see, this earth4energy scam (aka homemadepowerplant aka homemadeenergy aka DIY Green Energy aka Efficient Planet) runs deep on the Interwebs.  Like so many zebra mussels, it appears to have infested the solar web - to the point where it's virtually impossible to have a solar site with ads that aren't involved in the scam.  Their lucrative affiliate program offers web marketeers about $34 a head for anyone they can lure into taking the bait.  That's a 75% referral fee on a downloadable product that costs nothing to reproduce.  Enter the piranhas...

Google "earth4energy" and you'll get about 260K results.  Try "earth4energy scam" and you get almost 26K results.  The particularly insidious part is that it's actually the affiliates who are targeting the "earth4energy scam" keyword phrase.  Try it yourself.  Many of the sponsored links are intentionally manipulative with tag lines like "Don't Be Fooled By Earth 4 Energy Check This Before You Waste Money".  When I tried, all 11 sponsored links pointed to affiliate sites claiming that earth4energy actually works great - just click here to buy now!  It's almost as if they're targeting the keyword "earth4energy scam" to obscure any real feedback from actual users.

Peter Parsons does an excellent job explaining the scam in detail.  A little digging reveals that Earth4Energy comes to us from Brisbane, Australia and is part of a growing series of "green lifestyle products" offered by Drew aka Swerd from http://www.ezcbcash.com/ (that's EZ Clickbank cash).  Check out his latest offerings or read the Earth4Energy affiliate handbook for tips on why you should hide your affiliate codes when you promote e4e!  As it happens, Earth4Energy is a top grossing clickbank product, sandwiched somewhere between shady get rich quick scams and tips on how to lose weight without diet or exercise.

What's got me pissed off about this whole thing is the breadth of this scam.  I feel like I'm playing Whac-A-Mole with each new affiliate that comes up trying to push this crap on my website.  I personally take offense at their misleading claims and think it's shameful that they are willfully taking money from people for something that can be easily downloaded for free and does not deliver on its promise. 

It is our duty, as concerned netizens to call BS when we see it and I call BS on earth4energy.  Like so much greenwashing, their cynical approach (note their tag line - "We can make a difference...") only serves to obscure the reality and mislead the public (eg. "Why pay $1000's for solar or wind power when you can build your own professional system for less than $200?"). 

I'm not suggesting that you do this, but I imagine that if web users went to their favorite search engine, entered "earth4energy" and started clicking on all the affiliate ads en masse - the stream of ez clickbank cash would come to a crawl.  Maybe then I'd start seeing ads for real solar products on my blog again.

Have you been the victim of a "green" Internet scam?  Please leave a comment and share your story.

The extension of federal solar investment tax credits, coupled with state and city rebates are making it easier than ever to go solar these days.  Thinking about taking the plunge?  Would you be interested in seeing a list of solar installations in your area and how much each one cost per installed watt?

Our CSI Browser lets you navigate completed installations that received incentives through the California Solar Initiative from 2007 - 2009.  Solar panel installations doubled in California in 2008 and this tool helps show you how it happened.

One of the most interesting features is the price per watt graph. Price per watt is a key metric for measuring the real cost of an installation - yet as the CSI Browser shows, actual price per watt values vary greatly from one PV system to the next.

In the above graph we can see the price per watt for completed CSI installations registered as "Self-Install" over the past two years.  The values range from $3 to $13, with the average price for a self install hovering around $8/watt ($6/watt after the CSI incentive).

When you click on an item in the list, or a node on the graph - it will pull up information about that particular installation.

The description includes the system size, total cost, the CSI incentive payment and a description of the system - who it was installed by and what solar components it uses.  You can filter the installation results by clicking on the installer, PV module, inverter or manufacturer.  Check out the highly fragmented installer business or look up market share for the major solar manufacturers.

The CSI data is not perfect and the browser is a work in progress, but it should give you a sense of what we're up to at Open Solar.  We've got an open platform that we use to gather data about solar installations. Over the next several weeks we'll be introducing new features and functionality which will bring Open Solar to the networks of Facebook, Yahoo!, MySpace, Google and LinkedIn.

Information like average price per watt by installer make for interesting data points, but the real story behind every solar installation is a human one.  The goal of our Open Solar social app is to make it extraordinarily easy for users to capture that story and share it with friends and solar fans alike. 

Try the CSI Browser - and tell us what you think.

With the inauguration of Barack Obama last week, change has finally come to America.  The era of Dick Cheney style, cloak and dagger secrecy has been replaced by a new whitehouse.gov and the stage set for a dramatic change in US energy policy. 

In a testament to what America became under Bush, today Barack Obama had to instruct the EPA to start protecting the environment.  Thankfully, allowing California to impose limits on vehicle carbon dioxide emissions is only the first step.  

Amongst other things, the administration intends to ensure 10 percent of our electricity comes from renewable sources by 2012, and 25 percent by 2025.  According to the Department of Energy, renewable energy supplied 8.4% of total U.S. electricity generation in 2007, to meet 7% of the energy demand.

Moving from 8.4% to 10% by 2012 seems feasible given that more than half of the states already have some form of renewable portfolio standards, which require electricity providers to generate or acquire a percentage of generation from renewable sources.  

California has the most ambitious RPS program, which requires utilities to generate 20% of their electricity from renewable energy by 2010.  Whether they can actually do this remains to be seen, but they are making progress. In 2007, California's three large independently owned utilities collectively served 12.7% of their retail electricity sales with renewable power.

The growth in renewable energy during the oil boom of the last several years has been impressive and a federal RPS program that includes a compliance market for renewable energy credits should help keep the momentum going.  It will be interesting to see where the new administration takes us, but if their first week is anything to go by - things are looking very good for clean technology in Barack Obama's America.

Yesterday we checked out the Solar Living Center in Hopland, CA.  I've been there before but always enjoy stopping by.  The place is really nice and the staff is very friendly.



It was my original visit to this place that inspired me to buy shares of Gaiam.  Those shares doubled in value quickly and I was feeling pretty fantastic about the whole thing.  Alas, then the real goods IPO split off the solar business and the Bush Depression did the rest.  Things did not fare so well for GAIA last year.



But the low stock price belies all the good, educational, family oriented solar fun that goes on here.  The Solar Living Institute offers a series of educational workshops, runs a popular internship program and hosts the popular renewable energy SolFest festival each year gathering visionary speakers, musicians, performers and concerned citizens alike.  Just a two hour drive from San Francisco, you'll be inspired by their example of solar living   Check it out!

Welcome to Open Solar.  The idea for this project originally began almost 18 months ago when the city of Berkeley started talking about an innovative financing program which would allow residents to install solar panels and pay for them over 20 years through their municipal taxes.  This would effectively eliminate one of the major obstacles of "going solar" - the high upfront costs.  The pilot phase of the plan has now been implemented and could eventually become a model for other municipalities across the United States and beyond.

But not everybody lives in Berkeley, and even with similar financing plans available, the task of buying solar panels, getting them installed and up and running is daunting for most people.  There are so many vendors, so many products and so many government programs to learn about.  The industry has really just begun to emerge from its infancy.  We need a resource that allows us to learn and share from each other. 

Whenever I buy a book these days, I make my selection based upon the reviews I find online at places like Amazon.com.   When I buy a new TV or home theater system - the customer ratings and reviews have an enormous impact on what product I end up purchasing.  Even when we bought our car a couple years ago - it was the positive customer feedback it had received that gave me the confidence to sign that loan agreement. 

No such resource currently exists for those interested in going solar.  Many companies have emerged which will help guide you through the process.  They can help answer questions you have, suggest a type of system based upon where you live and refer you to a respected installation company in your area.  But what I'm looking for is people.  People who have already gone solar.  I want to hear their story.  I'm really interested in learning everything about their experience with solar power. 

Open Solar will help connect people together so they can share information about products and vendors.  We're interested in any and all feedback from solar consumers, businesses and enthusiasts.  We're going to make it really easy to access the site from Facebook or MySpace, or using a Yahoo!, Google or OpenID account.  Finally, we will share the data we collect via a set of open web service APIs and RSS feeds that anyone can use to better understand the residential solar industry. 

Our core functionality is currently under development, but we'll be blogging about all things solar over the next couple months and keeping you apprised of all our developments.

Stay tuned and we look forward to hearing from you.