If you want to build a solar power house, you will want the best power for a reasonable price. Although there was a time when it was costly to build solar power homes, today with technological advancements it is becoming less costly and very effective. One excellent addition to the market for solar homes has been the thin film solar panels, making it extremely easy to get solar energy for less money.

These new thin film solar energy panels now being used in solar power for home, are actually stacks of many layers that are not thicker than packing paper. This solar technology can be seen in calculators that are solar powered and the very thin film these calculators contain. Thin panels aren’t baked the way traditional panels are, the solar panels made with thin film are made on unique rolling machines much like a printing press.

Using these new thin-film solar panels has many advantages for a solar power house. They are much lighter and they can easily be put on various surfaces. They blend in with the home, and there are no more thick and heavy panels on the roof-top to worry about. A key benefit is that these flexible solar panel technologies are much cheaper to purchase and very efficient. Installing thin film solar panel for conversion to a solar power house is definitely a cost effective idea.

While the technology behind new thin film solar panels is essentially the same, some differences exist in in the way the panels are manufactured. Silicon is used in wafer cells, but for the thin film cells, either copper indium gallium diselenide or cadmium telluride is placed between each thin layer. The new thin panels are also made quite differently as well. Large presses are use to make them similar to printing presses using aluminum foil, which is a cost effective process.

Thin film solar panels designed for a solar power house have been featured by CNN and even named the “Invention of the Year” by Time Magazine. The benefits surrounding these panels definitely make them a worthy invention to be given this title. You’ll also find solar power is now just as cheap as other energy forms, and these flexible solar panels are definitely a progress that will totally change solar energy today.

Where does one start? Not any of the renewable energy technologies we have today will be enough to wean us off fossil fuels in the near future. Nor is any of it cost effective, in other words if my annual electric bill is less than one thousand dollars annually, and the cost of installing a solar and or wind energy system is easily thirty thousand dollars plus interest on the loan, and still not produce 100% of my energy needs. (Because these only work under the right conditions.) It would take over thirty years just to pay for itself and still have an electric bill to pay every month.

One of the hurdles is the ancient transmission grid, parts of which date back generations divided into many balancing areas, designed to help mange distribution of power and some are so localized they can’t communicate with the neighboring grid resulting in wasted electricity, rather than sharing it.

The idea of a smart grid, is to upgrade the transmission lines by install electric super highways, connection all of the renewable energy farms to cities and remote areas of the country and allowing home owners to sell their extra energy back into the system.

In California a company by the name of Konarka is developing printable solar ink making it possible to create flexible shingles and exterior paint capable of generating electricity for a tenth the cost of conventional solar cells. And there are plenty of wind turbine companies making smaller quiet residential wind generators. Hopefully the United States Energy Task Force (Process Used to Develop the National Energy Policy)

Could convince congress to subsidize the mass production of these technologies like they do with corn based ethanol, also subsidize the utility companies allowing them to purchase large quantities of these products, package them together and lease the equipment to home owners (much like the satellite companies install their equipment) and you would subscribe to the service. This would allow these renewable energy companies to mass product their product reducing the production cost per unit and also reducing the need to build more power plaints.

What about transportation? This is the second largest generator of green house gases in the United States, our use of gasoline & deisel in this country is unbelievable; we use so much fuel that one-penny per gallon ads up to over a billion dollars in a year’s time, and emits three hundred and thirty million tons of carbon into atmosphere annually. The gas mileage of domestically manufactured vehicles is the lowest in the world. How do we go about fixing this, Mr. T. Boone Pickens is for natural gas powered vehicle, this would reduce the importing of oil and apparently natural gas has the same B.T.U.’s as diesel fuel making it possible to run in our nations diesel trucking industry. But it still is a fossil fuel and it still puts green house gases in the atmosphere. And will need to distribute natural gas to every gas station. (A bridge until something better comes along.) GM is working on an electric car "again" this one though has a onboard generator that’s used to charge the batteries on long trips. If this generator ran on natural gas and if they added solar cells and even wind turbines under the hood where the radiator use to be. This would generator power even sitting in the driveway at home, as would the kinetic wind energy as you drive down the road, lowering the use of the onboard generator. By the way, Gm is not using natural gas, wind or solar in their new electric car that I’m aware of. The one I like is the Honda SCX hydrogen fuel cell vehicle, to bad there is no eas way to fill up the tank. Maybe someone will come up with a solar powered machine that generates hydrogen from tap water.

So here’s the question. If you had the ability to develop the nation’s renewable energy policy, what would you like to do? Thanks, for reading!