Nearly 6, 000 years ago, the Egyptians were the first to follow the solar year.
Until then, the Catholic Church branded as heretics scientific investigators who, like the 13th-century English friar Roger Bacon, calculated that the current calendar year was over-running the solar year by a whole day every 125 years.
All told, of the 561 MW of solar added last year by the top 10 utilities (776 MW of solar capacity was added altogether in 2010), 140 MW are actually owned by utilities, marking an increase of more than 300% in utility-owned solar over the previous year.
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The film's name refers to the end of the Persian solar year, which Iranians celebrate, in an echo of their Zoroastrian past, by setting off fire crackers.
He noted that the new solar capacity the country added last year accounted for 11% of all new solar installations worldwide, a marked jump from the 5-7% it historically occupied.
Despite fewer householders installing solar panels in the past year, more solar developments have been given the go-ahead by local authorities in Carmarthenshire and Pembrokeshire.
The solar explosion is only a year away and without question the major Chinese solar players will survive and thrive.
Corning believes steps are available to mitigate the impact of the solar industry problems as the year progresses.
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The report puts the year the leading solar manufacturers will return to positive margins at 2014.
The data, from NASA's TIMED mission, show that Earth's thermosphere (the layer above 62 miles or 100 km above the Earth's surface) "responds quite dramatically to the effects of the 11-year solar cycle, " Stan Solomon of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo.
The solar manufacturing business has been in a bad shape over the past year as a glut of solar panels worldwide caused the panel prices to fall by about 50 percent during 2011.
Intel said Monday it will spin off a new venture, dubbed SpectraWatt, that will build a factory in Oregon in the second half of this year and begin sending solar modules to customers by the middle of next year.
The prices of solar panels have fallen by more than half over the past year and a half, and that helps to reduce the price of solar electricity.
It wowed attendees at the Frankfurt Motor Show last year with the transparent solar cells in the roof of the Smart Forvision concept.
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In truth, the mass of the Main Belt which extends just past the orbit of Mars to about three and a half times the distance from the Earth to the Sun has not changed much over the 4.5 billion year life of the solar system.
Second, that orbit looks so unstable that he thinks it unlikely that it could have lasted for the 4.5 billion-year history of the solar system.
This would be similar to the home owner solar credit Congress created last year for the 2006 and 2007 tax years.
Yet over the past year the U.S. solar and wind companies have struggled.
Ruffalo, an Academy Award-nominated actor, made the switch to solar last year on his property in New York's Catskill Mountains, also near gas reserves.
Overall, project developers completed 152 utility solar projects in 2012, and that represented 54%, or roughly 1.8 gigawatts, of the solar panels installed that year.
The result is an industry that will likely end the year with the capacity to build 40 gigawatts of solar modules, according to Citi which also estimates demand this year of just 24GW. The bank doesn't expect annual demand to hit 40GW anytime this decade.
Fueled partly by billions in government incentives, the industry is creating millions of solar panels each year and, in the process, millions of pounds of polluted sludge and contaminated water.
Construction of the Antelope Valley Solar Projects is set to begin this year with the power plants going online at the end of 2015.
When fully operational, these plants will produce millions of state-of-the-art solar panels each year.
Over a year, the solar-powered microgrid will reduce the running time of the diesel generators from 100% to 40%.
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Several companies have pulled their IPOs over the past year, including solar thermal power plant builder BrightSource Energy.
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An oversupply of solar panels over the past year has intensified competition.
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Last year, the Solar Impulse made its first transcontinental voyage, traveling 1, 550 miles from Madrid to the Moroccan capital Rabat in 20 hours.
Dan Hershman's life changed dramatically after he photographed a spectacular aurora in Washington state in 2000, which was a peak year in the solar cycle.
During 2011, five of nine large solar projects approved the prior year by state and federal regulators in time to qualify for federal loan guarantees became entangled in environmental impact litigation.
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