Solar power for less than $2 a day

Imagine a solar panel as affordable as a fancy new bicycle. A panel designed so simply that you can install one (or more) yourself, just outside your windows, in the course of an afternoon.

That’s the concept behind Oakland, Calif.-based Veranda Solar, a start-up founded last year by Capra J’neva and Emilie Fetscher, recent graduates of the product design program at Stanford University. J’neva and Fetscher dreamed up attractive, flower-shaped solar panels as part of their master’s project at the design school. “We created a starter solar system that expands as your budget does,” J’neva says.

Oregon State University studying how to predict wind energy

“The high variability of wind energy production is the primary limiting factor to using more of it in our electrical system,” Annette von Jouanne, a professor of electrical engineering at OSU, said in a news release. “For short periods wind can disappear almost without notice. Because of that, electric utilities right now are reluctant to use wind as more than 15 percent of their overall energy resource because of its variability and lack of adequate energy storage systems.”