POWERHOUSE IDEAS

WASHINGTON POLICY BLOG.TYPE PAD.COM- Last night the Senate passed ES SB 5899, which will provide a B&O tax credit up to $4,000 for each newly hired employee for businesses with fewer than 20 employees. It passed unanimously. The catch? The business doing the hiring has to also offer health insurance to its employees in order to qualify for the credit. The language in the bill states,"The credit equals: Four thousand dollars for each employee.

(Roofing Contractors take notice!!)

The idea for solar shingles has been bounced around a lot lately in certain Green Energy Forums.The glass-covered prototypes were good but they soon got wet.Dow Chemical,a company not in the Energy sector,teamed with Corning to produce a coating
it had modified for use on solar panels in outer space.It worked beautifully and now
Dow Chemical is in the solar Energy business producing solar shingles.The new home roofing program is called Powerhouse.C I G S are one in about seventy-five different
kinds of wafer thin metal coated solar cells produced today.Dow Chemical has modified
it making it ready for mass production.Orders are being placed as you read this article.

The chemical giant says it will launch shingles with CI GS cells in 2010 and plans to work first with home builders in North America.

Dow Chemical is ready to launch so-called solar shingles that have been developed thanks partly to public funding.

The Midland, Mich.-based company plans to roll out the shingles in "limited quantities" in North America in mid-2010. First customers will come through partnerships with home builders Len n a r and Pu l t e Homes.

Dow has talked about the solar shingles for a few years now. Back in 2007, it received $20 million from the U.S. Department of Energy to develop solar energy-generation products that could be incorporated into building materials and serve both as protective layers of a building and a solar power generator. The solar shingles would take place of the conventional asphalt shingles on parts of a roof that get a good amount of sun.

As an industry giant with hefty resources, Dow will be a formidable competitor in the solar market. The company will not only aim to take business away from manufacturers of conventional solar panels, it also will be jostling with other developers of building materials that also can produce solar energy.

Building-integrated solar products offer the key advantage of being less obtrusive, and appeal to those who want to camouflage the existence of a solar energy system on their rooftops.
But the limited choices on the market today aren't as efficient at converting sunlight into electricity as conventional solar panels. Dow has yet to disclose the pricing for its solar shingles, which are undergoing UL testing for product safety and performance.

Roofers who want a slice of the solar market also would find lower installation costs with solar shingles than with solar panels, which require more specialized skills, Dow said. An electrician would still be needed to run the wires from the roof to an inverter and the home.

Dow is working with Global Solar Energy, a developer of copper-indium-gallium-selenium (CI GS) cells, to develop the solar shingles. Last month, Global Solar said building-integrated products featuring its solar cells would appear in 2010 (see Global Solar: BI P V Market or Bust).

Dow didn't disclose how well its solar shingles would be able to convert sunlight into electricity, a key measurement for determining whether how soon a homeowner could get a return from their investments. That calculation would be difficult to come by if the shingles are installed by home builders and the cost is blended into the overall home sale prices.

Moisture can significantly hamper the performance of CI GS cells, so making sure that the cells are tightly sealed is critical.

Global Solar currently assembles cells into strings and sell them to makers of conventional solar panels that use glass to encase the strings. Each string is made up of 18 cells, the company said. The average efficiency of the strings is between 10 percent and 11 percent.