The building is made up of 14,000 equilateral triangles. Some are solar panels, some are windows and others just fill out the structure. The net result is a building that manages to mask the black behemoths you’re used to seeing.

I love how the exterior influences the interior lighting, not to mention how great it all looks when lit up. [Inhabitat]

The car itself used Sharp solar panels to give it enough juice to chug along at an average of 100kph. It output 1.8kW, with a conversion efficiency of 30%, and although that sounds low, it’s relatively one of the highest in the world.

The real question now though is this: Would you drive this thing? Personally, I’d rather drive a Roadster…

My guess is that you will need all of that space to generate enough electricity to play your music for 4.5 hours at full volume/12 hours at a normal volume. Of course, it takes 20 hours of outdoor sun exposure (or 40 hours indoor) to reach a full charge. If you are not patient enough to wait, the Reverb can be powered up via a regular electrical socket — although I would suggest spending your $US2229 elsewhere if you see yourself doing that frequently. Speaking of being patient, the Reverb won’t be available until April of 2010. [Reverb via Gizmag via Inhabitat]

The structure generates 130 kilowatts of solar power, enough to offset 65,770kg of greenhouse gas emissions annually. There are even charging terminals available for electric cars, but only two can be charged at a time. Seems like a pretty smart way to keep drivers comfortable and harvest some spare energy on the side. [Dvice]

The way you’d use the reNEW charger is simple. You toss your batteries in the top portion and they’ll be ready at the bottom once they’re fully-charged. Cool idea, but I’m not entirely sure that I’d want to plaster my windows with it. [Yanko Design]

Energy efficiency is the ultimate goal of the Solar Decathlon, but the surPLUShome’s good looks and functionality helped the German Team beat out the early favourites from California. Nearly all the available surface area of the surPlushome is covered in solar panels with a few stylish wood panels thrown in for good measure. Those and the windows are really the only things keeping the house from looking like an oversized 2001: A Space Odyssey prop.

Congrats to the winners! You can check out other entries from the competition at the link. [Inhabitat]

Student groups from around the world (and several from the States) competed to create a net zero-energy, 800-square-foot house powered exclusively by solar energy, and came up with some great ideas. The house pictured above was created by the team from Cornell University in upstate New York, using silos to reflect the bucolic look of that area. Other teams experimented with automatic shutoffs for TVs and lights or sophisticated purification of shower and rainwater. The winner will be announced this coming Friday, and you can check out the current standings here. [CNET]

The shingle will use thin-film cells of copper indium gallium diselenide (CIGS), a photovoltaic material that typically is more efficient at turning sunlight into electricity than traditional polysilicon cells.

Dow is using CIGS cells that operate at higher than 10 percent efficiency, below the efficiencies for the top polysilicon cells — but would cost 10 to 15 percent less on a per watt basis.

As you can see, the panels look like standard asphalt shingles — and they can be installed without any specialised knowledge. In fact, they only take about 10 hours to install on average compared to the 22-30 hours for traditional panels. Since a basic roofer could handle the job in a short amount of time, installation costs should be more manageable. Plus, Dow claims that their Powerhouse will be 30-40% cheaper than other solar shingle designs.

This could finally be the innovation that gets homeowners on the solar bandwagon. It’s still not cheap of course, but the energy savings, boost in home values and government incentive programs might make the upgrades worth it. [Reuters via Treehugger via DVICE]

As a teenager in a rural village in Napal, Milan Karki knows just how desperately developing countries need an affordable, renewable energy source. Rather than whine about the availability of electricity or the cost of batteries though, he sat down and came up with a solution: low-cost solar panels with human hair conductors.

Solar energy isn’t anything new, but solar panels themselves can be pricey to produce due to using silicon as a conductor. Karki solved the cost issue by using human hair instead since it turns out that Melanin, a colour pigment in hair, is a good conductor. Oh, and did we mention that it’s cheaper than silicon?

Half a kilo of hair can be bought for only 16p in Nepal and lasts a few months, whereas a pack of batteries would cost 50p and last a few nights.

I don’t know why they’re selling hair by the kilo, but this idea is absolutely brilliant and I can’t wait to see if it turns into something widely used. [Daily Mail]

Solar Roadways, a single-purpose startup, just snagged a $US100,000 grant from the DoE to design and build a 3.6m x 3.6m super-tough solar panel, intended to be laid as sections of road. As it’s been optimistically imagined, the panels would also have a layer of low-res LED lights, so they could display changing signage.

Given how expensive and inefficient regular solar panels are, this whole plan sounds a little far-fetched, but the benefits could be huge: the company says that they could meet the entire country’s energy needs if the interstate system was replaced with its (still theoretical) panels. Neat, but there’s a minor issue of cost.

To pull this into perspective, Solar Roadways say they could take 500 homes off the grid with just 1.6km of four lane solar highway. They also say their 3.6m x 3.6m panels will cost about $US6900 apiece. Assuming a width of four panels, 1.6km of highway needs to be made up of 1760 panels, which comes to over $US12 million dollars before construction costs, which usually make up the bulk of the sum anyway.

I mean, they managed to coax $US100k out of the government already, so maybe there’s more to this than meets the eye. Or maybe, the Deptartment of Energy just wants to give this plan a fair shot, just make sure this won’t work. Spaghetti, walls, etc. [Solar Roadways via Inhabitat via PopSci]