New York borrows Rushcliffe Solar idea?

.... but does it better! 

20 June 2011: City University of New York and the Dept of energy have worked on a map of New York using the Lidar laser system to analyse roofs, found that if roofs suitable for fitting PV panels were fitted, the city's rooftops could double the entire USA's current solar capacity, and would be enough to power half the city at peak time. Read more about this in Ecogeek website and in the New York Times.
  This is similar to a survey we did last summer, but we have yet to do more work on this, and certainly didn't have a Lidar laser system.
  66.4% of the city's roofs would be suitable, and could generate 5,847 megawatts of energy from the hundreds of thousands of suitable buildings. Currently, in the city now there are only about 6.6 megawatts of solar energy installed.
  You can take this further and see a version of the Googlemap with suitable locations marked on. This is an idea to pursue further. Does anyone know how to overlay custom information onto Googlemaps?

5 Reasons to love the Solar industry

http://cleantechnica.com/2011/06/17/5-reasons-i-love-the-solar-panel-industry/
This is a good read.... written by Kriss Bergethon of Colorado.

• the People... 
• the Purpose.... 
• the Science.... 
• the Technology..... 
• the Future!

World Solar Day June 18

18 June.... well in the Northern Hemisphere anyway. http://www.solarday.com/ See the page to read more about the mission of Solar Day. (it is 18 November in the Southern Hemisphere)

Face it....
• we have perhaps 50 yrs of declining oil and gas....
• if it wasnt for the smoky emission and the destruction of open cast mining we also have a lot of coal remaining below - enough for perhaps a couple of hundred years...
• but shouldn't we consider that the life of the Sun is measured in billions of years? Enough sunshine lands on the earth every day to cover our entire needs many times over if only we can develop the technology to capture and distribute it.

All energy sources cost something to exploit, I would prefer to see the money spent on a field full of Solar panels than a field converted into an open cast coal mine.
   Coming back to our own houses, what can we do? The upfront cost of a 4 kW PV array is only a fraction of the value of the house it goes onto, but will give a lifetime of cheap energy without emitting carbon, and an income for the first 25 years at least, more than enough to pay off the first cost.
   If the German government can project that the growth of renewable energy may be enough to decommission their nuclear power stations in 20 years, then that's an encouragement to us to try harder!