Photovoltaic Cells

When the writer's strike left him idle last year, Jeremy Kromberg decided to give up on the film industry, where he had worked in postproduction, and slide in on the ground floor of the next big thing. That is how the 37-year-old from Hollywood found himself at an adult school on the Eastside on Monday, practicing his technique for fastening solar panels onto rooftops. "We just do it over and over," he said. "We build them up and tear them down just as fast as we can." Not that he minds.

Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and other municipal leaders unveiled a green energy initiative Tuesday by the city's utility that they predict will create as many as 400 union jobs over the next three years to install and maintain solar panels on city buildings and other structures around Los Angeles. Villaraigosa promoted the new effort as part of a larger clean-growth strategy during an appearance atop a Los Angeles Convention Center parking garage with solar panels as a backdrop.

Solar energy is getting a big boost in Southern California with the unveiling of two projects that will be capable of generating a total of 500 megawatts of electricity, enough to serve more than 300,000 homes. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and Southern California Edison plan to announce today the country's largest rooftop solar installation project ever proposed by a utility company. And on Wednesday, FPL Energy, the largest operator of solar power in the U.S.

In a lab in Caltech, Harry Atwater holds up a plastic panel, a fraction of a millimeter thick. Even in the brightly lit room, the surface's panel remains jet-black -- absorbing all the light that hits it. The high-tech material is 10 times more efficient at absorbing light than the regular silicon cells that some homeowners install on their roofs to harvest the energy of the sun. It is one of several projects that Atwater's team at Caltech...

British Petroleum's solar power unit is buying the remnants of Fairfield-based Advanced Photovoltaic Systems out of bankruptcy and will invest $20 million in a solar power manufacturing plant to reopen later this year with 100 workers. BP Solar International does not generate solar energy but manufactures and markets panels to businesses, individuals and utilities, BP President Dipesh Shah said. The plant will produce "thin film, glass-based" photovoltaic cells to be marketed nationwide.

Once again, solar panels produced by Camarillo-based Siemens Solar Industries are generating some of the electricity that lights the national Christmas tree. As it did last year, Siemens has joined other U.S. solar manufacturers in providing panels for the traditional Washington holiday spectacle. The panels gather the sun's power during the day, then deliver it at night to the National Park Service.