Solar Power With Style: Fast Company article

Some nice looking solar products rolling out, especially by a company called Regen. Here is the beginning of the Fast Company article below, with the entire write up at:
http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/140/star-powered.html

After decades of design neglect, the next wave of solar gear finally gets a blast of style.

Solar energy got hot in the 1980s. The economic sting of the oil embargo was still fresh and the air was thick with tax credits, so Innovation Nation put on its thinking cap and began harvesting the resources that were literally falling from the sky: the 1,366 watts of solar energy that constantly rain down on every sunny square meter of earth. Smelling opportunity in those free-flowing photons, huge companies jumped into the sun business. In 1984, the energy giant ARCO teamed up with Fluor, the engineering conglomerate, to erect what was the largest solar farm in the world, a mammoth photovoltaic cluster in the California desert called Carrisa Plains. It was spectacularly unbeautiful -- 120 acres of blue-gray panels, bolted to concrete posts -- and even less efficient. And if its rumored $65 million cost was accurate, then each watt cost about $10, only to be sold to the local utility, Pacific Gas & Electric, for pennies.

Thus was born solar's reputation: hopeful, expensive, and ugly. Americans who wanted to participate in this new energy-independence movement had to be millionaires with a south-facing roof or hold a PhD in mechanical engineering. Or both. They certainly couldn't care about how their hardware looked.

Solar has since trickled down to the consumer-products market -- calculators, alarm clocks, air purifiers -- but even there, things haven't looked much better. "When we took an audit of solar products at the point of use," says Robert Brunner, former director of industrial design for Apple Computer and now cofounder of San Francisco -- based Regen, "we realized that most of them look like bad science experiments -- geeky boxes, Rube Goldberg kinds of things. There are very few objects I coveted or wanted to use."

Without covetousness, of course, there is no market. So Brunner's design firm, Ammunition Group, teamed with a New Mexican clean-tech venture accelerator called Noribachi to create patented solar-hybrid devices that also happen to be beautiful. Regen's goal is twofold: Bring charm to a sector that has been devoid of it, and more important, satisfy a huge new appetite -- customers with an urge to do good.

"This is not an 'eat your vegetables' aesthetic," says Brunner. "In this case, form follows function, and then becomes a virtue."

Regen is not alone in its desire to make solar shine, however. Here, examples of great design that finally see the light of day.

More at:http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/140/star-powered.html