It's been over a year since we wrote our popular tutorial on Solar MACRS for 2011. I wanted to update the article for 2012. Let's get started!

How MACRS Depreciation is an Incentive

Businesses are able to reduce their taxable income by expenses they incur during the normal course of business. Every business prefers to expense things today instead of capitalize them over time. This is because by increasing their expenses today, they reduce the taxes they have to pay and all businesses would rather pay taxes tomorrow, rather than today - that is what expensing something allows a business to...

It was another successful week of development at SunMath! In addition to releasing ToolboxPlus to the public, we've made additional enhancements to the site to improve workflow and make the financial evaluations appear more customized! Read below for an itemized list of improvements from this week!

1) Once you complete creating a Customer, you are returned back to the Solar Calculator tab. Previously, you were shown the credentials of the customer you just created, which wasn't good for workflow.

2) Added an "edit" button to the Customer line item. There was a bug that meant you couldn't...

I don't have to tell you there is a great deal of misinformation about solar in the media these days. Providing accurate information to combat this misinformation has been a constant struggle for industry veterans. An especially hotly contested topic is the closing gap between the cost of solar and traditional energy technologies (coal, nuclear, gas). The closing of this gap, or the accomplishment of "grid-parity" of solar, will result in a paradigm shift for the industry. Subsidies will no longer be necessary to help solar compete - changing the game completely.

As with any new...

A Science Daily report that came out this week reported that researchers whose study was published in the journal Environmental Science and Technology ran the numbers on regions around the globe to see where might be the best place to generate renewable solar energy. They used a technique that accounts for the way that temperature can affect solar sells, and came up with some interesting findings. Namely: many cold regions at high elevations get loads of sunlightplaces in the Andes, the Himalayas, and even Antarctica.

Unless you have some alpine real estate, this news probably wont affect...

If you werent able to make it to the Solar Decathlon in Washington D.C. that happened over the past several weekends, youre in luck. Intrepid bloggers for Renewable Energy World did a top-ten list from the entire event.

My favorite out of their list? Probably the solar-powered houses built specifically for FEMA to use in disaster-relief situations. The home design students built for the multi-day Decathlon showcasing solar home solutions is elegant and simple, but definitely appealing. Now those who suffer from the unlucky strike of a natural disaster will be able to return to normalcy in...