GreenFest Philly is today: Sunday September 13th

The fourth Philly GreenFest is taking place today  Sunday September 13th from 11 am to 6 pm at 2nd and South Street in Philadelphia.

The Philly Green Fest offers “green” activities for the whole family:

Come to Philly in September to Get Your Slice of the Renewable Energy Pie

President Obama has pledged that $150-billion dollars will be put towards energy independence over the next 10 years.  Where can you learn about how to get your slice of this pie from leading public and private industry experts?The answer is the The World Green Energy Symposium and Exposition on Sept 25-26 to be held right here in Philly.

The Solar PV Philly Show Opened to the Public: What $20 million will get you AND Let your IMAGINATION run wild.

By Betsy Teusch and Jacques Sapriel

Since Solar PV Philadelphia is a trade show, much of the exhibitors supply solar manufactures and so on, up the chain.  But there are a lot of distributers and installers, and they’re making the case given programs like Sunshine PA, that solar is becoming cost effective.  And when Pennsylvania deregulates electricity prices in 2011, payback will be a helluva lot quicker….

More than 135 companies are represented in the expo hall. Since manufacturing solar cells is a precise scientific based process, a lot of  companies that are represented manufacture some of the complex machinery and measurement tools necessary to set up and run a solar cell fabrication.  This is how I found out, while chatting with the US Representative of OTB Solar from Eindhoven – Netherlands, that $20 million is the approximate cost of a brand new turnkey solar cell manufacturing line. If that sounds like a lot of money, think that a basic microchip fab similar to what Intel runs around the world cost about $2 billion a pop.  Same kind of materials, similar manufacturing process, differences in complexity and need for high accuracy account for some of the difference.

Here are some of the interesting innovations I ran into:

How about making your own cleaning product?

Charing Ball decides to make her own Green household product.
Maybe we don’t need to spend money buying major cleaning product brands?
How difficult could that be?

See it for yourself right here: