One of the best new things shown to home builders attending the International Builders Show in Las Vegas was a whole new generation of architecturally-pleasing photovoltaic roof arrays.

“What,” you say? “You wanna give that to me one more time, maybe in plainer language”?

Sure. Here goes.

If you’ve spent any time at all on our website, you know already how excited we are about our SunSmart energy efficiency program. The next big step for us toward our long term goal of building homes that supply their own electrical needs will be to harness the power of the Sun to generate electricity directly, with no power company to pay. The way that will get done is to use panels of photovoltaic electric generating cells - much like the International Space Station uses - mounted on the roof. The biggest problem in doing that is that these electric generating panels are just plain ugly. And, since they have to be mounted on a generally south-facing roof surface, sometimes they wind up having to be on the portion of the the roof which faces the street.

Not good.

But, here comes a whole new generation of photovoltaic panels made to look like roof shingles. They even have ones that mimic roof tiles, both the flat ones and barrel tiles, too.

Stay tuned to this blog. We’re working hard so that soon, you may have the opportunity to view these new devices in a LifeStyle model home.

They’re very cool. . . in a manner of speaking, of course.