There’s an apocryphal story about the origin of the dimensions of the standard-sized photovoltaic solar panel.  The tale goes that the maximum size of a UPS delivery truck’s shelf dictated the dimensions of the original PV panel’s form factor. (If any of our readers can confirm or refute that -- leave a comment below.) Anyway, the industry standard size is about 62 inches by 32 inches by 2 inches, give or take, for a panel that puts out between 150 and 200 watts. And that’s been the only game in town. Until now. Applied Materials large-format panel -- the 5.7m2 Gen 8.5 panel -- is fabricated by amorphous silicon suppliers like Signet and Moser Baer. These panels are relatively low efficiency (6 percent to 8 percent) and intended mostly for free-standing large-scale solar farms. (The glass size for these panels is inherited from the glass dimensions used in LCD PVD processing.) So we have PV panels with sizes dictated by truck shelves and flat screen displays. How about PV panels with shapes and sizes designed for actual rooftops? Which brings on Armageddon... Energy. A memorable if macabre name for a newly formed solar firm. Armageddon Energy is amongst the more than 200 solar startups created in the last few years that Greentech Media has listed and categorized. Armageddon's CEO Mark Goldman explained that there are 100 million homes in the U.S. but only about 60,000 have solar installed.  Why such a small percentage? There are a number of reasons -- cost of course, but also difficulty of installation and the intricacies of the permitting process. Goldman believes that someone will figure out how to deploy residential solar cheaply and attractively enough -- and with materials better suited for the application, to make it massively successful at displacing new power plants, and he sees Armageddon as that someone. "We take a ton of cost out of the installation by removing a lot of the overhead and labor," said Goldman about Armageddon's consumer-tailored solar panel.  The firm's modular and standard product streamlines the permitting process and the reasonably powered and reasonably priced 1-kilowatt system turns installing residential rooftop solar into a process like buying a home appliance instead of "a high-involvement sale." Goldman claims that Armageddon's uniquely shaped hexagonal module is easier to handle and better accommodates the contours and features of a rooftop. Three of the hexagonals are racked on a triangular support to form a "clover" and three of those clovers provide about a kilowatt of power. Armageddon claims:

• That its affordable systems enables mainstream consumers to buy into solar
• That plug-and-play modules allow installers to scale up rapidly
• That its standardized smaller, lighter system streamlines the sales process
• Its system makes it profitable for installers to do small systems

Armageddon isn't divulging all the details on its system, but it has a unique electrical set-up that dispenses with terror-inducing DC electronics and a housing that eliminates the heavy float glass and metal frame used in most solar panels. The firm has patents filed and is moving forward with engineering and development. Armageddon is in the midst of raising seed funding for the company (which must be a humbling experience -- lots of competitors and a flinchy investor climate). A name change might be in order, though.

Can you spare another $21.6 billion?

General Motors and Chrysler collectively requested that amount in federal aid Tuesday as they filed their progress reports to Congress. Congress has provided $17.4 billion in loans to both companies since last December, along with a list of requirements to ensure that money would be well spent on rescuing the two firms. Lawmakers gave the companies until March 31 to show they can turn around their operations and make money, or else they would lose the loans.

Both companies said Tuesday that the car market isn’t getting better, and they are likely to need more loans to survive.

GM, which has received $13.4 billion in loans so far, said it could require as much as $16.6 billion more in loans by 2011, reported Bloomberg. GM is asking for at least $9.1 billion in the near future (see GM’s progress report summary).

GM said it also added another five facilities to the list of factory closures it had proposed in December, bringing the total of factories to be closed between 2008 and 2012 to 14. The company had 47 manufacturing plants back in 2008.

Chrysler, which has received $4 billion from the loan program so far, wants another $5 billion. The company plans to layoff 3,000 people by the end of this year (see Chrysler’s progress report summary).

Both companies promise to develop and sell more fuel-efficient cars, including electric vehicles, as part of their restructuring plans. GM expects to launch its Chevy Volt, a much touted plug-in hybrid electric car next year. Chrysler also outlined a launch schedule for electric cars last September.

Italian police arrested eight politicians and mobsters for allegedly taking over a wind power project on the island of Sicily through bribes and corrupt practices. Police in Trapani said that the local Mafia bribed city officials with luxury cars and other goods in nearby Mazara del Vallo so the town would invest in wind farms. The contract for constructing the project was ultimately awarded to a firm with ties to Cosa Nostra. In a fun twist, the mobsters actually stole a copy of a rival bid to fashion their own proposal. I guess it beats stealing trucks full of cigarettes.

Vanuatu and Sri Lanka might not be the biggest mobile phone markets in the world, but they could soon be the greenest. That's because the two island nations are seeing a big push by companies to replace the diesel generators that power their off-grid mobile base stations with solar and wind power, according to annoucements coming out of the GSM Association's meeting in Barcelona this week. Digicel, the Caribbean's largest mobile operator, is now carrying 60 percent of its network traffic on the Pacific island nation of Vanuatu through 25 base stations powered by sun and wind, the company said. Digicel operates in Vanuatu, Samoa, Tonga and Papua New Guinea through its Digicel Pacific subsidiary. And Dialog Telekom, the largest mobile communications provider for the Indian Ocean nation of Sri Lanka, plans to power 10 base stations with solar and wind power — five of them on-grid, interestingly. Two are being tested now and the rest are set to go live by April, the company said. It's all part of a push launched by GSMA in September to power more than 100,000 mobile base stations in developing countries with renewable energy by 2012. That could save 2.5 billion liters (660 million gallons) of diesel fuel each year, the association said. (The United States alone consumed 4.2 million barrels, or about 176 million gallons, of diesel fuel and fuel oil per day in 2007, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, so a reduction of 660 million gallons would equate to about 3.75 days of American thirst for the fuel. Still, every small reduction helps a little.) To speed up mobile communications' green footprint, Alcatel-Lucent (NYSE: ALU) said Tuesday it would start an "Alternative Energy Program" at its Villarceaux facility near its headquarters in Paris. While it made note of the environmental benefits of taking such a course in its press release, it also noted the commercial benefits that lie in reaching "a huge population of potential new subscribers -- the more than one billion people living in areas that are not served by an electrical grid." Alcatel has about 300 solar-powered radio sites installed so far, and is looking to solar, wind and fuel cell technologies for its future efforts. It's also testing power controllers from U.K.-based PowerOasis in its new research effort, it said. There are other mobile phone station powering schemes out there. Fuel cell makers Plug Power (NSDQ: PLUG) and Ballard Power Systems (NSDQ: BDLP) are looking to serve telecommunications companies that need back-up power systems (see Ballard to Deal 10,000 Fuel Cells to India). As for the phones themselves, Intel said in December that it is researching ways to charge cellphones and other mobile devices with radio waves that are abundant wherever cell and radio towers are broadcasting.

The Crown Estate, the body in the United Kingdom that dispenses the land rights in the country, has awarded 10 leases to companies to develop offshore wind farms. In all the wind farms will produce 6 gigawatts when completed. And at least two of the wind farms you will see the novel offshore wind turbines touted by SeaEnergy Renewables and Burntisland Fabrication. These turbines essentially are built on four-legged platforms initially devised for the oil industry, rather than the conventional monopile used to hold up turbines now. The platforms require less steel, and hence cost less, than traditional turbines and they can be planted further out to sea. Two were erected earlier in the decade by Talisman to power oil platforms in the Beatrice oil field off the coast from Aberdeen, Scotland. The people who designed the turbines left Talisman to found SeaEnergy. (Burntisland Fabrication makes the platforms. SeaEnergy then buys them, erects the wind turbine on top of them and then sells the energy to utilities.) We saw these turbines last week and got the technical rundown from SeaEnergy's Allan MacAskill last week. Read more here. SeaEnergy is part of a group that won the rights to develop a 920-megawatt turbine off Inch Cape and also in a group that won the righ to build a 905 megawatt farm in the Beatrice field. You will probably see the design pop up in other farms too. Burntisland says it already has orders for 44 platforms and will expand to 100 a year soon. One of the other winners in the Crown Estate was Fred Olsen Renewables. Olsen is an investor in SeaEnergy. They are nuts for wind in scotland, which hopes to get half of its energy from renewable sources by 2020. Twenty-five percent of Europe's wind resources are located offshore. If Scotland votes for indepedence in 2011, it's really going to through of the U.K.'s renewable energy plans.

Suntech Power Holdings (NYSE: STP) has invested about $8.1 million in Asia Silicon, which has been supplying Suntech with the raw material for making solar cells.

Suntech, based in Wuxi, China, said Tuesday it bought a minority stake from an existing shareholder of Asia Silicon, which is located in Qinghai, China.

Back in 2007, Suntech said it had signed a seven-year, $1.5 billion deal with Asia Silicon. Asia Silicon was to begin delivering the material in the second half of 2008. Suntech said at the time that the contract would give it the cheapest silicon it could find. The company also said it would pay more than $40 per kilogram for the first half of the deal, and less than $40 per kilogram for the remainder of the contract.

Asia Silicon is a new entrant in the market. The company said it began producing silicon at the end of last year, and is revving up its manufacturing pace to reach 2,000 metric tons per year by the middle of this year.

Owning a piece of a silicon company could prove a good move at a time when silicon prices are falling rapidly. The trend, coupled with the economic downturn that has softened market demand, has prompted many solar cell makers to renegotiate their contracts with silicon makers.

Silicon makers aren’t immune to market forces, however, and Suntech has seen its investments in two silicon makers, Nitol Solar and Hoku Materials, taking a dive. Suntech said last month that it would incur a charge between $49 million and $52 million in its fourth quarter financials as a result of its stakes in Nitol and Hoku.

Hoku, based in Pocatello, Idaho, recently said it could have trouble building its very first silicon factory because a few of its customers couldn’t make the advanced payments that would help to pay for building the factory in Idaho.

Suntech is scheduled to release its quarterly earnings Wednesday.