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One of the obstacles to installing a solar electricity system is often the high upfront cost associated with solar panels. But in the UK, GE has changed that thanks to a partnership with Solarcentury.

The goal of the partnership is to make it affordable to install solar electricity in schools throughout the UK through Solarcentury’s Solar4Schools program. Solar4Schools has already installed solar electric systems in more than 250 schools in the UK and hopes to work with hundreds more over the next two years under the partnership.

GE has partnered with Solarcentury to make solar power affordable for hundreds of schools throughout the UK. The program helps schools reduce their carbon footprint and save money on electricity costs.

With energy experts forecasting substantial increases in solar power in the coming decades, scientists at GE Global Research are working with Arizona Public Service, the state’s largest electric utility, to understand how large amounts of solar can best be integrated into today’s grid. The first-of-its-kind study, which was approved earlier this month by the state’s regulators and is part of the utility’s ongoing smart grid efforts, will focus on methods and technologies to make the grid more reliable and efficient in a setting in which solar power is generated and delivered in close proximity to its customers.

Yesterday, GE Global Research, which is the hub of technology development for all of GE’s businesses, announced that in the race to have the most efficient, low-cost solar technology on the market, GE is now focusing its extensive R&D efforts on what’s known as “thin film” technology. As we described in our recent audio slideshow with Danielle Merfeld, GE’s solar R&D leader, the vision for thin film solar panels is that they will be lightweight, inexpensive and can one day be wrapped around objects, conform to a roof, or even hung like sails. GE is stepping up the pace of its thin film work in conjunction with PrimeStar Solar Inc., which is an Arvada, Colorado-based startup firm in which GE is a majority investor. As you can see in the audio slideshow below, unlocking the secrets of the complex technology with PrimeStar is a job that is uniting GE’s network of four Global Research Centers — and drawing on the unique expertise found in each.

As we recently reported, 10 of GE’s solar-powered water purification units were shipped to earthquake-stricken Haiti to help with the country’s desperate needs for clean water. Now, seven of the Sunspring units are up and running — with each able to provide safe water for up to 10,000 people per day. Our Sunspring partner, Innovative Water Technologies, was hard at work this week completing installations that bring the total of available clean water in the Port au Prince area to over 40,000 gallons per day. The video below was created and produced by Mark Tchelistcheff of openfilms.net and documents the installation at the SOS Children’s Village orphanage in Santo, Haiti.

As momentum builds for making power grids smarter, so too is the need to harness and integrate more renewable energy sources on a large scale for utilities. One way in which that is happening at GE is by sharing the technological advances being made in two key renewable sources — wind and solar. As science blog Earth2Tech recently described the work: “Solar, like wind, is intermittent — power from the sun fluctuates when clouds pass overhead and wind doesn’t blow consistently. Now General Electric, which has been a major player in helping to integrate wind into the world’s power grids, wants to do the same for solar.” One way in which GE Energy is doing this is by taking the converter technology that plugs wind energy into the grid to make a “solar inverter” — basically a technology that takes the direct current generated by solar panels and converts it to alternating current used on the power grid.