We've seen a few massive solar farms pop up out west, but it looks like Southern California Edison is taking a different approach: instead of cluttering up the desert, the company plans to build a distributed solar array on the rooftops of commercial buildings throughout SoCal. The plan is to spend $875M over five years to cover about two square miles of rooftop with the panels, which will alleviate stress on the grid by generating around 250 megawatts of juice, as much as a small power plant. That's enough to light up 162,000 homes, but it's still a little short of the record 280-megawatt Solana installation planned in Arizona -- come on, Cali, let's see a little fight.

Sure, plug-in hybrid tech has been around for a while, but no major manufacturer has stepped up and actually delivered on all the concepts and vague plans we've seen so far -- until yesterday, when Ford delivered the first of 20 plug-in hybrid Escapes to Southern California Edison to begin testing. The handoff, which happened with great fanfare at the EVS23 conference, is the start of a two-year pilot program between Ford and Edison that will eventually have consumers testing the vehicles. For now, the first off the line is being dubbed a "research vehicle," and features a 30-mile electric-only range on a full battery charge. When the battery is depleted, the system switches over to a traditional gas / electric hybrid scheme, which, under ideal conditions, can apparently achieve up to 120mpg. There's a full gallery of the unveiling and the interior over at AutoBlog Green, hit the read link for some eco-friendly love.

We've seen some interesting uses for Ambient Devices' various "thin data" products, but Mark Martinez, a Southern California Edison power station manager, has probably hit upon the most interesting application we've seen: by reprogramming the device to reflect energy usage and costs, customers in his 120-person test program managed to reduce their energy consumption by 40 percent. Martinez chalks the results up to the "sentinel effect," saying that ""It's nonintrusive. It has a relatively benign effect. But when you suddenly see your ball flashing red, you notice." Ambient Devices actually sells a similar product called the EnergyJoule, and we've seen some other monitoring attempts before, but we think we like Martinez's hack better -- it brings a little mod flair to living green. Hopefully he'll let us know how he did it soon.

[Via Inhabitat]