rooftop solar

The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) is a “free electric bank account with your name on it.” It’s packed with rebates and tax credits that help Americans purchase everything from EVs to solar and electrical appliances to heat pumps. Check out this easy-to-use IRA savings calculator from Rewiring America that tells you what you get – and when.

Here are three standout rooftop solar trends that emerged in 2023 – and how they impact consumers who want to switch to clean energy.

In 2022, US small-scale rooftop solar saw a tenfold increase over the last decade, according to a new report – here’s why and what needs to happen next.

The UK slashed value-added tax (VAT) to zero for folks installing battery storage in their homes from February 1, 2024.

The 12,500-square-meter (134,549-square-foot) roof of an indoor ski slope in Belgium is covered in solar panels.

EV charger annual installed capacity is going to overtake distributed solar – that is, rooftop solar on individual homes and businesses – for the first time in 2023 in the US.

If you live in an apartment with a balcony and want a plug-and-play solar and battery storage system, EcoFlow may have just the solution.

Rooftop solar arrays on industrial buildings could potentially meet the electricity demands of up to 35% of US manufacturing sectors annually, according to a newly released study.

Here are three standout rooftop solar trends that emerged in 2022 – and how they impact consumers who want to switch to clean energy.

The Home Depot is going to install 13 megawatts of rooftop solar on 25 of its stores.

German manufacturer Kopp has launched a foldable, four-panel solar rooftop system that comes with everything it needs for installation in reusable transport boxes.

A year on from the big Texas freeze that knocked out the state’s power system and caused at least 246 deaths, new research released yesterday found that rooftop solar could have supplied more than enough electricity to meet the shortfall on all but two of the 13 days when power production fell short of forecasted demand.

California-headquartered SunPower (Nasdaq:SPWR) announced today that it’s launched SunPower Financial, which means that customers working with SunPower to buy rooftop solar and storage no longer need a third-party lender to obtain and manage financing.

We are really only starting to develop the energy potential of the giant nuclear reactor in space that we call the sun. We know that every day it sends enough energy to earth to power human civilization 10 times over, but we haven’t managed to scale ways to harvest it the way nature has done almost perfectly.

For generating electricity, photovoltaic cells on solar panels have been the method of choice, but even then there are different approaches, like large solar farms owned by electric utilities and investors or distributed solar installations on rooftops owned by homeowners and businesses. The latter has been an attractive solution to many: it decentralizes energy production and enables homeowners to get the direct benefits of solar energy.

But the question of scaling remains: how many houses and buildings can realistically benefit from solar? A study by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) tried to answer just that, and came to the conclusion that about 25% of the electricity needs in the US could come directly from rooftop solar installations.
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SolarCity, the largest residential solar installer in the US, employs a grid engineering team to integrate its systems and evaluate the impact on the grid. The company decided this week to publish the team’s findings in a white paper titled: “A Pathway to the Distributed Grid”.
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