Solar power

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.

State legislators in Florida have approved Florida SB 1024 and HB 741, which would require future rooftop solar panel owners to pay higher rates and curb net metering. Yesterday, solar workers traveled to Tallahassee and let legislators know what a terrible idea they think these bills are.

Electricity from solar is cheaper than sourcing it from coal-fired power plants, according to a new article published in the journal Energy and Environmental Materials.

A federal appeals court yesterday ruled that Arizona utility Salt River Project, which services most of the Phoenix metropolitan area, can be held liable for violating antitrust laws because it charged customers who own rooftop solar panels higher electricity rates.

Homeowners who buy rooftop solar can track both the installation process and PV panel performance once their system is online with a free app from three-year-old software technology startup, Bodhi. The app makes buying into rooftop solar much more user-friendly.

Massachusetts-based Ko-Solar wants to put solar panels in places no one really notices, like on industrial building roofs, in parking lots, and sound barriers on highways. It may finally get its chance, in the Boston area. And that will be a US first.

US big-box retail and grocery stores have enough rooftop solar potential to power more than 7.9 million homes – utilizing all that unused space for clean energy is a no-brainer.

The US Energy Information Administration (EIA) has forecast in its January Short-Term Energy Outlook that rising electricity generation from clean energy such as solar and wind will reduce generation from fossil fuel-fired power plants over the next two years. 

Houston-headquartered renewables company EDP Renewables North America has completed a 200-megawatt (MW) solar farm in Randolph County, Indiana, northeast of Indianapolis. It’s now the largest-capacity solar farm in Indiana.

US window manufacturing giant Andersen Corporation is leading a series B $30 million funding round of solar window company Ubiquitous Energy.

Late Tuesday evening, Tesla CEO Elon Musk weighed in on a controversial topic in California: the state’s solar tax proposal. Musk tweeted that California’s proposal was a “bizarre anti-environment move by govt of California.”

Beijing-headquartered electric power company Huaneng Power International (HPI) has completed the world’s largest floating solar project in Dezhou, which is in Shandong, an eastern Chinese province on the Yellow Sea. The 320 megawatt (MW) project is the largest floating solar farm to come online to date.

Clean energy made up 46% of Germany’s net public power generation in 2021. That was down from 50% in 2020, according to Fraunhofer ISE, the largest solar energy research institute in Europe. 

A 200 megawatt (MW) solar farm will be built on a former coal mine in eastern Kentucky. It will be the largest solar project in Kentucky and will provide employment opportunities for former coal workers.

Hawaii is going to get a 30 megawatt (MW) solar farm in 2022 – one of the first utility-scale solar farms on the Big Island.

Swiss solar technology company Meyer Burger announced today that it is opening a production facility for high-performance solar modules in Goodyear, Arizona – its first factory in the US, and its first outside of Europe. Solar module production is scheduled to begin by the end of 2022.

Clean energy sources generated a record 834 billion kilowatt hours (kWh) of electricity, or about 21% of all electricity generated in the US in 2020, the US Energy Information Administration (EIA) reported yesterday. That includes wind, hydroelectric, solar, biomass, and geothermal.

The US Department of the Interior announced on Tuesday that it has approved two solar farms, with a third nearing final approval, on public lands.

If President Joe Biden’s Build Back Better Act is enacted, the US is projected to install 43.5 gigawatts (GW) of additional solar capacity over the baseline forecast between 2022 and 2026. This would bring cumulative solar capacity in the US to over 300 GW – triple the amount of solar currently deployed, according to the US Solar Market Insight report released today by the Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA) and Wood Mackenzie.

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.

Despite the pandemic, supply chain challenges, and rising costs of materials, 2021 is going to be a record year for clean energy, the International Energy Agency (IEA) announced today in a new report.