Each day, our industry sits down and whittles the unsightly knots off the tree we call solar energy. We, as a group, spend more time than we should pointing to one of a growing number of reasons why solar energy isn’t taking hold in America: that perhaps our government incentives were cut too quickly, that our state’s SREC program is broken, that the net metering (more…)

With the year nearly half done, here’s the solar scoreboard–updates from things we’ve been working on, and a selection of other notable solar victories.

New state solar programs

New York is our biggest market-building campaign in the East. Last month the Senate unanimously (more…)

As prices for solar energy continue to drop and reach grid parity in some regions, the ongoing battle over domestic sourcing of materials continues to grow. Ahead of the next round of auctions in India under the Jawaharlal Nehru Solar Mission, the Ministry of New and Renewable Energy recently announced that approximately 300 megawatts of the (more…)

Scientific breakthroughs often follow a collective focus on an issue or problem. When a tipping point is reached, the combination of small solutions across sectors spurs a giant leap forward. Renewable energy development has been a growing focus of international research over the last 3-4 decades and advances in clean energy technology have coincided (more…)

Rusinga Island, located in the eastern part of Lake Victoria in Kenya, is having solar panels installed on homes to not only provide electricity but to aid in the fight against malaria. Malaria kills an estimated 1.2 million people per year and is a big problem for the 30,000 inhabitants of Rusinga Island. If fitting homes with solar panels that power insecticide-free (more…)

The first solar projects from California’s Renewable Auction Mechanism (RAM) are now online. This is some of the world’s lowest-cost solar, now up and running.

For those that need a primer, the RAM is a 1.3 gigawatt program to procure renewable projects (more…)

Solar is really shining in Albany’s Earth Day activities this year. This week, the New York State Senate unanimously passed legislation to extend the successful NY-Sun program for 10 years and make New York a real solar powerhouse – on to the Assembly! Between the Senate vote and the Governor introducing similar legislation of his own earlier this week, there’s serious momentum for (more…)

Hawaii is one of the American states cracking ahead to make a switch to clean, solar power. We have reported several achievements Hawaiian Electric Co. reaching 20 megawatts of solar photovoltaic energy on the island of Oahu.

As usual, government incentives play a key part in (more…)

DuPont Tate & Lyle BioProducts (DPTL) is a joint venture between DuPont and Tate & Lyle which provides natural and renewably sourced industrial materials. In collaboration with Climalife, DPTL has developed and launched a new line of heat transfer fluids (HTF) under the brand name Greenway. (more…)

Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) say they have achieved a major breakthrough in the conversion of sunlight into electricity, surpassing what was long believed to be an absolute limit to the efficiency of solar cell devices. (more…)