With a PUC vote on the horizon, the final tally is in! Solar, environmental, public interest and science groups banded together to help Californians send nearly 60,000 messages asking the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) to expand a popular clean energy program called net metering. (more…)

BELECTRIC, a German solar power company, has helped the solar industry achieve a historic milestone with the installation of more than 1 GW of photovoltaic solar power. The amount corresponds to the system output of a large conventional power plant.

“This is an outstanding event for BELECTRIC and the (more…)

Palo Alto-based One Million Lights’ mission is to deliver solar power to those people in rural communities who still depend on dirty kerosene for lighting. By giving them solar lights, students can study more at night and improve their prospects. Now the organization has teamed up with SunPower Foundation on a project called One Million Students. The aim of the project is to educate (more…)

At a solar jobs fair yesterday at Malloy College’s Suffolk campus on Long Island, we joined up with leaders from the business community, environmental advocates and the local labor movement to call on elected officials in Albany to pass the Solar Jobs Act – and soon! (more…)

An increasing number of people use tablet computers these days, adding to the high demand on energy caused by our digital tools. But one company has come up with a solar powered solution to reduce energy consumption from the grid and tap it from the sun instead. (more…)

Introduction: Vote Solar’s Annie Carmichael recently sat down with Stan Greschner, Director of the Single-family Affordable Solar Homes Program (SASH) at GRID Alternatives. We learned some surprising facts about who’s going solar in California.

Annie Carmichael, VS: Can you tell us about GRID Alternatives and California’s SASH Program? (more…)

Three student housing communities will be powered with solar power thanks to an agreement between Campus Crest Communities, a developer of student housing, and SolarCity, a provider of alternative energy. The student communities are located in Greeley (Colorado), Flagstaff (Arizona) and Las Cruces (New Mexico). They will be fitted with more (more…)

We have seen several initiatives regarding the use of solar power to help people who live in off-grid regions to have access to modern electricity services. LuminAID, Solar Pebble, and the amazing work that SELF does to bring solar power to emergency areas.

Now, Olafur Eliasson, an Icelandic artist known for his (more…)

Planning a solar PV power plant to make them efficient is a complex task, but German researchers have developed a software that makes conceptual design simpler.

Researchers at the Fraunhoger Institute for Industrial Mathematics ITWM in Kaiserslautern, in conjunction with Siemens Energy Photovoltaics, have a (more…)

Here’s a good article on a recently completed solar thermal tower (aka concentrated solar power or CSP) in the desert between Las Vegas and Reno, NV.

The thing to like about solar thermal, as we’ve often discussed here, is that it affords us a fairly low-cost way of storing energy and delivering it when the sun (more…)