Just a few short years ago, a large solar PV project could be considered anything well north of 100 megawatts.

It’s a testament to how quickly and dramatically the global solar industry has grown that a large PV plant today is now measured in hundreds of megawatts, and increasingly gigawatts.

Traditionally, developers of large-scale utility solar power plants always used large central inverters for a very understandable reason. “In the past, lower capex leaned towards central inverters for large projects,” said Sham Ramnarain, chief engineer of Huawei FusionSolar Smart PV Solution for North America. “With today’s innovations and mass production in string

The blockchain is set to take on a new role with off-grid solar developer The Sun Exchange, which aims to use the technology for insurance.

The South Africa-based startup said its Ethereum ERC20-based rewards currency, SUNEX, would be used to create a solar project insurance fund, or SPIF, to cover the cost of relocating PV plants to new sites if the original electricity off-takers defaulted on payments.

This is one area of risk that is not currently covered by traditional insurance products, said Abraham Cambridge, The Sun Exchange’s founder and CEO.

The Sun Exchange acts as a crowdfunding platform for small- to medium-scale solar projects

The California Energy Commission is expected to approve the new rule when it votes this week, making California the first state in the country to require that new houses come with photovoltaic(PV) Generation of electricity directly from sunlight. A photovoltaic cell has no moving parts; electrons are energized by sunlight and result in current flow. panels.

"California is about to take a quantum leap in energy standards," Bob Raymer, technical director for the California Building Industry Association, told The Mercury-News. "No other state in the nation mandates solar, and we are about to take that leap."

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The BP-backed solar developer Lightsource sees a very compelling case for deploying energy storage in the Western U.S.

All major utility-scale solar developers have added storage development talent, and some have begun regularly bidding combined projects. But few have actually won bids for, much less constructed, hybrid plants. That makes it hard to determine just how central that kind of project is to their business models.

Not so with Lightsource, the largest European solar developer, which launched its U.S. branch last year and soon after received $200 million from oil and gas giant BP in exchange for a 43

The slow death of solar module manufacturer Suniva continues. Last week, Suniva Wanxiang America Corp. joined SQN Capital Management in gaining approval to auction off parts of the company.

In April, a bankruptcy judge gave SQN — which is responsible for the majority of Suniva’s assets — the go-ahead to offload equipment at factories in Michigan and Georgia. Now equipment controlled by Wanxiang will join auctions slated for late May.  

According to Jade Jones, GTM Research senior solar analyst, the move to sell off Suniva is an expected one.

“Unlike SolarWorld, which had been actively talking about its outlook for

Capacity prices in the PJM interconnection have seen a steep decline in the last two auctions. Wood Mackenzie’s Power and Renewables team expects the upcoming 2021/2022 capacity auction will clear at an RTO-wide price of $103/megawatt-day, a 35 percent increase over last year’s base residual auction.

Wood Mackenzie and GTM Research provide some insight into how recent market events are impacting price and the future outlook for capacity markets.

It’s all about nuclear: a power plant closure in Ohio and Pennsylvania and subsidies in Illinois and New Jersey

Even before FirstEnergy’s announcement to close nuclear power plants serving Ohio and Western Pennsylvania,

If you think competitive retail electricity markets provide value to residential consumers in the U.S, it’s worth taking a closer look. It’s a disaster.

The Massachusetts Attorney General’s office just took a look itself. Here are just a few highlights from the report, Are Residential Consumers Benefiting from Electric Supply Competition?

• Massachusetts consumers in the competitive supply market paid $176.8 million more than if they had bought electricity from the power company during the two-year period from July 2015 to June 2017.
• On average, throughout the year, 88 percent of households participating in the competitive supply market lost money, and 90 percent of

Republicans are often viewed as enemies of the clean energy transition. Some people believe the GOP will never embrace climate action. So is voting them out the only way to save the planet?

If you ask environmental policy pioneer Terry Tamminen, the solution isn’t that simple. 

As Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s pick to lead the California EPA, Tamminen found ways to craft ambitious clean energy policies and programs with buy-in from both Democrats and Republicans. In his current role as CEO of the Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation, Tamminen is working to advance sustainability solutions across the country and around the world. 

In this episode of