AES announced the groundbreaking of its Alamito Energy Center, a 100 MW / 400 MWh battery for electric utility SoCalEdison, which is being constructed as a full on building – much like a data center.

Solar power represents the idea of individualism within a broader society unlike few others things, and this is one reason it polls so high, sells so much, and will dominate our future energy ecosystems while shaping our political systems.

SimpliPhi offering up sales to deal with California grid shutdowns, Final Mile Solar delivering your hardware with style, Tesla got a solar roof approval, NEC has a cool energy storage warranty, and CRYObattery is available in a 200 MW / 1.2 GWh package at $140/MWh.

Solar developer Silicon Ranch has launched its Regenerative Energy program, which takes a broader view of climate and land use issues in utility scale solar construction.

The State of Florida deployed 113 MWac of net metered, customer owned solar power across 13,705 installations last year – 68% more installations and 76% more watts than the prior year.

The sun is up, summer is here and PG&E is still paying Topaz, LONGi is hiring in the Bay Area, and Common Energy is installing in today’s pvMB!

The city’s municipal utility is readying a 25-year power purchase agreement for 400 MWac of solar power at 1.997¢/kWh along with electricity from 200 MW / 800 MWh of energy storage at a 1.3¢/kWh adder, for an aggregate price of 3.297¢/kWh.

A judge has set rates for an 80 MWac solar project at 3.833¢/kWh for 25 years after previously finding that state regulators had violated due process in intentionally setting rates too low for the facility under PURPA.

NREL research projects that as solar power breaks 10% and 25% penetration levels across the United States, energy storage has an up to ~144 GW / 728 GWh opportunity to replace 261 GW of gas peakers.

The Massachusetts SMART program is deploying 1.6 GW. The challenges of growth include long interconnection queues in some areas, incentives tapped out in others, equipment requirements increasing system costs, and utilities circling back after approvals to re-asses project interconnections.