While installers in Florida added the most distributed solar last year, South Carolina leads on a per-capita basis, and Georgia, North Carolina and Louisiana round out the leaderboard. Snapshot stories included.

The profile permits standardized communications between a utility (or aggregator) and distributed solar and storage resources. The profile will permit access to an expansive set of solar and storage capabilities.

The utility aims for at least 66% participation in a residential demand response pilot. It also gives customers the option of moving to a lower rate structure by allowing the utility to automatically reduce their consumption during peak periods.

Added transmission, varying levels of distributed generation, and increasing levels of “load modernization” are all under consideration in an NREL study. The results could illuminate paths for California and other states to reach 100% zero-carbon or renewable energy targets.

Japan’s JGC Corporation reports an efficient method of converting hydrogen to ammonia, which can later be combusted to generate carbon-free electricity. Ammonia, according to JGC, has various advantages over hydrogen in terms of safety and cost effectiveness.

While large utility-scale projects grab the headlines, installation firms in the region racked up 7400 small-scale (under 1 MW) solar installations in 2018. Snapshot stories included.

While a national lab report on floating PV did not estimate its economic potential, the report suggests the most promising markets could be reservoirs in areas with high land costs for ground-mounted solar, and reservoirs with grid-connected hydropower or high evaporation rates.

With every new solar-on-schools contract, more people learn how it’s done, share what they know, and make it easier for neighboring school districts to follow the same path. U.S. schools could host up to 30 gigawatts of solar.

Distributed energy management systems can capture added value from solar and storage by shaving peak loads, providing grid services, and deferring grid investments. Utilities testing such systems have shared their lessons learned, while Western Australia leapfrogs ahead.

Unnecessary grid investments raise costs for all customers, displace solar and distributed solutions, and could be unfairly charged to solar customers. Vote Solar’s director of grid integration Ed Smeloff shares his insights in this pv magazine interview.