Consumer Protection

In this op-ed for pv magazine, Cesar Prieto and Seth Gunning of Creative Solar USA explore the barriers to rooftop solar put up by utilities in Georgia, a state with top-15 solar capacity, but a lagging residential market.

Hello one and all and thank you for starting your workweek with the pvMB. Today we’ve got TVA contract drawbacks outweighing benefits for Knoxville, a Delaware solar farm expansion, the Chair of the Energy and Commerce Committee calling out utility obstruction to rooftop solar and more!

Contractors across California are seeing greater demand for battery storage than ever before in response to PG&E’s Public Safety Power Shutoffs. With the threat of blackouts on the 10-year horizon, customers have decided to take their power into their own hands.

Lawrence Shaw says understanding solar module hotspots via infrared scans can help quell residential rooftop fire risks, while suggesting missing data represents missing work. Shaw also found the missing USA solar fire data.

Vivint Solar has settled on a case in New Jersey which contained accusations that the company would illegally acquire customers’ credit reports as well as force them to sign purposefully misleading contracts.

Massachusetts regulators have opened an investigation into electric utility National Grid’s handling of the SMART solar power program, which has led to 1 GW of projects being put on hold after many of them were given utility approval.

After adding enough solar capacity to reduce its costly peak load by about 30%, an Arkansas utility plans to cut electric bills by 4.6%. Expansion of a solar-powered factory that will yield 400 jobs is already under way.

A research note by Roth Capital Partners predicts the residential storage market in the United States to grow more quickly than expected. This prediction is founded just as much in disaster mitigation as it in economic viability.

The Clean Power Alliance of California is arguing that in dealing with projected electricity shortfalls, regulators should allow for full state participation and clean energy developers to meet the demand, versus extending the operations of gas plants located in population centers.

Inverter manufacturer Solaredge has filed three additional patent infringement lawsuits against its competitor, Huawei, in China. This comes after three similar legal actions against Huawei that had been undertaken by Solaredge in Germany last summer. While Huawei has decided not to comment on the matter, the Chinese manufacturer revealed that it had filed three patent litigation claims against Solaredge at a Chinese court this May.