United States

Illinois’s solar market under the Future Energy Jobs Act is just getting started, but a business group is calling for the next governor and state legislature to provide less restriction and more action in community and distributed solar programs.

Florida regulators have ruled that Sunrun’s 20-year solar equipment lease in Florida is not a retail sale of electricity – opening the door to third-party owned solar.

The Energy Storage Association has published a roadmap for the adoption of 35 GW of energy storage, as well as outlining the benefits of such a move.

Over the protests of many different parties, Michigan has become the latest state to experiment with destroying the fundamental policy for distributed solar in the United States.

Kelly Speakes-Backman, the CEO of the Energy Storage Association, spoke with pv magazine about storage and the challenges of state-level advocacy at ESA’s annual conference in Boston.

The project will be built on 640 acres of public land in a zone designated for solar energy, and is expected to be online by the end of 2020.

Microlink Devices has achieved a record efficiency of 37.75% on its triple junction thin film cells, as confirmed by NREL. The lightweight cell achieves a power density of more than 3000 W/kg, and is designed for use in satellites and unmanned air vehicles (UAVs).

The solar finance technology company’s Series B financing round is 30x larger than its Series A round a year ago.

The company added 43 MW last year, placing it well ahead of Walmart and Prologis. Overall installations at 4,000 companies tracked by SEIA grew slightly to 326 MW last year.

The U.S. Department of Energy has announced up to $20 million in funding for nine projects to advance early-stage solar power electronics technologies.