Sebastopol was likely to be the first California city to require all new buildings to be outfitted with solar panels. But it was the second.
Last month, the city of Lancaster beat Sebastopol to implementing an ordinance requiring all new construction to don solar panels.
A group of some of the largest rooftop solar companies in the country that would normally compete against each other for customers have formed an alliance in preparation for a fight against utility companies that feel threatened by the growth of distributed generation technologies.
SolarCity, Sungevity, Sunrun and Verengo – all known for their solar leasing models – announced this week that they have formed The Alliance for Solar Choice or TASC.
Empower Energies—formerly ViSole—has just completed one of its first installations under its new name. The installation consists of four solar photovoltaic arrays at the General Motors Warren Technical Center campus, in Warren, Mich. The projects consist of a 49 kilowatt ground-mount array, and three electric vehicle-charging solar canopies.
The U.S. military has been adding in solar and renewable energy rather quickly of late. A new Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA) report, Enlisting the Sun: Powering the U.S. Military with Solar Energy, looks into the ways that solar power is making for a more secure military from the battlefield to the home front.
While new large-scale concentrated solar power (CSP) projects seem to be on the wane in the U.S. and Europe, they’re just getting started elsewhere. Case in point, Morocco. Earlier this week construction started on what’s being called the largest CSP trough system in the world. The 160 megawatt (MW) Noor 1 CSP system is being built as part of the country’s efforts to get more than 40 percent of its energy from renewable sources—2 gigawatts from solar—by 2020.
