This week, Canadian Solar said that it has won three solar power contracts with Alberta’s Ministry of Infrastructure, for a total of 94 megawatts (MWp) of solar power system in southeast Alberta, with an average contracted PPA price of 48.05 Canadian dollars [US 36.27] per MWh. When in operation in 2021, these solar plants will provide 55 percent of the electricity needs for Alberta provincial government.

California-based solar developer Sunpin Solar said that Direct Energy Business, a subsidiary of Centrica PLC, signed a power purchase agreement (PPA) for the full output of the recently completed 96.75-MW DC / 74.8-MW AC ColGreen North Shore Power Plant.

This week LONGi announced that it would be supplying modules to what it says is the largest “bifacial+tracker” power generation project in the United States. The 224-MW project will be built in Mitchell County, Georgia and is expected to be complete this year.

South Africa plans to expand use of renewable power as the coal-dependent nation expects traditional, centralized generation plants to “disappear,” Energy Minister Jeff Radebe said.

An onsite solar PV system in now operational at the most advanced cement factory in Cambodia.

While solar roads have been criticized as impractical and inefficient, a Georgia foundation says they will continue to be part of its research lab for greener highways.

The Lithuanian Business Support Agency (LSBA) has granted €235,000 (US$267,500) to support development of an experimental floating solar photovoltaic power plant at the existing 900-MW Kruonis pumped-storage hydroelectric plant in Lithuania.

The Trump administration imposed a tariff on steel imports last year to get companies to buy more American metal. In some ways, the duty has the U.S. solar business doing the exact opposite.

This week JinkoSolar held an opening ceremony at its new manufacturing facility in Jacksonville, Florida. The facility made headlines when it was announced due to the fact that the Chinese company decided to set up manufacturing in the U.S. in response to solar tariffs that are put on solar cells and modules imported from China. To date, Jinko is the only Chinese-owned solar manufacturer to set up a facility in the U.S.

Two large-scale solar farms are set to make Warrington Borough Council the first local authority in the UK to produce all its own electricity from clean energy.

Reaching the remote Havasupai community of Supai, Arizona is not a journey for the faint of heart. Surrounded entirely by the Grand Canyon, this remote Native American reservation is either an eight-mile hike or mule trek from the closest road, or a helicopter ride to the bottom.

The list of the world’s top solar EPC contractors was released in late February by Wiki-Solar.org. The list ranks the solar developers by number of projects and total installed capacity and reflects about the 30 percent of the market. Wiki-Solar.org says the list shows how the less volatile markets have favored domestic power plant builders. In particular, contractors from India and the US are rising up the ranking. Europeans have, with a few notable exceptions, found it harder to hold their position.

A solar-hybrid mini-grid project is underway in Tanzania.

Today SunPower is launching its next generation solar panel called A-series, which boasts 400 or 415 watts, in the United States. A new 400-watt product, Maxeon 3, is available in Europe and Australia.

Thailand plans to build the world’s largest floating solar farms to power Southeast Asia’s second-largest economy and to boost the country’s share of clean energy.

Florida Power & Light Company (FPL) this week announced plans to build four new solar power plants this year that are expected to begin powering customers in early 2020:

As of the end of 2018, China’s renewable energy installation capacity had reached 728 GW, an increase of 12 percent from a year earlier, according to statistics released by China’s National Energy Administration. This breaks down into 352 GW (up 2.5 percent) for hydro, 184 GW (up 12.4 percent) for wind, 174 GW (up 34 percent) for photovoltaic (PV) and 17.8 GW (up 20.7 percent) for biomass. Renewable energy accounted for 38.3 percent of the country’s total installed power capacity, a rise of 1.7 percentage points.

On March 4, Hanwha Q CELLS filed a patent infringement complaint with the U.S. International Trade Commission (ITC) against JinkoSolar, LONGi Solar, and REC Group. The company also filed related patent infringement complaints with the U.S. District Court for the District of Delaware against the same companies. In Germany, Hanwha Q CELLS filed patent infringement complaints with the Regional Court of Düsseldorf against JinkoSolar and REC Group.

China’s plans to loosen its solar subsidy policy will keep growth of the world’s largest market intact, according to the head of JinkoSolar Holding Co., which is increasing production capacity by as much as 20 percent this year.

An energy storage system has been installed at the largest single-site solar park in the world.

A trailblazing wind-solar hybrid project in western Minnesota could be a preview of what’s to come as renewable developers look for new ways to bolster projects.

For the third year in a row, the U.S. solar industry installed double-digit gigawatts (GW) of solar PV capacity, with 10.6 GW coming online in 2018, according to the latest statistics from Wood Mackenzie Power & Renewables and the Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA).

According to an analysis by the SUN DAY Campaign of data just released by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), new solar and wind generating capacity has taken the lead over natural gas and all other energy sources for the first month of 2019.

Annual solar energy production in North Carolina jumped 36 percent in 2018, according to the latest government data – firmly placing North Carolina as the No. 2 solar-producing state in the nation.

Southeast Asia is poised for a long-overdue and much-needed boom in solar.

Two of America’s biggest solar-farm owners are warning that a patent dispute between panel makers could roil a sector already shaken by President Donald Trump’s import tariffs.

Idaho Power unveiled a goal Tuesday to provide 100-percent clean energy by 2045 on the heels of an announcement that it will purchase 120-MW of solar energy through a PPA with Jackpot Holdings at a price of less than US $0.022 cents per kWh.

The unit of NextEra Energy announced plans to build a 409-MW energy storage facility in Manatee County. FPL says the Manatee Energy Storage Center will be the world’s largest solar-power battery system by four-fold.

BlackRock Inc., the world’s largest money manager, is boosting its bet on clean energy.

Solar energy companies could fill the void created by the lack of secure energy transfer between UK and EU, the group says.

After announcing nearly a gigawatt of new clean-energy projects in February, APS is now seeking proposals to build two of them in different parts of the state. The first request for proposals (RFP) seeks partners to add batteries to existing APS solar plants in rural Arizona, storing their power for use after the panels stop producing each day. A second partner is being sought to develop a large (100-MW) solar plant paired with an equal amount of storage, to bring more clean energy to customers after dark. Both of these projects will provide APS customers with more solar after sunset, serving their evening energy needs with an even cleaner resource mix.

Over the past week, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has announced multiple funding opportunities to renewable energy research including $130M for early-stage solar and $28M for wind. Further, the National Offshore Wind Research and Development Consortium announced up to $7M in funding for offshore wind.

Mercom Capital Group released its report on funding and merger and acquisition (M&A) activity for the global solar sector in the first quarter of 2019 and found that total corporate funding (including venture capital funding, public market, and debt financing) into the solar sector in Q1 2019 came to $2.8 billion. Year-over-Year (YoY) funding in Q1 2019 was about 10 percent higher compared to the $2.5 billion raised in Q1 2018.

Just after the midnight hour of New Year’s Eve 2020, more than confetti will be abandoned on America’s sidewalks and parlors. Somewhere around $130 million dollars of Investment Tax Credit (ITC) from that year’s anticipated Commercial & Industrial solar projects will fall out from any hope of reaching the proverbial pocket books of the nation’s infrastructure investors (assuming 2000MW of C&I and Community solar, and a $2/w installation cost). On 1/1/20, the ITC drops to 26 percent, a first step to further decrease the following year.

Climate change is picking up pace in Europe, thrusting farmers and power generators onto the front lines of a battle with nature that threatens to upend the lives of the half billion people who occupy the world’s biggest trading bloc.

kWh Analytics, a leader in solar risk management, this week announced the first refinancing supported by the Solar Revenue Put. The portfolio of 41 projects, owned by AES, totaling approximately 28 MW DC of capacity is located in Arizona and Massachusetts. The portfolio is being funded by Silicon Valley Bank and a Japanese financial services company. Swiss Re Corporate Solutions, a leading global corporate insurer, is providing capacity for the Solar Revenue Put.

The Redford Center, a California-based non-profit co-founded in 2005 by Robert Redford and his son, James, announced that every morning, from April 15-22, 2019, the organization will post an episode a day of "Renewable Therapy for Climate Anxiety," a conversational mini-series featuring Filmmaker, James Redford, and Matthew Nordan, clean energy investor and managing partner at MNL Partners. In each two-minute installment, the pair explores questions that nag environmentalists when it comes to renewable energy. Watch the first episode below.

In the years since its passage, Section 210 of the Public Utility Regulatory Policies Act (PURPA) has provided one of the few options for small producers of renewable energy to access electric generation markets controlled by monopoly utilities. The law requires a monopoly utility to purchase the output of certain small power producers known as “qualifying facilities” (QFs) at the utility’s “avoided cost”—that is, the cost the utility would incur to generate or purchase power in the absence of the purchase from the QF.

Starbucks Corp. is boosting its investments in clean power.

Building solar and wind energy projects on potentially contaminated lands can be a golden opportunity, both effective and cost-effective, for developers. The 120-acre Reilly Tar & Chemical Corporation Superfund site was recently redeveloped with a utility-scale solar farm and is a prime example of the reuse potential inherent in thousands of Superfund sites, brownfields, retired power plants, and landfills.

Yuba College, a community college part of the Yuba Community College District, this week completed a 1-MW solar carport installation that it says could result in $10 million of avoided utility costs over the life of the system. The District purchased the solar outright, which resulted in optimal savings.

Duke Energy Corp. will develop six utility-scale solar power projects in North Carolina that may cost up to $404 million as part of the state’s bid to boost renewable energy.

In their push to upend the economics of rooftop solar, Iowa’s major electric utilities are up against an opponent as politically potent as they are: the state’s pork producers.

Bank asset management is known to be an opaque subject. Thankfully, Diana Weis and Sarah Disch, each co-heads of the Solar Asset Management groups at their organizations, U.S. Bank and Wells Fargo Bank respectively, shared their expertise with me at SAMNA 2019. They each have over a decade of experience in solar finance. Here are three key takeaways bank asset management experts Weis and Disch shared:

This week Sempra Energy subsidiary PXiSE Energy Solutions announced that Sempra-owned development company Infraestructura Energetica Nova (IEnova) would be using its software at the 110-MW Pima Solar facility located in Mexico to help manage the integration of renewable power to the electric grid.

Solar energy is now providing the electricity for an entire village in Togo of 4000 people, powering streetlights, homes, schools and shops.

A year ago, Tesla Inc. lost its throne as king of the U.S. rooftop solar business to Sunrun Inc. Now, it may get relegated to third place.

This week global energy and infrastructure group, Eversheds Sutherland, announced that it helped Ball Corporation secure two virtual power purchase agreements (VPPAs) – one wind and one solar – for a total of 388 MW of new renewable energy. According to Ball, these agreements will allow the company to power 100 percent of its corporate, packaging and aerospace operations electricity load in North America with renewable energy by the end of 2021.

The insurance industry has lots of exposure to climate change. But as Warren Buffet has explained, not so much for companies that do annual policy adjustments, like Berkshire Hathaway. Their exposure is limited because the trends are baked into the premiums. But there is an opportunity for reducing insurance risk due to climate change, and it comes from the insurance industry itself. The business model is to have car insurance salespeople provide leads to virtual electric car charging services. This has perfect demographics because electric vehicle owners are very receptive to solar electricity. Who wouldn’t want a clean transportation solution with local job creation that can’t be offshore?

Last week, independent power producer Silicon Ranch Corporation said that the 53-MW solar array that it built in partnership with the City of Millington, the U.S. Navy, Memphis, Light, Gas and Water (MLGW) and the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) is now operational. It’s the largest solar power plant in the state.