Technical reviews of solar+storage news

Hanwha Q Cells solar panels are the leading market share products in the residential and commercial markets per research firm Wood MacKenzie Renewables & Power. The manufacturer supplied 25.2% of all residential solar modules, and 13.3% of commercial modules. Considering the residential market installed 2.8 GW, and the commercial space 2 GW in 2019 –…

NextEra, the most valuable energy company in the United States and the nation’s largest renewable energy company, announced 8.2% year over year growth. This number was near the top end of the projections. Energy Resources, their wind+solar+storage subsidiary, grew 11.3%. The Energy Resources team added 1,590 MW to their construction backlog. This includes 600 MW…

The Massachusetts Department of Energy and Resources has updated its SMART solar power program. Updated documentation can be found on the emergency rule making page. At the highest level, the most needed change is that the program has doubled in size from 1.6 GW to 3.2GW of total solar power. This needed to occur because…

Whether the policy is sound is a discussion for another day. Today though, it is of fundamental importance that you know how to maximize the tax benefits associated with solar power in order to gain the greatest financial benefit. And that means, you need learn about the recently signed CARES Act that granted U.S. taxpayers…

Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) have demonstrated a new record for solar cell efficiency – 47.1%. The six-junction structured research cell required a light concentration equivalent to 143 suns. A variation of this solar cell, under standard sunlight, reached 39.2% efficiency. The researchers, who published in Nature, suggest…

The Peck Company is a publicly traded commercial and industrial solar engineering, procurement, and construction group based in Vermont. The second generation company is focused on the northeast U.S. markets. Peck went public in the summer of 2019, and immediately the value of the stock fell. In fact, it has fallen about 80% from those…

The solar panel above is the first time this author has seen a perovskite+silicon tandem heterojunction module in the real world. It excites me. It should excite you as well. Oxford PV hopes to deliver perovskite-silicon tandem solar cells to high-end solar module manufacturers in the first half of 2021, now less than a year…

Philosophically, we could go long: “Humanity exists as it does because we learned to use fire, the original self-generated distributed energy technology, and then we shared it across the whole of the species. Solar power is a modern version of fire, and we must expect that the knowledge of this new technology will tend to…

On March 10, due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, Massachusetts Governor Charlie Baker declared a State of Emergency. On March 15, schools were closed through April 6. A week later, all non-essential business was shut down across the state. It’s probable that this period will extend through the end of April. California has also implemented…