The Arizona Corporation Commission (ACC) has approved Tucson Electric Power’s (TEP’s) plan to provide customers with an affordable way to meet their electric needs with locally generated solar power. By the end of this year, participants in TEP’s Bright Tucson Community Solar Program will be able to purchase shares of solar energy for as little [...]

Abengoa Solar Reaches Total of 193 Megawatts Operating Abengoa Solar’s third parabolic trough solar power plant, Solnova 4, successfully passed its three day production and operation tests. Commercial operation of this plant came days after receiving a conditional commitment for a loan guarantee from the U.S. Department of Energy for Abengoa Solar’s 280 MW plant [...]
For CSP development the most suitable land with environmental resources are under the control of the US Bureau of Land Management. Add this to the aggressive RPS state targets across the Southwest USA and it makes it an ideal location for CSP developments.Despite this natural fit, actually securing BLM land is not easy, and it [...]
Following a popular vote among peers and conference attendees at the Fourth Concentrated Solar Power Summit for the first US CSP Today Industry Awards, the Stirling Energy Systems (SES) SunCatcher technology was honored with the Best Commercialized Technological Innovation Award. SES received the award for its SunCatcher technology advancements that led to its commercialization in [...]
In the first program of its kind in Arizona, 32 residential solar installers became the first to achieve the designation of Qualified Solar Installer (QSI) from Arizona Public Service Co. These installers passed a challenging series of technical, professional and administrative courses; hold the appropriate licenses with the Arizona Registrar of Contractors; and have achieved [...]
Jul 29 2010 | Posted in
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First Solar, Inc. /quotes/comstock/15*!fslr/quotes/nls/fslr (FSLR 129.71, -2.42, -1.83%) today announced it has completed the acquisition of NextLight Renewable Power, LLC, a solar development firm formed by the inaugural fund of Energy Capital Partners, a private equity firm focused on investing in North America’s energy infrastructure. With the NextLight acquisition, First Solar now has power purchase [...]
Jul 13 2010 | Posted in |
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This summer has seen some record temperatures around the world and the trend is likely to continue through the season. At first glance you would think that this would be good news for solar technology as we harvest the additional solar energy but this is not the case for all types of systems. Unlike solar [...]

The case for the global adoption of clean energy becomes stronger everyday not only in the daily headlines about the worst man-made environmental disaster possibly of all time but in the effects of global warming. A new study shows the Arctic climate system may be more sensitive to greenhouse warming than previously thought, and that [...]

Washington, DC – President Obama announced Saturday in his weekly video address that DOE has offered a conditional commitment for a $1.45 billion loan guarantee to Abengoa Solar, Inc. The loan will support the construction and start-up of Solana, a 250 net megawatt (MW) concentrating solar power (CSP) plant in Arizona. “After years of watching companies [...]

The condenser for the power plant block of the Andasol 3 Solar Thermal power project arrived at the building site near La Calahorra on Monday. Also the turbine for the Andasol 3 power plant has already reached the Mediterranean coast in the south of Spain. At the same time, the generator that was built in [...]

Linamar Corp. is expanding its local workforce with a new $200-million investment in the city of Guelph , Ontario,Canada. Chief executive officer Linda Hasenfratz said the company has already begun hiring between 1,200 and 1,300 people over three years to work in its local car parts and solar thermal dish manufacturing plants. Linamar has been developing [...]
The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) has released a rental schedule for solar energy right-of-way authorizations on U.S. public lands. The amount of the rental is charged by megawatt produced and the facilties rated capacity. If we are truely interested in bringing clean energy in the U.S. to parity with coal or natural gas then one [...]

Victor Valley College in Victorville, California and SolFocus recently held a grand opening ceremony for the largest solar power plant in North America using concentrator photovoltaic (CPV) systems. After two months of construction, the one megawatt solar power plant is now providing clean power to Victor Valley College in Victorville, California. The SolFocus CPV technology employs a [...]