As commercial and utility-scale solar projects become more widespread, fires and failures shouldn’t. Unfortunately, the number of rooftop solar installation fires in the United States each year increased 69 percent between 2016 and 2018, according to U.S. Fire Administration data. Unprotected, improperly connected or incompatible connectors are some of theRead More

You’ve got a fault code or even a whole series of fault codes, and it looks like something has gone wrong with an inverter. Downtime is expensive, so a technician needs to hop in a truck and go fix that faulty inverter pronto, right? Hold on there. Effective troubleshooters neverRead More

The commercial and industrial (C&I) solar segment has lagged behind residential and utility-scale to this point, but not because of the opportunity. In terms of available surface area and financial impact for asset owners and off-takers, C&I arguably has the most potential. Yes, C&I solar is a perfectly ripe pieceRead More

This was originally published by the Clean Energy Associates. In recent weeks and months there has been a lot of press and discussion about the ethical sourcing of PV modules, specifically whether the solar industry is somehow tied to the use of forced labor. Since the 1930’s Tariff Act, theRead More

Wire and cable management decisions can seem small, but they have both short- and long-term ramifications, from boosting installation efficiencies and cutting site-prep costs to reducing O&M burdens and improving a project’s levelized cost of energy (LCOE). We reached out to providers of wire and cable management systems for residentialRead More

Basics worth repeating When a solar PV system is not functioning as it should, that means less energy production, which means a loss of ROI for a customer. That is a duh statement to be sure, but it’s also a scenario that occurs often enough in the solar industry thatRead More

  Corporations purchased a record of 23.7GW of clean energy in 2020, up from 20.1GW in 2019 and 13.6GW in 2018, according to new research published by BloombergNEF (BNEF). The increase came despite a year devastated by the Covid-19 pandemic, a global recession and uncertainty about U.S. energy policy aheadRead More

Until recently, most solar + storage systems have been out of reach of average homeowners. At first, that was because solar systems were expensive, even with the Investment Tax Credit (ITC) from the U.S. government. Then, as solar prices tumbled thanks to inexpensive imported panels, the sticking point became energyRead More

When Tim Graunke, head of project development at Solar Gain, first encountered the Roof Tech team he knew they would be the right choice for a new job he was about to start. “I was at the 2016 Intersolar North America conference in San Francisco,” he recalled. “We had aRead More

In 2019, Maine’s Governor Janet Mills addressed the United Nations, laying out a plan for the state to reach carbon neutrality by 2045. When compared to Maine’s sister states that have been working for the last decade to establish renewable energy markets to assist with reaching similar carbon neutrality goals,Read More