UX Solar, a joint-venture partnership between Excelsior Energy Capital and Unico Solar Investors LLC, along with co-development partner Namasté Solar, has broken ground on four new community solar gardens in the Denver metro area, totaling 8 MW of capacity. In 2019, Xcel Energy selected Unico Solar and Namasté Solar toRead More

Pivot Energy and Joliet Junior College in Illinois (JJC) have completed and activated the 1.3-megawatt onsite solar system at JJC’s Main Campus. The solar array, with 3,542 solar panels, was installed by national solar developer Pivot Energy and will save the college more than $1.6 million in electricity expenses overRead More

Based on an analysis of anonymized energy data in more than 5,200 homes that have the Sense home energy monitor, Sense found that, since Covid-19, average electrical usage increased 9.3% from April through August 2020 compared to 2019, a reflection of people using more electricity while they stayed home, combinedRead More

Update: This article has been updated to remove the claim that the PV line in would still be live if the switch was off.  While we’ve all been busy figuring out the various ways to comply with NEC 2017 and 2020 rapid system shutdown, NEC 2020 includes another PV system-specificRead More

ConnectDER, a company that enables utilities and homeowners to expand access to distributed energy resources, has received a patent for innovations to their ‘plug and play’ solutions for distributed energy resources (DER’s). The patent is for a reinvention of the standard utility power meter that combines the ubiquitous metering andRead More

On this edition of The Pitch, we look at how applying a carbon additive in traditional flooded lead-acid batteries significantly improves their performance in off-grid solar applications. Here to give us the details is Jeff Myles, marketing manager for Rolls Battery. First we get into the science behind the carbonRead More

AutoGrid was awarded $2.25 million in funding from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) to increase the scalability and electric vehicle (EV) management capabilities of its Flex Virtual Power Plant (VPP) platform. The expanded Flex capabilities include scaling real-time co-optimization up to 100,000 assets, and expanding theRead More

Made-to-order microgrids are a recognized energy solution for large industrial, government and agricultural facilities. New more agile systems with pre-design and prefabrication are now expanding microgrid applications for small and midsize operations. BoxPower is one brand filling this niche with new integrated microgrid products that offer quick, affordable energy solutionsRead More

The Hawaii Public Utilities Commission (PUC) approved Swell Energy‘s $25 million contract with Hawaiian Electric for the delivery of various grid services through an aggregated “virtual power plant” (VPP) on three islands. Swell Energy, a California-based energy and smart grid solutions provider, will deploy behind-the-meter solar-powered home batteries to approximately 6,000Read More

Improving the electricity yield in photovoltaic solar energy long has been a game of incremental additions of new technology. Over the past few years, bifacial panel adoption has been tested at a utility scale, and designs have been refined to the point that a high single-digit gain from a single-axis trackerRead More