Category Archives: News

Articles about important news in the solar and energy industries.

How your behind-the-meter solar system can lower electricity bills for your whole neighborhood

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Reading Time: 4 minutes

It’s well known that the behind-the-meter (BTM) solar on your rooftop can reduce the demand for grid-scale electricity: every megawatt-hour (MWh) produced from BTM solar is one fewer MWh that needs to come from the grid (often from a dirty coal or natural gas power plant). Lesser known, however, is the “price effect” of BTM solar. When BTM solar lowers the amount of electricity that expensive power plants need to produce, it also reduces the price that all utilities pay for that electricity. This means that BTM solar can both avoid the creation of dirty electricity, and lower the price that everyone in a region ultimately pays for electricity.  As a result, when you install BTM solar, it benefits you and your neighbors.

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LBNL LMI solar

How can the clean energy industry support low-income households in going solar?

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Reading Time: 3 minutes

Although there is growing interest in policies and programs to ensure that the benefits of solar power are equitably reaching households of all income levels, lower income households are still less likely to go solar. 

Some of the causes for this are well-documented and unsurprising.  Income is unequally distributed among households, low and moderate income (LMI) households have less cash, are less able to finance installations, are less likely to own their home, and are less aware of the opportunity.

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LBNL tracking the sun 2021

Highlights from LBNL’s 2021 Tracking the Sun report

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Reading Time: 4 minutes

In case you missed it, solar has been in the news quite a bit recently: the Biden Administration announced a goal for solar to produce 40% of the nation’s electricity by 2030; the Department of Energy released a corresponding Solar Futures Study that lays out just how to reach that lofty goal; the inclusion of clean energy incentives (including for solar!) is at the forefront of the debate around the infrastructure and budget reconciliation bills; the latest Solar Market Insight report from the Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA) and Wood Mackenzie just dropped; and we recently released our own biannual Marketplace Intel Report. There’s a lot going on! 

Amidst this solar news frenzy, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) just released their annual Tracking the Sun report, the best resource for tracking the state of residential solar installations in the U.S., and complete with publicly-available data sets with info on nearly 80 percent of all of the solar panel systems installed in the country. Here are some of the highlights from the report:

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