New England Clean Energy Council

A house is the biggest single investment most of us will make in our lives - the way it is built and how it operates can reflect a long term investment in both the building and the planet.

Standard Solar, Inc., a premier full-service developer, integrator and installer of solar electric systems for commercial, government and residential customers, today announced that the company was named to the prestigious Inc. magazine Top 500 Fastest Growing Companies in America list, a compendium of the most entrepreneurial and fastest growing companies in America. Standard Solar ranked 73rd out of 500 and was the highest ranking renewable energy company on the list.

The developers of the embattled Cape Wind project got another piece of good news today, moving the nation's first federally-approved offshore wind farm closer to construction.

SMA Solar Technology AG continues to expand its technological lead over the competition, and has set the course for the increased use of transformerless solar inverters in the United States. The leading manufacturer of solar inverters has become the first company in the world to receive certification from Underwriters Laboratories® (UL) for transformerless inverters. The certification applies to SMA transformerless Sunny Boy 8000TL-US, Sunny Boy 9000TL-US, and Sunny Boy 10000TL-US inverters and was granted as a result of complying with "UL Standard 1741 for PV and Battery-Powered Inverters," which, for the first time includes requirements on transformerless inverters.

Using solar energy, Butte College in Oroville, Calif., plans to be one of the first colleges in the U.S. to produce more energy than it consumes. While the college has been using solar energy for three years, the board of trustees approved its Phase III solar project which is expected to be completed by May 2011. Butte College will install more than 14,000 Mitsubishi Electric solar modules capable of producing 3,481,920 kWh of clean energy per year. This 2.7 MW DC installation is an addition to the 10,000 solar panels the college already has, making the total system size 4.55 MW DC.

Utility scale parabolic trough solar concentrators harness the sun's energy to make steam for electricity generation. The more efficiently that a trough can harness the sun's energy and convert it to steam, the more electricity it will be able to make.

Coming on the heels of yesterday's announcement that California is moving closer to setting grid energy storage mandates for utilities in the state, today Pike Research released a new report that says the grid energy storage market could reach as much as $35 billion by 2020.

The era of the "smart" solar panel is here. As more companies develop new power optimization and data tracking technologies for solar systems, the market has exploded.

Two months after installing an 80-kW concentrating photovoltaics unit in California, Skyline Solar has put another 22-kW project in the ground in Hawaii.

Conservatives, let's talk about energy. And why so many conservatives are so wrong -- so liberal, even -- on wind and solar energy.

The purpose of this series on peak oil investments has been to highlight companies outside the oil sector that are likely to benefit from increasing oil prices. This article explains why we should expect oil prices to rise. (Note: scroll to the end of this article to find a link to all the articles in this series.)

As policymakers consider energy and environmental goals, renewable portfolio standards (RPS) are one popular tool to encourage the development of renewable power resources. These regulations, also called renewable electricity standards, typically require utilities to source a specified percentage of their power from qualified renewable sources. States adopt RPS programs to incentivize the development of new capacity, reduce their carbon footprints and mitigate volatility in fossil fuel prices. While such regulations do have cost impacts to ratepayers, proponents argue that their benefits exceed their costs.

GreenRay Inc., developers of the first safety certified AC Module, announced today that the company's SunSine™200 AC Module has completed its safety certification and is now listed by Intertek to the UL 1741 standard.

The Chilean government is getting serious about geothermal. Last week, the country's energy minister said that Chile will support over $200 million in geothermal investments over the next two years.

The state of California is on its way to requiring utilities to store a portion of the renewable energy they generate for off-peak usage.