Policy

The city council in the capitol city of the U.S. state of Texas has passed a sweeping resolution to strengthen solar policies and goals for its municipal utility. This includes procuring an additional 600 MW of utility-scale solar, another 100 MW of local solar and deploying energy storage.

A new report by Environment America looks at the top 10 U.S. states for solar electric installations, and finds that while California’s installed solar capacity is impressive, other states have greater densities.

Dr. Rodrigo Sauaia serves as executive director of ABSolar, the Brazilian Solar Industry Association. The following interview was conducted at the Intersolar South America trade show, and addresses the barriers and promise of Brazil’s solar market.

Citing a “ministerial error”, the U.S. Department of Commerce has cut in half duty levels for solar products made in Taiwan by Motech, and has reduced tariff levels for most other Taiwanese solar PV makers as well.

The Bachelet government has announced a large number of land concessions and modest policies to encourage distributed generation. However, much of the progress in Chile has been without government support, and the current administration has a lot of work to do to improve policies.

Sweeping energy reforms signed into law this week include multiple changes to the electricity sector, many of which favor solar and other renewable energies.

Enabled by legislation at the state level, counties across California have launched property assessed clean energy (PACE) programs. This represents a revival for PACE, a promising mechanism for property owners to finance solar systems and energy efficiency improvements, and the program administrator expects CaliforniaFirst to support US$250 million in solar PV systems in 2015.

The U.S. solar trade organization has released a report on Germany’s experience with policies to support solar PV, finding that the nation’s widely misunderstood system of feed-in tariffs has been highly successful in deploying large amounts of solar PV and decarbonizing its electricity sector.

Landmark legislation to move Massachusetts’ solar incentives from SRECs to declining block grants did not make it out of committee. However, caps on the volume of solar PV able to participate in net metering were marginally increased, making room for more systems.

The move by the Arizona utility would replace a utility-scale solar PV plant that it planned to build. APS’ rooftop solar plans are in sharp contrast to its attacks on net-metered solar, and the move has been questioned by SEIA.