By Frank Andorka, Senior Correspondent The Solar Foundation has received a $2 million grant from the Department of Energy’s Solar Energy Technologies Office to expand its solar jobs training efforts, focusing particularly on veterans. This new program will include an effort to support solar industry apprenticeships for hundreds of transitioning military veterans, preparing them for leadership roles in a rapidly growing industry. The program will also provide expert assistance to help the solar industry leverage workforce development resources and hire more workers from underserved communities. [wds id=”3″] The Solar Foundation was selected as a part of the Energy Department’s FY2018 … Read More →

By Frank Andorka, Senior Correspondent FlexGen, the energy storage developer/integrator backed by GE and Caterpillar, is for sale. The company, whose sale is being handled by Cascadia Capital, currently sports a $400 million pipeline of solar + storage and thermal generation + storage projects across North America. FlexGen was a first-mover in DC-coupled solar + storage technology and, as we have reported, is currently delivering the largest storage project in ERCOT for Vistra Energy. T The prospectus suggests they are casting a wide net in search of a buyer, including utilities, infrastructure funds, oil and gas majors and renewable players. … Read More →

By Frank Andorka, Senior Correspondent One recent project of mine was to edit a book for a client on climate change. The book focuses on promoting the policies that historically help clean energy in the hopes of showing policymakers what they can do to mitigate climate change on a global scale. One of the policies that continually came up was government investment in early-stage technologies designed to decarbonize different segments of the economy. In the Trump Administration, you would assume that such government investment would come to a screeching halt given their outsized disdain for technologies like solar and wind. … Read More →

By Frank Andorka, Senior Correspondent As the Illinois market continues to unfurl, corporations in the state are starting to look for solar options to power their businesses. Now, one of the country’s largest retailers has partnered with a U.S.-based solar provider to add solar to the roofs and the ground surrounding its facilities in the state. SunPower and Walmart announced an agreement with to have the commercial energy provider install solar systems at 19 stores and two distribution centers in Illinois. As part of the project, a mix of rooftop and ground-mount solar systems are expected to account for 23 … Read More →

By Frank Andorka, Senior Correspondent Tyndall Air Force Base is a United States Air Force Base located 12 miles east of Panama City, Florida. The base was named in honor of World War I pilot 1st Lt. Frank Benjamin Tyndall. The base operating unit and host wing is the 325th Fighter Wing of the Air Combat Command. The Air Force base found itself in the direct path of Hurricane Michael, and the results were tough. A lot of roofs were ripped off, leaving homes exposed to the elements – with no protection from the rain and winds. But I noticed … Read More →

By Frank Andorka, Senior Correspondent We talked about this a couple of times last week, but coal country is suffering as more utilities are cutting back on their use of coal. Which makes it more interesting when coal may be replaced by a 400 MW solar farm in Ohio Appalachia – which is right in coal country’s heart. Inside Climate News has the details: American Electric Power submitted a plan Thursday evening to work with two developers to build 400 megawatts of solar in Highland County, Ohio. It would more than triple the state’s current solar capacity and be a … Read More →

By Frank Andorka, Senior Correspondent It’s stories like this that remind us all how corporates are going to drive solar adoption in many solar-reluctant states. New Mexico, which has had a contentious relationship with solar, is going to add 100 MW of solar in order to serve the electricity needs of a corporation of which you may have heard. PNM Resources’ New Mexico utility, PNM, received approval on Wednesday from the New Mexico Public Regulation Commission (NMPRC) to purchase 100 megawatts of solar generation from NM Renewable Development, LLC (NMRD) in order to continue serving the Facebook data center in … Read More →

By Frank Andorka, Senior Correspondent As SolarWakeup Live! heads to Jersey City, New Jersey, in about three weeks, I was startled to run across a story at the website NJSpotlight with the following headline: COLLAPSE OF NJ SOLAR INDUSTRY, BIG LAYOFFS IF NO INTERIM STATE PLAN — WARNING Because I understand clickbait when I see it, I did not immediately pull out my phone and call SolarWakeup Managing Editor Yann Brandt and tell him to abort his trip out East. Instead, I clicked on the link to figure out exactly what writer Tom Johnson was talking about. It turns out … Read More →

The Energy Show: By Barry Cinnamon Energy storage is critical to our ability to eliminate the use of fossil fuels. Basically, we need a way to store the abundance of daytime solar and use this energy at night. Although lithium ion batteries have been getting most of the attention, fuel cells provide another way to convert fuels into electricity. A fuel cell is an electro-chemical cell that converts the chemical energy from a fuel into electricity through a reaction of hydrogen or another hydrocarbon fuel, such as gasoline or natural gas, with oxygen. The history of fuel cells goes back … Read More →

By Yann Brandt, Managing Editor In this episode of the Energy Wakeup podcast, we sat down with Brad Klein, senior attorney with the Environmental Law and Policy Center. He and the team at ELPC were instrumental in bringing Illinois’ Future Energy Jobs Act of 2016, and Klein takes us behind the scenes to discuss exactly what that process – long and arduous as it sometimes was – looked like. Whether it was the threatened closure of nuclear plants or the coal industry piping up near the end of the process to get involved, Klein says what ultimately brought about the … Read More →