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On April 26, the 160-kW Valatie Falls Hydro plant in New York began generating power for the first time since June 2018. Valatie Falls will provide direct energy to the Village of Valatie, as well as charge the electric vehicles of local business PlugIn Stations Online. Built along the shores of Kinderhook Creek in Valatie,…

Arizona Public Service Co. (APS) said yesterday that it will soon serve customers with even more solar power after expanding the all-source request for proposals (RFP) originally issued in December 2020. The original RFP sought approximately 600-800 megawatts (MW) of renewable resources and about 400-600 MW of capacity resources. These resources are expected to be in service…

By Roger Bales, University of California, Merced and Brandi McKuin, University of California, Santa Cruz Climate change and water scarcity are front and center in the western U.S. The region’s climate is warming, a severe multi-year drought is underway and groundwater supplies are being overpumped in many locations. Western states are pursuing many strategies to…

By Josh Lariscy, Blue Wave Solar The rapid expansion of community solar continues to be both the most exciting, and at times, most complex form of solar development happening today. The advent of community solar in states like Massachusetts is a critical component in the fight against climate change; however, the location and impact of…

Originally published at ILSR.org In late 2020, the Minnesota Public Utilities Commission asked the state’s electric and gas utilities to discuss what infrastructure projects they had in queue that could be accelerated to support the COVID-battered economy. Tucked into a proposal from Xcel Energy, the state’s largest electric company, was a comparison of two proposed…

MISO planning resource auction prices for the 2021 planning year did not live up to their expectations from 2020 auction results. In the 2020 auction, the Michigan zone cleared at a cost of new entry of $250-per-MW-day. But in the latest auction results from April, MISO capacity prices were mostly in the $5-per-MW-day range, and…

This week Wiki-solar released its latest ranking of the top 32 utility-scale solar EPCs. The company ranks the developers by number of projects developed and cumulative capacity brought online.  This year, a new company tops that list. China’s State Power Investment Corporation (SPIC) rose to number one thanks to the 2.2-GWAC project its subsidiary Huanghe Hydropower…

Cat Creek Energy and Water has chosen Voith Hydro to design, manufacture and install 720 MW of ternary pumped storage equipment for the Cat Creek Energy and Water (CCEW) Project planned near Mountain Home, Idaho. The overall project, on the South Fork of the Boise River, includes wind and solar generation parks and the pumped-storage…

There are 2,600 megawatts of solar power capacity installed in the U.S. today that can be considered community solar, according to the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL). That is a little less than 5% of all solar capacity in the country, and it is also not very widespread—only three states, Minnesota,…

By Marriele Mango and Abbe Ramanan, Clean Energy Group Solar+storage is increasingly being explored by low-income service providers, such as affordable housing developers, community institutions, and municipal facilities, to improve resilience in the event of an outage and reduce energy costs. Despite an increase in the occurrence and duration of power outages due to extreme…