A new study at Lancaster University and the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology in the United Kingdom found that solar farms not only are good for the environment because they’re eliminating pollutants for the atmosphere, they’re also good locally because they can reduce local temperatures. 

The 100 megawatt (MW) North Star Solar Project was just purchased by D. E. Shaw Renewable Investments, LLC (DESRI) from Community Energy. When completed it will be the largest solar project in the Midwest. 

In less than a week Southern Company has announced the acquisition of three large solar farms each in different states. It acquired two solar farms 102 megawatts in size in, one in California, the other in Texas and a third, 74 megawatt solar farm in North Carolina.  

Enphase Energy and Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E) are piloting a program using integrating microinverters for solar panels to control the flow of electricity through grid management. The program is designed to study Enphase’s systems to help develop the smart grid of the future. 

More than 200,000 US homes had photovoltaic solar panels on them at the end of 2015, that’s according to BuildFax’s first annual ranking of the fastest growing US cities for solar power. In 2010, only about 54,000 homes had solar panels. What’s more the report found that the trend is curving up like a hockey stick. It found that residential solar activity jumped 29 percent just between 2014 and 2015. 

While gamblers might be inside tugging on one-armed bandits or rolling the dice at craps MGM Resorts’ Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas made a smart bet by installing the US’s largest rooftop solar array. The 8.3 megawatt behemoth rooftop solar array consists of 26,000 photovoltaic panels and supplies 25 percent of the power required to run the whole Mandalay Bay Resort & Casino campus.

Last week San Diego Gas & Electric (SDG&E) became the first utility in California to meet its limit for net-metering under California’s original rooftop solar subsidy with 90,000 rooftop solar installations in its service area, comprising 5 percent of its generation base. Now the utility is the first to transition to net-metering 2.0 for new rooftop solar power customers. 

The solar industry keeps evolving. That’s perhaps a key takeaway from Mercom Capital Group’s most recent quarterly Global Funding and M&A Report. The report found that while corporate funding was down significantly for the quarter, residential and commercial solar funding rose to $1.36 billion worldwide.

So there’s this thing in solar power called the Shockley Queisser Efficiency, which states that a one-layered solar cell can only be roughly 33.7 percent efficient at converting the sun’s light into electricity. As of July 2016 the most efficient single-junction cell is a 28.8 percent efficient gallium arsenide test cell developed by Alta Devices. But research from the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory show that perovskite solar cells, one of the newer solar technologies being explored, could reach efficiency levels of 31 percent—knocking on the door of that theoretical limit. 

The latest California Green Innovation Index by Next 10 shows that solar has grown 1,378 percent between 2009 and 2014. Moreover all forms of renewable energy and electric vehicles are experiencing significant growth in the Golden State even as the state increases its economic growth.