Fully 330 utilities across the U.S. responded to the Smart Electric Power Alliance’s (SEPA’s) annual market survey. The 2015 survey found that respondents added 6.4 gigawatts of solar power across their service territories, with one utility, Southern California Edison (SCE), installing nearly 20% of the new solar power. The rankings looked at newly installed solar power across all sectors, residential, commercial and utility.

These days there’s a lot of talk about organic solar power. Usually this means something like a using a small organic molecule polymer to convert sunlight into electricity. New York’s Binghamton University is taking a different approach and has developed a biological solar cell that can produce electricity using bacteria to convert photons into electric current. 

Last week Sungevity and REC Solar partnered to expand access to the commercial solar power market, a market that remains underserved as other solar markets, residential and utility-scale have flourished. Both companies will share share sales leads appropriate to each company’s focus to better serve commercial clients. 

The first quarter of 2016 saw $2.8 billion in corporate funding, that’s according to a new report from the Mercom Capital Group. It found that the amount of corporate funding for the first quarter of 2016 was significantly lower than last year’s first quarter, which saw $6.4 billion in corporate funding.

The solar market in Massachusetts was thriving until it hit a roadblock—itself. It began hitting caps for net-metering and renewable energy credits for solar power, and there wasn’t a plan clear plan forward from there. The state legislature reached an impasse last year as bills between the state House and Senate were different. Yesterday (April 6) the House and Senate agreed on legislation to raise the state's net metering caps by 3 percent.

Fully 15 cities now have achieved “Solar Star” status with more than 50 watts of solar power installed per person. That’s just one finding from Environment America’s “Shining Cities 2016” report. It found that 64 major cities across the U.S. are using almost as much solar power as the entire country had installed at the end of 2010—1.7 gigawatts. It’s the latest in a series of reports the nonprofit advocacy organization has issued in support of solar power.

Solar power is growing in more places across the U.S., including the southeast in places like Tennessee, Arkansas and Mississippi. A newly strengthened partnership between First Solar and Silicon Ranch, which operates primarily in the region, is a great example of that. The companies entered an agreement for 231.6 megawatts of First Solar's solar panels for projects being constructed in 2017 and early 2018.

Last month SunPower introduced its new Equinox solar array for homeowners, which is designed to provide more power for homeowners with less visible parts. The new product line is intended to help make solar power look less intrusive on homes while making as much power as possible.

Following the U.S. Supreme Court’s actions in February to temporarily block the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan supporters from across the country are speaking out in defense of it. This week more than 50 city and county governments, and in a separate action, leading companies have filed amicus briefs supporting the plan to reduce carbon pollution in the U.S.

Of all the new electric generation installed in the U.S. the largest source was wind power, which saw 8.1 gigawatts of new installations in 2015—41 percent of all new electric generation, according to recent data from the Energy Information Administration (EIA). The data also showed that 5.1 gigawatts of solar photovoltaics were installed, accounting for 26 percent of the U.S.’s new electric generation last year.