Yesterday (June 25) Sunrun announced that it filed a Form S-1 for an initial public offering (IPO) of stock. The company plans to issue more than 54.8 million shares of common stock on NASDAQ trading under the ticker RUN. In doing so it joins SolarCity and Vivint Solar in becoming a publicly traded residential solar company. The IPO will help ease access to capital to grow the company. 

Community solar power is becoming an increasingly popular choice to help people, municipalities and businesses go solar. But there’s still a disconnect and not everyone—including utilities understand it. Hence, earlier this week Clean Energy Collective introduced its Community Solar Platform (CSP), a suite of software tools and services aimed at utilities and solar developers, among others to help them get community solar up and going. 

This must be a final kick in the pants for the companies that supplied coal to the Widows Creek coal power plant in Jackson County in Alabama. First the coal-fired power plant was scheduled for a shutdown, now Google has announced it will be resurrected as a data center powered entirely powered by renewable energy. 

The U.S. now has more than 50,000 wind turbines and 650,000 solar installations, according to  according to Clean Energy Champions: The Importance of State Programs and Policies. State policy has a huge impact on the adoption of solar, wind, and other forms of clean energy in the U.S., the report, released June 22 by the Clean Energy States Alliance (CESA), found. 

Earlier this year Tucson Electric Power (TEP) announced plans to change its net-metering program without giving homeowners an idea of how much they would be compensated for the solar power they produce and put back on the grid. The proposal sparked an outcry from the local solar industry and advocates. The utility rescinded that plan now it filed another proposal that would reduce the amount it reimburses for net-metering but offers homeowners more pricing stability allowing them to plan for how much a system will cost and when it will pay off. 

First Solar and SunPower previously announced they were joining together to form a YieldCo to provide financing for their solar projects. Today (June 19) they announced the $420 million initial public offering (IPO) for their YieldCo, 8point3 Energy Partners LP. 8point3 Energy is trading on the NASDAQ Global Select Market under the symbol “CAFD".

A new report out from Mercom Capital Group anticipates that the by the end of 2015 the world will have roughly 57.4 gigawatts (GWs) of newly installed solar power. That’s about 12.4 more gigawatts of installed solar power than the roughly 45 gigawatts of solar that was installed in 2014.

Solar installer giant, SolarCity, is branching out from residential and commercial solar installations into community solar gardens. The company partnered with Sunrise Energy Ventures to makes its first foray into community solar in Minnesota with a series of 1 megawatt solar arrays in the greater Minneapolis-St. Paul area. 

More than 10 gigawatts of solar, 10,649 megawatts, to be precise, were operational in California as of the end of the first quarter of 2015. That’s according to figures from the Solar Energy Industries Association’s (SEIA’s) and GTM Research’s quarterly U.S. Solar Market Insight Report, which was released last week. That’s more than 10 percent of the state’s nearly 80 gigawatts of electric generation capacity. 

Today (June 15) First Solar announced a new world record efficiency for cadmium-telluride (CdTe) photovoltaics (PVs). In testing at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) its full-sized advanced PV module had an 18.6 percent aperture efficiency, which is more efficient than the highest efficiency multi-crystalline silicon PV modules. The advance in efficiency is putting First Solar closer to producing some of the world’s most efficient solar panels at lower costs.