Ahead of 2018 and his state-of-the-state speech New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) called on the state’s retirement fund, Common Fund, to end investing in fossil fuel companies to de-carbonize the more than $200 billion fund’s portfolio. The new proposal from the Governor would instead direct the fund to invest in opportunities to combat climate change and support the clean tech economy, like wind, solar, and energy storage.

During this holiday season as news about solar power and renewable energy slow down like molasses in January, there was some surprising news for renewables including changes to the tax bill that made it ultimately more favorable for wind and solar. Meanwhile, in more gifts Austin Energy increased access to solar for low-income families and researchers in California identified thousands of square kilometers ideal for solar plants.

When solar companies and utilities look for land to build giant, sprawling solar farms one of the prime places they look to are farm lands. But these lands are already often performing an important function—providing food. Now researchers at the University of California (UC), Riverside, have identified more 8,400 square kilometers (the equivalent of 183,000 football fields) in California’s Central Valley as ideal locations for future solar farms.

Austin will soon shine as a way that Texas can show off its solar bonafides. The city’s utility announced today (Dec. 21) that it’s giving more of its low-income residents a chance to go solar with community solar even as it signs what may be the lowest-cost power-purchase agreement (PPA) for solar power in the US. 

The technologies in thin-film photovoltaics continue to nip at the heels of silicon solar as efficiency improvements continue. In the latest efficiency improvement for a technology called CIS (copper, indium selenium) Japan’s Solar Frontier has created a solar cell that converts 22.9 percent of the sun’s light into electricity. 

When both houses of Congress introduced their tax reform bills both the wind and solar industries were concerned over provisions in the bills that would have impacted the rebates and incentives they currently experience. As the bill comes closer to reconciliation and potentially passing, however, the provisions that could have raised prices on renewable energy causing 10s of thousands of lost jobs, were largely removed. 

The US continues to see an explosion in solar growth, installing more that 2 gigawatts (GWs) of solar in the third quarter of the year. Meanwhile an increasing body of evidence proves that renewable energy is lowering emissions compared to other energy sources. 

BP is back in the solar business. Today (Dec. 15) it announced that it’s investing $200 million into the United Kingdom’s Lightsource, one of Europe’s largest solar development companies. The $200 million stake will represent a 43 percent share of the company, which has developed solar projects across the world, including in the US.

Solar power continues to grow rapidly in the US as the country saw more than 2 gigawatts of solar power come online in the quarter, reaching an accumulative 49.3 GWs of installed solar power. It’s essentially a doubling of the amount of solar power installed in the US since the end of 2015, when the country had 25 GWs of solar installed.

That solar power and electric vehicles (EVs) are better for the environment than fossil fuel and gas-powered vehicles should be a given but new research from the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) on Austin’s Pecan Street Inc. project shows just how dramatic it can be.