TransActive Grid, a solar project on Brooklyn’s rooftops in New York City is taking a slightly different approach to community solar with a local microgrid. The project, still in early stages, hopes to ultimately use a blockchain platform that will allow participants to buy, sell and trade energy produced by solar panels in the system in what Siemens called the first peer-to-peer blockchain network fro electricity.

Fluidic Energy’s unique Zinc-air long duration energy storage systems are proving their mettle in real life. One of its installations in Indonesia for a telecommunications company, Indostat, hashas used Fluidic Energy’s initial energy systems for five years—two times longer than lead acid batteries. During that time period they’ve been up more than 99.5 percent of the time.

The solar industry has launched a set of new tools aimed at helping consumers across the nation learn more about going solar. The new tools, introduced by the Solar Energy Industries Association today (March 29) build on previous tools SEIA has launched to make it easier and safer for consumers to go solar as it anticipates 4.4 million homes will be solar powered in the US by 2012—up from 1.4 million now.

On Monday (March 27), the world’s largest brewer—with more than 500 brands across 50 countries—among them, Anheuser-Busch and Budweiser—InBev, announced that by 2025 it would get all of its power from renewable energy. That means the company will transition 6 terawatt-hours of electricity—enough to power 400 soccer fields—from dirty energy sources to clean ones, with 15 percent to 25 percent coming from onsite facilities and the rest through power purchase agreements. 

President Donald Trump (R) has taken further actions to weaken the US climate protections and make the US less competitive as he seeks to make it easier for dirty coal to compete with cheap, renewable energy. In his latest moves to dismantle protections and roll back President Barak Obama’s Clean Power Power, Trump has drawn outrage from environmentalists and supporters of clean energy like wind and solar power and will soon be the subject of a march on Washington, DC. 

There’s more interest than ever in installing home solar systems with energy storage, particularly as states like California adopt time-of-use and other charges that can make stored energy more valuable. But a report out today (March 28) from the Department of Energy (DOE) National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) showed that the costs of energy storage systems are still high and revealed new soft costs associated with such systems. 

A new solar power system installed by Horizon Solar Power and Ice Energy is storing energy produced by the sun in ice to cool the Palm Springs Cultural Center in California. The system produces ice for the center’s HVAC system during off-peak hours then uses it to cool the building during peak hours when electricity is more expensive. 

Last week in the world of solar power records were set as states continued to debate the future of solar power—with some taking positive actions while others took more draconian actions. Meanwhile, Tesla’s Elon Musk took to Twitter tantalizing that the company will start taking orders on its highly anticipated solar rooftop tile system as soon as April.

Today (March 24) Tesla CEO Elon Musk took to Twitter to tease on his company’s new solar roof tiles with a tantalizing tweet! “Start taking orders in April.” 

Thanks to the second stage of the NY Prize Community Microgrid competition 11 microgrid projects will receive $1 million in funding from the NY Green Bank. The funds, announced by Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) will support engineering plans and business designs for the projects as they advance to a third stage of the competition to fund their construction.