Last week was a big week for solar power and renewables. The Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA) announced that the US solar industry had a quarter that shattered all previous records and that the fourth quarter will be even bigger for solar power. Meanwhile, international investments in renewable energy are increasing with developing nations leading the way. Both Al Gore and Bill Gates and others stepped back into the environmental and renewable energy spotlight last week, too. 

MCE a not-for-profit, public electricity provider in California just signed a power-purchase agreement (PPA) with EDF Renewable Energy for 150 megawatts of its Desert Harvest Solar Project underway in southern California. Once completed the project will add more electric generation to MCE’s portfolio of renewable energy choice for its customers in Marin and Napa counties and a number of California cities. 

The latest Climatescope report found some interesting things. In 2015 the price of solar projects were essentially equal to those of wind projects—and that investments in solar power across the world surpassed wind power for the first time. Looking ahead, the report also found that developing nations have pledged to build 18 percent more renewable energy than wealthier nations. 

The first fully solar-powered mobile medical clinic is going to Clemson University’s Joseph F. Sullivan Center in South Carolina. The new mobile clinic, designed by Wyoming’s Odulair, will allow the university to serve underserved and largely rural areas of South Carolina. The clinic will operate without the need for a generator or fuel to power its services, other than the fuel needed to drive the clinic to a location.

Arizona’s largest utility, APS, recently began installing 4 megawatts of commercial-sized lithium-ion batteries—2 MWs each. The energy storage systems will serve customers in the utility’s Solar Partner Program (SPP) and to study the impact of an energy storage system on feeder lines with a lot of solar power. 

It’s not solar power, but it’s a major advance for its renewable energy cousin, wind power, in the US. The US’s first offshore wind farm, Deepwater Wind’s five-turbine, 30-megawatt Block Island Wind Farm in Rhode Island, began producing renewable energy to New England this week. 

When former Vice President Al Gore introduced An Inconvenient Truth in 2006, it helped bring concerns about the climate change and the environment to the forefront. Now, as another anti-environmental president, President-elect Donald Trump, is set to take office and has named climate haters to prominent roles impacting the economy and environment, Gore, Participant Media and Paramount Pictures are introducing the sequel to the Academy Award-winning documentary. 

There are many ways to look at it but with 4,143 megawatts of new solar power installed in the US in the third quarter of 2016 every previous quarterly record was broken handily. For instance, the amount of solar installed in the third quarter grew 191 percent over the previous year’s third quarter.

The Breakthrough Energy Coalition (BEC), a group of entrepreneurs, business leaders, and institutional investors, chaired by Bill Gates announced that they will invest more than $1 billion into clean energy research. The new fund, Breakthrough Energy Ventures (BEV), will invest in promising zero-emissions energy technologies with a long, up to 20-year, horizon. 

Last week it came to light that solar power will return to space in two new innovative ways, manned aircraft and solar sail. More terrestrially, solar power continued to march forward with a California utility reaching more than 2.4 gigawatts of rooftop solar, while more evidence showed solar is reaching a tipping point—oh and Google is going 100 percent green energy in 2017.