Yesterday (March 17), in part in promotion of GTM Research’s Grid Edge Live, the company unveiled its March Madness bracket to see which state will install the most home solar in the month of March. “Last year, solar analyst Cory Honeyman filled out a bracket to predict which states would install the most solar in 2015. Some of our readers wanted in on the action, so this year we decided to create our own March Madness competition,” GTM Research said.

Among all the states in the Northeast Massachusetts is leading the way in solar power. This small state—more than five Massachusetts’ could fit into New York by area and New York has more than three times the population—installed more solar power last year than any other state in the Northeast. In fact, according to last week’s  U.S. Solar Market Insight 2014 Year in Review released by the Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA) and GTM Research, Massachusetts was fourth among all states in the nation, including California. 

SolarCity made its first bonds available for investment to the public last fall. Now it’s partnered with Incapital to make its solar bonds to investors across the U.S. It’s another way SolarCity and other large solar companies like SunPower, First Solar and SunEdison are making it easier for people to invest in solar and easier for those companies to pursue more solar projects at lower costs. 

Solar Frontier is the biggest manufacturer of Copper Indium Gallium Selenide (CIGS) thin-film photovoltaics in the world but thus far the company hasn’t had a large presence in the U.S. market. That’s likely to change now. Earlier this week the company purchased Spanish company Gestamp Solar’s 280 megawatt project pipeline in the U.S.

Louisiana’s Public Service Commission (LPSC) recently released a net-metering (NEM) study that’s drawing the ire of the local solar industry. The study is more evidence that the next step utilities and others opposing net metering and the rights of homeowners to produce their own electricity are taking their case to state utility commissions rather than state legislatures where many such efforts have failed. This was recently pointed out in a Washington Post article.  

This morning (March 10) GTM Research and the Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA) announced that 6.2 gigawatts of solar photovoltaics (PVs)—that’s 30 percent more than in 2013—and 767 megawatts of concentrating solar power came online in the U.S. in 2014. That brings the accumulative amount of solar installed in the the U.S. to over 20 gigawatts. The organizations released their results in their U.S. Solar Market Insight 2014 Year in Review report. The report also found that solar accounted for 32 percent of all the U.S.’ new energy in 2014—beating out new coal and wind power generation. 

And they’re off! This morning (March 9) Solar Impulse took off on the first leg of its attempt to circumnavigate the earth in an airplane powered only by the sun. 

Every month the Energy Information Administration releases the Electric Power Monthly report. This week it released the report for December 2014. It showed that the amount of installed, utility-scale solar has more than doubled since 2013 and that wind power generated 4.4 percent of all the electricity consumed in the U.S. in 2014. 

Today (March 5) SunEdison announced that it purchased Solar Grid Storage a maker of battery storage systems intended to provide back up storage for the grid as well as buffer the power from solar energy installations. The purchase and similar moves in the industry show that solar and utilities are increasingly looking to energy storage mechanisms. 

Yesterday (March 4) the Department of Energy announced the final rules for its SunShot Prize: Race to 7-Day Solar challenge. The challenge, as implied by the name, aims to help people install solar faster by speeding up the process of going solar significantly. Currently in some places in the U.S. it can take up to 180 days—half a year!—for a home or business to go solar because of all the steps a proposed solar installation must go through before it’s approved in some jurisdictions.