Today (March 5) Mosaic and RGS Energy announced the launch of the Mosaic Home Solar Loan, a new alternative in the solar financing space. Under the loan offering Mosaic and RGS Energy will allow homeowners to go solar with little or no upfront costs.

The bulk of new solar power coming online in Colorado in the next few years will come from one new project, Community Energy’s 120 megawatt Comanche Solar project. Community Energy announced the approval today (March 4). The new project, which will be built near Pueblo and close to Xcel’s Comanche Generating Station is slated for completion in 2016.

The sun has been around for a long time. So has marijuana. Legal pot in the U.S. hasn’t been around for a long time. In fact, earlier this year Colorado became the first state to sell legal marijuana in the U.S. With the country’s—if not the world’s—eyes on Colorado’s new policy, growers are looking for opportunities to better use their profits while still dealing with federal roadblocks. One potential is investing in solar to offset soaring utility costs for growers in Colorado that grow in warehouses. The issue was at the heart of one of the sessions at Colorado Solar Energy Industries Association’s Solar Power Colorado conference last week.

That’s right, not one, but two thin-film solar photovoltaic (PV) technologies broke efficiency records this week. Both technologies put their thin-film PV within much closer range of silicon-based PV, which comprise the overwhelming majority of installed solar power today. 

The session also featured executives from solar companies SunPower and SolarCity. Both companies are active in installing solar on new homes in an increasing number of states and see it as a growing market. “When builders start building, it’s good for us all, in all segments of the solar industry in particular,” said SolarCity’s Dennis Helbig, regional manager of new builder markets. He added that solar is shown to increase the value of new homes and is a rapidly growing market.

One of the key markets for solar is residential solar. While most people think about adding solar to an existing home, an increasing number of builders and states are offering solar as a standard option of even including solar as part of the building process. That’s what a number of home builders and solar installers discussed during a recent session at the Colorado Solar Energy Industries Association (COSEIA) annual conference Solar Power Colorado this week. 

A new report out from the Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) looks into what solar policies at the state level are most effective at supporting solar PV installations. The report was supported by funds from the SunShot Initiative to reduce the costs of solar. 

More than 13,000 U.S. Veterans are already working in the solar industry, and the number is growing. That’s almost 10 percent of the workforce in the solar industry, according to a new report from Operation Free, a coalition of veterans and national security experts, and The Solar Foundation. The report also found that nearly 62 percent of solar companies plan to hire more people in the next year. 

“I’m of the perspective that I want to pull the Band-Aid off and end all incentives for solar,” said Blake Jones, president and co-owner of Namaste Solar, during the CEO panel of the 2014 Solar Power Colorado conference put on by the Colorado Solar Energy Industries Association (COSEIA). “Including the ITC [i.e., 30 percent Investment Tax Credit]. I’m actually looking forward to the ITC going from 30 percent to 10 percent and wouldn’t mind if it went to zero,” he said.

The net-metering battle is raging in increasingly more of the U.S. Now it looks like a new hotspot for solar, North Carolina, is also a new hotspot for the net-metering fight. Even as the state’s largest utility, Duke Energy, filed to increase the amount of solar it has in its grid it also filed to reduce the amount that it reimburses rooftop solar owners for the solar energy that they put back on the grid.