
The electricity sector’s competitive dynamic completely flipped in 2017. It is now cheaper to build new wind and solar than new coal or often natural gas. In growing swaths of the country, it’s often cheaper to build new wind (and sometimes solar) than continuing to run existing coal plants. The implications are profound.

PRESIDENT TRUMP has what might seem like an irresistible opportunity for a populist climate-change denier: to crack down on imports and harm the effort to combat climate change all at once. Yet even the briefest of looks shows that slapping tariffs on imported solar cells, as he has been urged to do, would harm far more Americans than it could possibly help.

The US International Trade Commission published on Tuesday recommendations for import tariffs on solar PV cells and modules as part of the Section 201 trade case which has been in motion much of this year, and though any tariffs are harmful, the proposals were not as bad as many within the solar industry were fearing.

According to Google’s Project Sunroof, seventy-nine percent of all rooftops analyzed are technically viable for solar, meaning those rooftops have enough unshaded area for solar panels.
DOE has announced a new grant program solicitation for approximately $7 million in funding to support the development of sensors and modeling that allow utilities to more effectively integrate distributed clean energy sources into their power grids.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce is the latest conservative group to start spreading anti-solar messages. In an email sent to supporters on Wednesday, the chamber attacks net metering, a policy in place in many states that pays people with solar panels on their roofs for the electricity they feed into the grid. The group also posted a video on YouTube last week making its anti-net metering case. This is fairly new territory for the chamber, according to energy regulation experts.

The California utility that owns the state’s last operating nuclear power plant at Diablo Canyon announced it plans to close the facility within the next decade, signaling the end of the nuclear era in the Golden State – and with it, some green advocates hope, the start of a new era of marked by surging solar, wind and other renewable energy resources.