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It might have been cloudy, but Unionville High School celebrated its new solar array on Friday with an official ribbon-cutting ceremony. The array — installed by TerraSol Energies — covers roughly 70 percent of the school’s roof surface with almost 900 panels.
According to Director of Facilities James Whitesel, since the system went online on Sept. 9, it has already generated 58 megawatts of power.
“That’s 58,000 kilowatt-hours of electricity generated right here on our roof. That’s enough electricity to fully power any one of our elementary schools this past month. And at today’s electricity rates, that’s also enough power to offset approximately $75,000 in electricity costs,” he said.
“I’m very confident the sun is going to continue coming up every morning and now, thanks to this project, the sunshine is working for Unionville-Chadds Ford School District,” Whitesel added.
Funding for the project came from a $300,000 grant from the Pennsylvania Solar for Schools Grant.
Tim Hoffman, the superintendent of schools, said the project took a lot of work and there were many people to thank, including project partners and the state politicians who helped make it come together by voting for the grant program.
“This wouldn’t have been possible without the support of the solar grants,” Hoffman said.
He added that the project coincided with one of the district’s four core values, that of principled stewardship.
“That means we make the most of the resources that we have, whether that’s financial resources or natural resources; we do what we can do to the best of our ability with what we have. This solar array will help offset rising liquid fuel costs and electricity costs that have had a detrimental impact on school budgets.”
Also on hand for the ceremony were state Sen. Carolyn Comitta, D-19, and state Reps Christina Sappey, D-158, and Craig Williams, R-160.
Comitta said, “Energy and the environment are at the intersection of some of the biggest issues and challenges that we face…Pennsylvania is one of about half the states in the nation where electricity rates have risen faster than inflation. Meanwhile, we continue to lag behind in the deployment of renewables.”
She continued by saying the state ranks 47^th in growth when it comes to solar, wind, and geothermal generation, but said forward-thinking schools and districts, such as Unionville-Chadds Ford, are leading the way in overcoming such a deficit.
Sappey likewise said the project is a “massive win for students and facilities. Utility bills are consistently one of the largest operating expenses for our public schools. When the House of Representatives created the Solar for Schools Grant in 2024, our goal was to protect local taxpayers by lowering operating costs for districts. By completing this project, Unionville-Chadds Ford demonstrates how state grants reduce overhead and keep district funds focused on where they matter most, on students.”
The final speaker was Craig Williams, who said, “This really is a big moment. There was a little bit of bad news conveyed today about our current development of energy in Pennsylvania, and it’s absolutely true. But there’s also some good news in the message we bring you today,” he added. “We are still the number one electricity exporter state in the entire country, but we’re not building it fast enough.”
Williams went on to say, “The entry of data centers onto our energy grid means that we are now competing with them, for the moment, for the available power. Until we get that fixed legislatively, that is the pricing reality. So, school districts, like Unionville-Chadds Ford, face a daunting financial position which is they can either add power for their own facilities or lean less on the grid where those power prices are out of control. We need to fix this in Harrisburg and Washington, and I think we will, but in the meantime, one thing you can do is add power for your own facilities, take care of your own needs, and lean less on the power grid.”
Williams was the last of the speakers before the ceremonial ribbon cutting.
Rich Schwartzman has been reporting on events in the greater Chadds Ford area since September 2001 when he became the founding editor of The Chadds Ford Post. In April 2009 he became managing editor of ChaddsFordLive. He is also an award-winning photographer.
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“We had something very similar and our floor collapsed soooo spend the money to fix it.”
Photo Credit: Reddit
Trying to trace a persistent musty odor, a homeowner zeroed in on a sunroom crawlspace, and the image shared online raised another issue.
The replies did not stay limited to smell prevention. Several people on the r/homeowners subreddit said the poster should have a structural engineer take a look.
The original poster wrote on Reddit: “The entire first floor has this earthy, musty smell that even goes upstairs to an extent.”
The photo showed sections of subfloor exposed between insulation boards, with tape starting to peel away. The homeowner said this crawlspace is under the sunroom, while the rest of the home sits over a finished basement, and guessed the area was likely “done in 2003 and left like that.”
The discussion moved in two directions at once, revolving around moisture and structure. Looking at the crawlspace, one commenter asked, “Isn’t there supposed to be a support under the house on that nice big concrete support?”
Not everyone saw the uneven crawlspace floor as a major warning sign. A self-identified home inspector wrote, “Crawlspace floors are not typically leveled, so no concern there.” That same commenter still said the area should have a barrier extending “a foot or two up the sides of the walls and secured with adhesives and foam as well.”
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Other commenters were much more alarmed about what could happen if the issue is ignored. One person wrote, “We had something very similar and our floor collapsed soooo spend the money to fix it,” while another said plainly, “You need to call a structural engineer. Stat.”
The homeowner said the smell isn’t confined to the sunroom area. The finished basement smells “very musty, too,” and the earthy odor reaches much of the first floor and even upstairs.
A concrete footer visible in the crawlspace became another point of debate. Commenters repeatedly questioned why it didn’t appear to support anything. One suggested it was “probably just an old deck support from before the sunroom,” while another wondered if the visible material was “just foam board.”
Some commenters connected the odor to a larger moisture problem rather than a single bad-smelling spot. One said that if the smell is strongest in the sunroom, “that’s probably the culprit,” but also advised checking drainage around the house and comparing humidity “before and after rain.”
The next step most people mentioned was having a professional evaluate the structure. Multiple commenters tied that advice to the exposed subfloor, the peeling tape, and the concrete footer beneath the room.
For the odor itself, the clearest recommendations focused on reducing moisture in the crawlspace. One commenter suggested to “start with a vapor barrier and go from there.”
Some suggestions also focused on conditions outside the crawlspace. One commenter recommended making sure drainage is good “all around the house” and tracking humidity changes before and after rain to see whether water intrusion is causing the smell.
In follow-ups to commenters, the original poster said they were open to a range of options, including hiring an engineer to look at it, sealing off the sunroom, using an odor absorber, encapsulating the sunroom, and taking moisture readings.
When homeowners and renters track down strange smells or uncover hidden problems around the home, the culprit is often a surprise.
• In California, a resident found a 500-pound creature squatting beneath the house after hearing noises.
• A renter traced a strange odor to shoddy plumbing for a gas stove that looked unsafe.
• A homeowner found a strange object in the garage when the smell suddenly stood out.
• In a rental backyard, a foul problem with the artificial lawn left the outdoor space reeking.
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State Permitting Approves 90% of US Wind and Solar Projects, Study Finds
When a wind turbine or a field of solar panels is proposed in the United States, two bureaucratic hurdles stand between the developer and construction: connecting the project to the transmission grid and obtaining a permit to build it in a specific location. Interconnection queues and their notorious multi-year waits have been studied extensively, but the second hurdle, permitting, has remained largely opaque. Now a team of researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the University of California Santa Barbara, and the University of Massachusetts Amherst has compiled the first project-level dataset of state-based permitting for wind and solar facilities across 19 states, and their findings upend some common assumptions about how hard it is to get a renewable energy project approved.
The headline result is striking: 90 percent of the projects considered by state permitting authorities during the study period were granted permits, and most received their decisions within roughly a year of entering the process. In other words, at least for projects adjudicated under state authority, permitting is not the wall blocking new clean energy from reaching the grid that anecdotes sometimes suggest. The study, published in Frontiers in Sustainable Energy Policy, documents 460 projects across 19 states, representing nearly half of the 41 states identified as having a state-based authority with jurisdiction over some or all large-scale energy facilities.
That such a dataset exists at all is itself a technical feat. Permitting for energy facilities on private land is particularized to individual states, with no common standard for docket record keeping or public data access. The research team searched and reviewed publicly available special permits and related documents, recording dates and decisions for all proposed large-scale solar and wind facilities with permit application dates after January 1, 2018 for solar and January 1, 2015 for wind, and expanded the wind timeline slightly to boost representation given less recent wind development. The data were organized in a relational PostgreSQL database, a structure the authors deemed necessary because individual projects often carry multiple permit applications, decision stages, and regulatory interactions that a flat table could not capture, and then analyzed using R statistical software.
The study period runs through a data collection cut-off of January 1, 2025, and the authors believe they captured the universe of proposed projects subject to state-level permitting authority in those 19 states. For statistically meaningful comparisons between states, they restricted their analysis to states with at least 20 projects with a known outcome, leaving six states, Kentucky, Mississippi, Maryland, Ohio, Minnesota, and New York, plus a combined set of the remaining states. Approval rates among those states varied from 80 percent in Maryland and Ohio to a perfect 100 percent in Kentucky, with Mississippi close behind at 97 percent.
Timelines told a more differentiated story. The overall average from permit application to a state decision was approximately one year, but a one-way analysis of variance testing whether mean permit days differed among the seven state groups was highly significant, F(6, N − 7) = 19.40, p = 2.01 × 10⁻¹⁹. Tukey post-hoc pairwise comparisons revealed two distinct clusters: New York, Minnesota, Ohio, and Maryland averaged about three months above the overall mean, while Kentucky and Mississippi averaged about five months below it. Notably, the researchers found no significant differences in decision time by application year, technology type, or project capacity, suggesting that where a project is permitted matters more than what or how big it is.
The two fastest states share a governance feature that may explain their speed and their near-universal approval rates. In Kentucky, facilities of 10 megawatts or more are reviewed by the State Board on Electric Generation and Transmission Siting, which must render a decision within 180 days of application completion, and the board cannot modify or waive local setback or decommissioning requirements. In Mississippi, the Public Service Commission grants a certificate of public convenience and necessity, but in most cases the project must first obtain agreement from local government. The authors suggest that in these states, most applicants may only apply after already bringing their projects into compliance with local regulations, which would help explain the very high approval rates.
Other states present more complicated relationships with local authority. Minnesota, Maryland, and New York typically preempt local requirements, and it may be that developers in these states propose projects with greater potential impacts, hoping the state authority will be more likely to grant approval. These states also carry state-level environmental regulations that could challenge certain projects. Ohio tells a different tale: since 2021, the Ohio Power Siting Board is not allowed to approve projects that a county has specifically precluded through zoning, a constraint the authors suggest may explain the 20 percent cancellation rate there. Maryland’s commission, meanwhile, may preempt local zoning authority, a power it has held since 2019.
Breaking the permitting process into stages reveals where the time actually goes. Four key dates structure the analysis: Notice of Intent, when a developer publicly announces plans to submit an application; Application Submission; Application Completion, when the authority deems the application complete and begins review; and Application Decision. Across most states, the longest stage is from completion to decision, indicating that authorities spend more time reviewing complete applications than requesting or waiting on additional information from developers. Oregon and New York stand out for substantially longer submission-to-completion stages, and Oregon also shows a long median timeline from Notice of Intent to submission, with the public typically notified at least a year before an application is filed. The authors suggest this may indicate the process is exceptionally onerous for developers to comply with in those states, and that clearer guidelines or standardization could help, though they caution this deserves further research.
Cancellations, the 10 percent of projects that did not receive permits, came in four flavors. A withdrawal is developer-initiated, removing an application before an official decision, and occurred in 8 of the 19 states. Terminations occur when the authority stops considering a project before issuing a decision. Denials are negative decisions from the authority, and one revocation of a previously approved permit occurred in North Dakota. Withdrawals may reflect developers observing a high likelihood of denial or increased costs during review, and the level of opposition a project will experience is notoriously difficult to predict at the onset. The authors note that many more projects request interconnection than are ever built, with connection request wait times typically exceeding four years and unpredictable, and that understanding the interplay between interconnection and permitting will require project-level matching of these datasets, which was not available for this study.
The findings carry weighty implications for the national debate over permitting reform, which in U.S. energy policy often fixates on federal policy and the National Environmental Policy Act. Yet federal permitting is most relevant to projects on federal lands, and to date less than 3 percent of all operating utility-scale land-based wind, photovoltaic solar, and geothermal facilities are located there. The real action, this study shows, is at the state level, where policies vary considerably and where reforms are reshaping the balance between local control and centralized review. The authors emphasize that their analysis cannot speak to community perception of process, project impacts, or cost, and that future research should measure those dimensions across permitting regime types, clarify what factors drive cancellations and long timelines, and establish whether swift approvals correlate with better or worse social and environmental outcomes. Administrative capacity, including sufficient staff and expertise, likely remains critical to states’ ability to process applications, and whether state processes better align projects with clean energy goals, or simply offer fewer opportunities for public participation, remains one of the most important open questions in sustainable energy policy.
Subject of Research: Energy Policy
Article Title: Outcomes and timelines for state-based energy facility permitting in the United States
Article References: Nilson, R., Tao, L., Maddock, W., Katz, J., Baillargeon, N., & Hoen, B. (2026). Outcomes and timelines for state-based energy facility permitting in the United States. Frontiers in Sustainable Energy Policy, 5, Article 1715811. https://doi.org/10.3389/fsuep.2026.1715811
Image Credits: AI Generated
DOI: 10.3389/fsuep.2026.1715811
Keywords: permitting, renewable energy, wind power, solar energy, state policy, energy transition, siting, United States, Outcomes, timelines, state-based, energy
News Source: Faith Mcneil. (October 16, 2026). State Permitting Approves 90% of US Wind and Solar Projects, Study Finds. Scienmag.
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“This is a negotiation and you have the upper hand.”
Photo Credit: iStock
After buying a home in August, a Washington resident says they learned the homeowners association has no established way to reach a wetland area behind the subdivision — and is now asking for an easement across their lot.
In return, the HOA offered to re-bark the owners’ yard once a year.
According to a Reddit post, the home backs up to a “critical area wetland tract” and wetland buffer that the HOA maintains, including fencing and vegetation. But because the tract is “completely surrounded by houses,” the homeowner said the planners never created an easement that would let the association get in to do that work.
They said two issues worried them most: possible yard damage “with equipment” and whether allowing an easement could make the property more difficult to sell in the future.
Commenters focused on the HOA‘s legal authority. One commenter wrote, “The HOA CCRs give them authority to maintain it not you. If you deny them access. They could take you to court to have their access to the wetlead upheld and an easement will be granted. You will pay the HOA lawyers.”
Some commenters said the problem appeared to trace back to how the subdivision was originally laid out, rather than anything the current owner did. “Almost everywhere part of subdividing the land includes handling access via an easement,” one commenter wrote, and asked whether another route would require “an ‘expensive’ driveway, a bridge or some other change.”
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Another theme was whether the HOA had other options and simply chose the easiest one. “Why are they targeting you and your house?” one commenter asked, while also raising the possibility that a nearby home not yet sold or still under contract could potentially be modified before closing to provide access instead.
In this Washington case, however, the dispute runs in the opposite direction: The HOA is seeking a new property right after the sale has already closed. Homeowners facing these kinds of conflicts can learn how to work with HOAs to best navigate tricky or limiting situations.
Before agreeing to anything, commenters said the homeowner should get clearer details on how access would work in practice. 
They also suggested challenging the idea that this particular lot had to carry the easement. Recommended questions included why they chose this house, whether the HOA had approached other neighboring owners, and whether any unsold homes could still be adjusted to provide access instead. 
On compensation, commenters largely treated the proposal as a negotiation over a burden on the property, not a courtesy. One wrote, “An easement is certainly a burden on a property,” and suggested putting a dollar figure on how much less the house would have been worth if that easement had already existed at the time of purchase. 
As the original poster put it: “They’re now coming to me asking if we will agree to an easement on our property to give them access to the wetland in exchange to rebark our yard once a year.” 
“Show me the MONEY! I would not allow it unless they paid me,” one commenter wrote. “This is a negotiation and you have the upper hand.” 
This dispute raises familiar questions about property rights, yard access, and how far an HOA can go. Other homeowners have faced similar battles, as highlighted in these stories.
• After HOA pushback, a homeowner installed a gate to a greenbelt without drawing more scrutiny.
• A homeowner grew frustrated when the HOA backtracked on approval for a lawn-saving retaining wall.
• One family said the HOA demanded removal of a fruit tree after years without complaints.
Get TCD’s free newsletters for easy tips, smart advice, and a chance to earn $5,000 toward home upgrades. To see more stories like this one, change your Google preferences here.
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In Rhode Island, a one-panel fridge backup ran into a tricky code question  Yahoo Tech
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Actis announced the launch of Yeltica Energy on September 17, 2026, as a greenfield renewable energy platform in Mexico with a target of more than 2 GW of generation capacity. The platform is anchored by three solar-plus-storage projects awarded under Mexico’s first Mixed Investment Tender, conducted by the state-owned utility Comisión Federal de Electricidad (CFE). Together, the projects account for approximately 330 MWp of solar PV and 255 MWh of battery storage. José Luis García, formerly CEO of Actis-backed Zuma Energía, will lead the new company. Mexico is targeting a 38% renewable electricity share by 2030, up from around 20% at the time of the announcement, with 22 GW of new renewable capacity planned as part of that goal. 
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“You may not be able to export all you generate.”
Photo Credit: iStock
A U.K. homeowner was left with a conundrum after being quoted roughly £22,000 ($29,000) for 40 solar panels, two Sigenergy batteries, and a 12-kilowatt inverter.  
Would using as much roof space as possible make the most sense, or would putting more of the budget into battery storage be better for long-term savings?
In a post on the subreddit r/SolarUK, the homeowner said the property could take 12-13 panels on the southeast-facing roof, another 19 on a similarly oriented garage roof, and 18 more on a northwest-facing rear roof. 
Rather than treating 40 panels as obviously excessive, one commenter wrote, “General rule is you can’t have too many panels, you can have an optimal number and that would depend on your house usage.” 
Want to go solar but not sure who to trust? EnergySage has your back with free and transparent quotes from fully vetted providers in your area.
To get started, just answer a few questions about your home — no phone number required. Within a day or two, EnergySage will email you the best options for your needs, and their expert advisers can help you compare quotes and pick a winner.
Much of the discussion focused on sizing the system to real consumption rather than simply cutting upfront costs.
In fact, going solar is one of the best ways to save money on home energy. EnergySage can help you get free solar installation estimates and compare quotes to find the system that best fits your needs.
Another user said they use roughly 22 kWh during daytime or peak periods. Describing their own system as “23 panels and 28kwh of battery with a 12 KW inverter system all Sig,” they added, “Sizing the battery to be able to cover all your daytime usage in the winter is more important than more panels according to all the payback calculations I’ve done.”
Roof exposure was another variable. The homeowner said the southeast-facing sections get sun early, and that in summer “all areas of the roof is in sun from around 12pm, with this lasting until early evening,” which could shape how much each part of the roof produces.
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They also said the final design may depend on the local grid operator, noting they were “at the mercy of the DNO report,” meaning the distribution network operator could still restrict what is installed or exported even if the roof has space for more panels.
Some replies highlighted trade-offs that can come with a larger array. One commenter warned, “You may not be able to export all you generate,” and added that export earnings could raise tax questions if design generation exceeds 120% of expected household use.
Overall, commenters urged the homeowner to size the system around actual household demand, especially in the darker months. If winter daytime use is the bigger issue, they suggested batteries may deserve priority over filling every available roof section with panels.
Adding battery storage to a solar setup is one of the best ways to protect your home during outages, save money on energy, and go off-grid. In this case, the homeowner was already considering two Sigenergy batteries, and commenters said storage can matter just as much as panel count. Homeowners can use EnergySage to explore home battery storage options, including competitive installation estimates.
💡Go deep on the latest news and trends shaping the residential solar landscape
For readers in the U.S. weighing a similar solar-versus-storage decision, EnergySage can also be a major money-saving tool, as the average person can save up to $10,000 on solar purchases and installations. 
EnergySage’s solar map also shows the average cost of a home solar panel system by state, along with details on local solar panel incentives. Together, those resources can help homeowners get the best price for rooftop solar panels.
Similar decisions come up when a solar quote starts climbing and system design gets more complicated. 
• A homeowner did the math on buying solar panels as a source of passive income.
• In Australia, a 20kW solar setup made blackouts a thing of the past and earned monthly credits.
• EnergySage’s former COO broke down interconnected solar cost factors confusing many first-time buyers.
• One homeowner said rooftop panels cut a sky-high electricity bill so sharply it was startling.
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Canadian Solar (NASDAQ:CSIQ – Get Free Report) was downgraded by Zacks Research from a “hold” rating to a “strong sell” rating in a research report issued on Thursday, Zacks reports.
CSIQ has been the subject of a number of other reports. Wells Fargo & Company reduced their target price on shares of Canadian Solar from $18.00 to $17.00 and set an “equal weight” rating for the company in a research note on Monday, August 31st. Wall Street Zen downgraded Canadian Solar from a “sell” rating to a “strong sell” rating in a research note on Saturday, August 29th. Weiss Ratings lowered Canadian Solar from a “sell (d+)” rating to a “sell (d)” rating in a report on Thursday, August 27th. Roth Capital set a $15.00 price target on Canadian Solar in a report on Friday, August 28th. Finally, UBS Group reduced their price objective on Canadian Solar from $25.00 to $16.00 and set a “buy” rating for the company in a research report on Wednesday. Three investment analysts have rated the stock with a Buy rating, six have given a Hold rating and four have given a Sell rating to the company’s stock. According to data from MarketBeat, the company has a consensus rating of “Reduce” and an average target price of $16.42.
Check Out Our Latest Analysis on CSIQ

Canadian Solar Trading Down 7.2%

• MarketBeat Week in Review – 5/22 – 5/26

NASDAQ CSIQ traded down $0.76 during trading on Thursday, reaching $9.81. 2,654,919 shares of the stock traded hands, compared to its average volume of 1,729,968. Canadian Solar has a fifty-two week low of $9.76 and a fifty-two week high of $34.59. The company has a quick ratio of 0.78, a current ratio of 1.02 and a debt-to-equity ratio of 0.95. The firm has a market cap of $666.10 million, a price-to-earnings ratio of -2.55 and a beta of 1.53. The stock’s 50-day moving average price is $12.70 and its 200 day moving average price is $14.61.
Canadian Solar (NASDAQ:CSIQ – Get Free Report) last announced its quarterly earnings results on Thursday, August 27th. The solar energy provider reported ($1.40) earnings per share for the quarter, missing analysts’ consensus estimates of ($0.18) by ($1.22). Canadian Solar had a negative return on equity of 5.57% and a negative net margin of 3.73%. The firm had revenue of $1.21 billion for the quarter, compared to the consensus estimate of $1.17 billion. During the same period in the prior year, the business earned ($0.53) earnings per share. The company’s revenue for the quarter was down 28.7% compared to the same quarter last year. Analysts predict that Canadian Solar will post -2.93 EPS for the current year.

Institutional Inflows and Outflows

• Solar Panel Demand Makes Canadian Solar a Buy-the-Dip Opportunity

Institutional investors and hedge funds have recently bought and sold shares of the stock. TD Waterhouse Canada Inc. lifted its holdings in shares of Canadian Solar by 139.2% during the third quarter. TD Waterhouse Canada Inc. now owns 23,200 shares of the solar energy provider’s stock worth $262,000 after buying an additional 13,500 shares in the last quarter. Mraz Amerine & Associates Inc. bought a new stake in shares of Canadian Solar in the second quarter valued at approximately $188,000. Susquehanna Fundamental Investments LLC acquired a new position in Canadian Solar in the 2nd quarter valued at $166,000. Hsbc Holdings PLC increased its position in shares of Canadian Solar by 170.5% in the second quarter. Hsbc Holdings PLC now owns 325,847 shares of the solar energy provider’s stock worth $5,220,000 after purchasing an additional 205,397 shares during the period. Finally, Wellington Management Group LLP acquired a new position in Canadian Solar in the second quarter valued at about $1,018,259,000. Institutional investors and hedge funds own 52.36% of the company’s stock.

Canadian Solar Company Profile

(Get Free Report)
Canadian Solar Inc NASDAQ: CSIQ is a global renewable-energy company that designs, manufactures and sells solar photovoltaic modules and system solutions. Its product portfolio includes solar modules, inverters, battery-storage systems and other equipment used in residential, commercial, industrial and utility-scale renewable-energy installations.
The company also develops, builds and operates solar-power and energy-storage projects through its Recurrent Energy business. These activities include project development, engineering, procurement and construction, as well as the ownership and sale of electricity-generating assets.

Further Reading

• Five stocks we like better than Canadian Solar
• Rocket Lab’s Neutron Delay Leaves Wall Street Bullish But Raises the Stakes for 2027
• ManpowerGroup Stock Sinks on Q3 Results, But Fundamentals Stay Solid
• Does the AI Selloff Put Alphabet’s Breakout in Doubt?
• Bank Earnings Are Mixed—These 2 ETFs Offer Very Different Paths to a Recovery

This instant news alert was generated by narrative science technology and financial data from MarketBeat in order to provide readers with the fastest reporting and unbiased coverage. Please send any questions or comments about this story to contact@marketbeat.com.
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⚡ Quick Read
Vikram Solar, a prominent name in the Indian renewable energy manufacturing landscape, has announced the acquisition of a significant 187 MW PV module supply order. This contract, awarded by a leading renewable energy developer, underscores the growing demand for high-efficiency solar components in the Indian market. The modules are destined for deployment across three distinct project sites located in the states of Karnataka and Tamil Nadu, both of which remain key hubs for utility-scale solar development in India.
Under the terms of the agreement, Vikram Solar will provide its advanced n-type TOPCon (Tunnel Oxide Passivated Contact) G12R modules. These units utilize glass-to-glass bifacial technology, a configuration increasingly favored for its durability and superior energy yield in diverse climatic conditions. The modules boast power ratings ranging from 615 Wp to 625 Wp, positioning them among the high-performance offerings currently available to domestic EPC contractors. This order strengthens the existing partnership between Vikram Solar and the unnamed developer, further cementing the manufacturer’s footprint in the southern Indian solar corridor.
For EPC contractors and project developers, this order highlights the aggressive shift toward TOPCon technology. As developers strive to optimize land usage and maximize generation per square meter, the transition to n-type bifacial modules has become a strategic priority. Vikram Solar’s ability to deliver high-wattage G12R modules at scale provides developers with the reliability required to meet stringent commissioning timelines. Furthermore, as a Tier 1 manufacturer recognized by Bloomberg NEF for nine consecutive quarters, Vikram Solar offers the bankability that project financiers demand, reducing the risk profile for large-scale solar installations.
The execution of this 187 MW order will contribute to India’s broader objective of achieving 500 GW of non-fossil fuel capacity. As the domestic manufacturing sector scales up, the availability of high-efficiency modules is expected to stabilize, potentially lowering the Levelized Cost of Energy (LCOE) for future projects. Industry stakeholders should monitor the commissioning timelines of these Karnataka and Tamil Nadu sites to gauge the real-world performance of the G12R TOPCon modules. This development is a positive indicator for the India renewable energy sector, demonstrating sustained investment and technical maturation as the country accelerates its energy transition efforts.
Aditya Pathre is the Founder of MVApulse and covers India’s renewable energy sector, including solar, wind, battery energy storage systems (BESS), green hydrogen, transmission infrastructure, renewable energy policy and competitive bidding. His reporting focuses on project developments, market trends, government policies and energy transition across India.
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Take Advantage of CR’s Bill Negotiator
Stop overpaying on your monthly expenses.
Solar energy can help you save on your electric bill for years to come, but it’s a big investment. Here’s everything you need to know.
Installing solar panels can lower your electricity bills and provide healthy returns in the future–especially given recent rate hikes for electricity. Plenty of American households have already decided to go solar. Investment in solar panels ramped up mightily after the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) in 2022, which offered a generous federal tax credit to homeowners who purchased systems. Approximately 6 million households now have solar panels, according to the Solar Energy Industries Association, a trade group. The organization expects that number to surpass 10 million within the next eight years–despite Congress abruptly ending the tax credit in 2025. 
Now, monthly “subscription” services, such as leases and power purchase agreements (PPAs), may be the more feasible path to getting solar panels. But if you want to own a system, there are still state and local incentives for solar. Plus, you may have other options where you live, like tapping into community solar projects, banding with neighbors to negotiate bids with an installer, and even selling back solar energy credits to your utility. The point is, bringing solar energy into your life may be more doable than you realize and can help keep your electric bills in check for years to come. 
Of course, getting a solar array for your home is still a significant investment, not to mention a major home improvement project requiring a skilled installer. EnergySage, a clean energy marketplace, estimates the cost of installing a typical rooftop system at approximately $31,000. Not every property may be a good candidate for solar, and there are local laws and regulations to navigate. You’ll want to choose an experienced company with a track record of working in your area to guide you through the process. So consider these questions when deciding whether to go solar.
Depending on what you spend on electricity, the answer may be a clear yes. The increasing cost of electricity in the U.S. has outpaced inflation over the last year, and it’s clear that people are struggling with these rising prices. About half of Americans report that higher electricity costs have strained household finances, according to a nationally representative 2026 Consumer Reports survey of 2,003 U.S. adults. The same survey showed that a majority of Americans have made or considered significant trade-offs to pay their electric bills, such as cutting back on other spending, lowering heat or air conditioning to uncomfortable levels, or seeking financial help from family members or organizations. Given the real-life effects of higher electricity prices, it’s understandable that people are looking for ways to cover or offset these costs. 
Going solar, while costly, can significantly reduce your electric bills for decades (or possibly bring them to zero), saving you money over the long term. Solar panels typically function at a high level for 25 to 30 years, so you are playing the long game of managing your electricity costs when buying a system or leasing one.
According to EnergySage, while purchasing a solar array may cost more than $30,000, the average homeowner will save more than $60,000 on electricity over the lifetime of their system (depending on how much energy they use and how large their solar system is). 
You can calculate your average monthly electricity expenses and plug that figure, along with your address, into a solar calculator such as Google Project Sunroof, EnergySage, or SolarReviews. Those tools will combine that information with aerial views of your roof from mapping programs such as Google Earth to estimate how large a PV system your home could handle, how much you could save over, say, 20 years, and your investment’s break-even point: that is, when a purchase would begin to pay off. Homeowners who buy a solar panel system could break even in about 10 years, on average, EnergySage says. 
Savings and break-even estimates for the same property can be wildly different among the calculators, so consider them a starting point in your decision-making. And of course, not all panels are created equal. Consumer Reports tested 10 different panels and found 3 clear winners.
With the end of the residential solar tax credit, which benefited homeowners who purchased a solar system, leasing may now be a more accessible option–and in many cases, a good deal. That’s especially true now, since federal tax credits still exist for solar companies that offer leases and power purchase agreements (PPA). PPAs are another kind of third-party ownership model, similar to a lease, but you pay for the energy you generate rather than a standard monthly fee.
But owning a system still has its benefits. And if you’re in a situation to purchase a solar system outright with cash, you’ll save even more money over the long term. That’s because you’re essentially buying years worth of energy in bulk, so you’ll likely get a lower rate for that energy compared to leasing. 
You can read more about the pros and cons of leasing vs. buying solar, but here is a quick summary of what to consider for each.
When you lease:
When you buy:
Getting back-up battery storage, in locations where it’s permitted, is another option for maximizing the electricity you generate with your solar system. Many companies now offer both batteries and solar as a package, whether you lease a system or purchase one. 
“It’s one of the opening questions we ask when we’re chatting with someone: ‘Are you interested in battery backup as well?’” says Clary Franko, chief operating officer of Sugar Hollow Solar, based in Asheville, North Carolina. “Most people come in at this point saying yes.” 
That’s because being able to store the energy you produce during daytime hours would allow you to use that stored electricity during evening hours of peak demand, when your utility may charge a higher rate. Plus, a backup battery can keep you resilient during power outages.
Franko says her customers experienced firsthand how crucial home energy storage could be when Hurricane Helene devastated Asheville and the surrounding area in 2024. 
“One of the things that came out of that was the people who had solar and battery backup systems at their home or business got to see it really work,” she says. “We heard story after story of households becoming these little hubs of resilience in their neighborhoods, being able to take care of people.” 
These lithium-ion devices are made by companies such as Franklin WH, SolarEdge, and Tesla and connect to your solar array via an inverter.  EnergySage estimates that a backup battery could power your home’s essentials for a full day on a single charge, depending on the electrical load. But when those batteries are connected to solar, they can provide power longer, as long as the sun is shining.
If your roof is old, the answer is no–at least not until you replace it. Many solar panels are warrantied to last 25 years or longer, while most roofs are warrantied for 30 years or less. 
With newer roofs, you’ll still only know for sure if a solar installation is feasible after a solar company rep checks out your roof and surrounding foliage in person. They’ll determine whether there’s too much shade or other obstacles, or whether the roof has problems that don’t make an installation worthwhile. 
“A good installer will help guide the process, catering to their customers’ needs and answering all their questions with honesty,” says Ruby Carbajal, president and CEO of Amicus Solar Cooperative, which includes more than 90 community-based solar businesses around the country, like Sugar Hollow Solar. “They won’t focus on getting the biggest system on a roof, whether it makes sense or not.”
Check, too, with your municipality–and homeowners’ association, if you have one–to find out about any restrictions on the type and placement of solar panel arrays.
As we’ve mentioned, working with an experienced installer is central to having a positive solar experience. Roger Horowitz, vice president of Go Solar programs at Solar United Neighbors, a solar advocacy and policy group, offers these best practices for vetting companies:
Go local. Solar is a local enterprise, given varying permitting requirements and arrangements with utilities. So make sure your installer has the experience to navigate the specifics of your location.
Get at least three bids. Start by looking at companies recommended by neighbors or others in your area who have had good experiences.
Compare the price per watt or kilowatt. That’s the up-front cost divided by the system’s size. The lower the cost per watt (the unit price), the better the system’s value. You can use each company’s estimated cost per watt to compare proposals. 
Avoid door-to-door sales. Horowitz says he has heard of roving teams of solar salespeople looking to expand in certain jurisdictions who don’t yet have an established local business. “First of all, we don’t recommend buying stuff door-to-door,” he says. If anything, “tell them, ‘Hey, give me your proposal. I always want to get three proposals.’”
Read online reviews. Make sure they’re good and plentiful. You’re looking for a contractor with hundreds of good reviews, not just a handful.
Ask about warranties. There should be warranties for the actual product (the panels and the inverter) as well as for the amount of electricity those panels are expected to produce. Both of those warranties are typically offered by the manufacturer. Additionally, the installer may offer a warranty for workmanship. 
Check to see whether the company has signed an ethics pledge. Certain states and even counties have solar associations with ethics pledges that companies can sign. For example, Solar United Neighbors helped create an ethics pledge in Ohio. 
Solar United Neighbors also runs a help desk for questions about solar, whether you’re starting research or need to troubleshoot an issue. 
There are a few different ways that you may be able to save on getting solar systems or benefit from solar energy without leasing or owning your own panels. Here’s how:
Most states have community solar projects, which are essentially another type of solar subscription service but with the panels located at an off-site solar farm within your utility area. You pay a solar provider for a share of solar energy and then receive a credit on your electric bill. This can be an option for people whose homes are not good candidates for solar panels–including condo owners or renters–or for those where paying for an individual solar system just isn’t in the cards. New York State, for example, has more than 1,000 community solar projects and offers a guide on how to choose one. As with solar leases and loans, you’ll want to review contract terms closely.
A solar co-op consists of a group of people, all seeking solar systems for their homes, who band together to negotiate bids from installers. Essentially, you’re purchasing in bulk to get a better deal for each household. 
Solar United Neighbors, for example, has organized bulk purchase groups for about two decades. First, they will begin building a group of solar-curious homeowners–about 50 to 100 households–and gather bids from installers without any strings attached, says Ben Delman, the organization’s editorial director.  
“A committee of the participants reviews the bids, chooses one, and then that installer develops a proposal for each co-op participant,” Delman says. “[Homeowners] decide individually if they want to go solar or not.” 
Delman says that, in addition to the possible financial benefits, grouping together for a solar installation can help navigate solar permitting and installation, which is sometimes a lengthy process.
Yasmeen Khan
Yasmeen Khan is a multimedia content creator at Consumer Reports. She covers topics related to home systems and tools, like lawn mowers and generators. Before joining CR, Yasmeen was a longtime news reporter for WNYC in New York City. She has also worked as a story editor and host of podcasts.
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Europe’s solar and storage industry has just reached a milestone worth celebrating: close to one million jobs in 2025, according to SolarPower Europe’s EU Solar Jobs Report 2026. But headline employment figures tell us how many people the sector employs. They say very little about who stays, who progresses, and who quietly walks away.
That is why Women in Solar+ Europe (WiSEu) chose to look beyond representation in its contribution to this year’s report. Our article, Beyond representation: what actually keeps women in Solar+, draws on a survey of women across our network in 22 European countries. Instead of asking how many women work in solar, we asked a harder question: why do they come, why do they stay, and what pushes them out?
Our findings confirm something many of us already feel. Women are drawn to solar above all by its purpose, the chance to contribute to climate action and the energy transition. At the recruitment stage, the industry’s pull is clearly working.
But purpose alone does not keep people. Once inside, what matters shifts towards everyday workplace experience: career growth, genuine flexibility, a stable organisation, fair pay and an inclusive culture. Our conclusion is simple: women join Solar+ for the mission. They stay, or leave, for the employer.
“Nobody I know came into solar specifically for the perks. We came because we wanted to evolve the energy system. But purpose doesn’t replace a manager who backs you. At some point, the employer has to deliver.” says Carmen Madrid, Founder of WiSEu.
That shift matters, because retention is far from guaranteed. Nearly four in ten respondents say they are likely to look for a new role within the next year. At a time when the report expects overall solar employment to contract towards 2030 while shortages persist in critical roles, losing experienced, committed people is a cost the sector cannot afford.
¨Renewable energy is a sector that inspires people to join, but inspiration alone is not enough to keep them. To build a resilient and diverse workforce, organisations must create environments where people can grow their careers, see role models they can relate to, and feel genuinely supported by strong and inclusive leadership,¨ says Zoraida Bejarano, Head of Talent at NextEnergy Group.
There is genuine good news. Women in our Solar+ industries largely feel able to speak up, share ideas and challenge senior colleagues. The problem lies further up the ladder. Confidence drops when it comes to understanding how to progress, having equal access to opportunities, and seeing women like themselves in senior leadership. Respondents also described a “motherhood penalty”: good policies on paper, undermined by cultures that slow the careers of those who use them.
¨It is essential for companies not only to update their policies on paper, but also to put them into practice by accommodating situations that require flexibility, such as parental leave or adjustable working hours, and ensuring that everyone has equal opportunities for career development and professional growth,¨ says Maria Sabella, Founder and CEO at Enlight Energy Services. 
When Women in Solar+ Europe asked women in our industries which single change would make the biggest difference, the answer was clear. Nearly half of respondents pointed to leadership: better management, more women visible in senior roles, and access to mentorship and sponsorship. Not more recruitment campaigns, better leadership of the people already there.
“Visibility matters, but role models alone won’t close the gap. Women need promotion criteria that are transparent, development plans that are followed through, and succession processes that are objective and evidence-led, and don’t depend on who happens to be in the room. When advancement is designed deliberately rather than left to chance, talented people – whatever their gender – do not wonder whether there is a path for them; they can see it,” adds Joanna Thorpe, Head of People and Talent at Sonnedix
“I believe strong leadership starts with recognizing potential in people, sometimes even before they recognize it themselves. Mentorship is important, but real progress comes when leaders turn encouragement into action through trust, responsibility and genuine opportunities to grow. For women in the solar and energy storage industry, having leaders who open doors, value different perspectives and empower talent can make all the difference,” says Aga Michalak, Head of Marketing and ESG Europe at Jinko.
WiSEu’s message is that this industry doesn’t have a recruitment problem. It has a “what happens next” problem. Companies that want to hold on to the talent they worked hard to attract need to treat retention and progression as deliberately as hiring:
This is not only a gender question; it is a competitiveness question. The report itself calls for inclusive, high-quality pathways into solar careers, and for measuring retention and progression rather than enrolment alone. Women in the sector have already committed to the energy transition. The question is whether the industry will commit to them in return.
This article only scratches the surface. The complete Women in Solar+ Europe analysis, with detailed results on why women join and stay, how they experience voice and progression at work, and the levers they would prioritise, is published as Box 2 of SolarPower Europe’s EU Solar Jobs Report 2026.
Download the report from SolarPower Europe here and read “Beyond representation: what actually keeps women in Solar+”. Whether you lead a team, shape HR policy or are building your own career in Solar+, we invite you to read the data, share it with your leadership, and join the Women in Solar+ Europe (WiSEu) so we can keep shaping the leadership intelligence our industries need.
The views and opinions expressed in this article are the author’s own, and do not necessarily reflect those held by pv magazine.
This content is protected by copyright and may not be reused. If you want to cooperate with us and would like to reuse some of our content, please contact: [email protected].
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Adaptive fairness algorithm delivers near-perfect energy sharing in peer-to-peer microgrids
As rooftop solar panels, home batteries and electric vehicle chargers turn ordinary consumers into energy traders, a quiet mathematical problem has become one of the defining challenges of the decarbonized grid: when several buyers compete for a limited pool of surplus solar power, who gets what? A new study published in Results in Engineering by A.V. Sreekumar and R.R. Lekshmi tackles this question head-on, evaluating six energy allocation strategies for peer-to-peer microgrids and proposing an adaptive framework that empirically achieves a fairness index of 0.9995 over a full simulated year—while completing each allocation decision in microseconds on an ordinary desktop computer.
The research emerges from a structural shift in power systems. International climate accords have driven national pledges to replace fossil-fuel infrastructure with renewables, and distributed energy architectures are replacing centralized utility models. Placing generation close to consumption reduces transmission losses and enhances grid resilience, while commercial entities and residential consumers become active market participants through rooftop photovoltaic installations, battery energy storage systems and small-scale wind turbines. Electric vehicle charging stations equipped with solar arrays can even bid strategically into electricity markets. In this landscape, peer-to-peer trading allows prosumers to exchange energy directly, bypassing conventional utility transactions—but it also raises questions about benefit sharing that economic efficiency alone cannot answer.
Those questions belong to the framework of energy justice, which analyzes fairness in the energy sector across distributive, recognition and procedural dimensions. As distributed generation penetrates deeper into grids, distributive justice—how benefits and burdens are shared among participants—becomes increasingly prominent. The authors note that unfavorable tariff structures and complicated interconnection requirements substantially reduce the economic feasibility of residential solar installations, and prosumers are often paid significantly less for grid exports through feed-in tariffs, creating a pricing disparity that deters investment in distributed energy resources. A well-designed decentralized market, they argue, can mitigate these barriers and foster a more equitable environment for small-scale renewable investment.
The study’s central contribution is the Adaptive Fairness-Based Allocation (AFBA) framework, which embeds fairness as a core objective rather than a post-hoc adjustment. The method works at the market layer of a five-node community microgrid, where a solar-equipped prosumer shares surplus energy with three buyers: an industrial consumer with a 300 kWh demand cap bidding ₹5.90/kWh, a commercial EV charging station capped at 250 kWh bidding ₹7.15/kWh, and a domestic consumer capped at 200 kWh bidding ₹5.58/kWh. Surplus energy is structured into six four-hour slots per day, and any energy left after all buyers are served is exported to the grid at a feed-in tariff of ₹4.5/kWh.
Technically, AFBA computes each buyer’s participation factor as the ratio of its weighted bid to the total weighted bids of all buyers, with weights updated adaptively from historical allocation outcomes. After every surplus slot, the framework stores one cumulative deviation per buyer—the gap between that buyer’s actual allocation and the equal-share level—using exponential memory decay with a factor of 0.95, so shortfalls in one slot can be corrected in subsequent slots. A bounded nonlinear mapping prevents stored deviations from producing oversized weight jumps, while a learning rate of 0.1, a compensation factor of 0.2 providing momentum, a nonlinearity factor of 1.2, and a smoothing factor of 0.5 stabilize the update. A minimum weight constraint of 0.1 ensures no buyer is ever completely excluded, and weights are normalized to sum to unity before each allocation.
The authors benchmarked AFBA against five alternatives: fixed contractual allocation, priority-first allocation with proportional redistribution, a price-weighted fairness method, linear programming (LP), and a genetic algorithm (GA). LP maximizes slot revenue subject to power balance and demand constraints and serves as the revenue benchmark; GA searches for near-optimal solutions stochastically, with results averaged over 20 independent runs. The evaluation used real-world data: solar generation from a private plant in Kuzhikattussery, Thrissur, Kerala, and EV charging demand from Perth & Kinross Council’s charging stations in Perth, UK, covering 2024 at 15-minute intervals, aggregated into 2,190 calendar slots of which 646 were surplus slots totaling 154,309.89 kWh of available energy.
The results reveal a stark trade-off. Under fixed pricing, LP achieved the highest annual revenue of ₹10.49 lakhs but the second-worst fairness at 0.4409, concentrating 72.74 percent of annual energy on the highest bidder while the domestic buyer received just 1.8 percent. The priority-first method fared even worse on fairness at 0.4162, starving the lowest-bid buyer to 3.98 percent of yearly allocation. AFBA, by contrast, delivered almost perfectly balanced yearly allocations of 33.33, 33.27 and 33.13 percent, a fairness index of 0.9995, value fairness of 0.9877, and revenue of ₹9.58 lakhs—only 9.0 percent below the LP benchmark. The price-weighted method offered the best revenue among fair-oriented approaches at ₹9.69 lakhs with fairness of 0.9882, while GA reached 0.9935 fairness but required roughly 28.6 milliseconds per slot on average, far too slow for time-critical clearing.
Computation time proved a decisive differentiator. AFBA completed each allocation in 0.0255 milliseconds under fixed pricing and 0.1467 milliseconds under time-of-day (ToD) pricing, while the price-weighted method ran in 0.0093 to 0.0183 milliseconds. LP required around 1.18 milliseconds and GA between 24.5 and 28.6 milliseconds. The authors also tested AFBA’s resilience under ToD tariffs derived from Kerala State Electricity Regulatory Commission regulations and Ministry of Power guidelines, applying multipliers that discount bids by 20 percent during solar hours and surcharge them by 10 percent at night. Fairness performance remained essentially unchanged under dynamic pricing, and the fairness progression analysis showed AFBA improving by roughly +0.4 percent over successive surplus slots, confirming that the system genuinely learns from experience—a property absent in static or optimization-only methods.
Scalability testing reinforced the practical promise. When the number of buyers was increased from 3 to 100, average fairness rose from 0.931 to 0.984 and stabilized, while per-slot computation time stayed between 0.087 and 0.192 milliseconds. On the same machine, LP took about 1.18 milliseconds and GA about 31 milliseconds per slot with three buyers. The authors acknowledge limitations: the allocation operates only at the market layer, ignoring voltage limits, line ratings and power-flow equations, and the generation and demand profiles come from two independent regional datasets rather than a physically co-located microgrid. Equal energy allocation, they note, is also inappropriate when buyers have contracts of different grades, non-deferrable loads, or significantly varying demand constraints—in such cases a fill-rate criterion or priority rule serves better.
The study’s implications reach beyond the test system. Existing research had achieved at most a Jain fairness index of 0.94, lacked frameworks to track cumulative fairness deviations with memory decay, and had not integrated ToD tariffs for distribution fairness under real regulatory frameworks. By raising the yearly index to 0.9995 at the cost of an 8.8 to 9.0 percent revenue gap relative to unconstrained revenue maximization, AFBA quantifies precisely what equity costs in a local energy market—and shows that the price is modest. For community microgrids deciding how to split their solar surplus, the message is clear: long-term equality among participants is achievable in microseconds, and markets that prioritize it may retain the trust and participation needed to sustain the decentralized energy transition.
Subject of Research: Energy
Article Title: Achieving equitable and efficient energy trading in peer-to-peer microgrids: An evaluation of allocation strategies
Article References: Sreekumar, A. V., & Lekshmi, R. R. (2026). Achieving equitable and efficient energy trading in peer-to-peer microgrids: An evaluation of allocation strategies. Results in Engineering, 32, Article 113537. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rineng.2026.113537
Image Credits: AI Generated
DOI: 10.1016/j.rineng.2026.113537
Keywords: peer-to-peer energy trading, microgrids, energy justice, fairness algorithms, solar power, electric vehicles, distributed energy resources, Achieving, equitable, efficient, energy, trading
News Source: Faith Mcneil. (October 17, 2026). Adaptive fairness algorithm delivers near-perfect energy sharing in peer-to-peer microgrids. Scienmag.
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Brazil’s new curtailment rules unlikely to revive utility-scale solar investment  pv magazine Global
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Thailand’s Ministry of Industry is promoting the creation of specialized industrial zones for recycling solar panels and electric vehicle batteries. The initiative is intended to help the country cope with growing volumes of such waste and strengthen control over the disposal of hazardous industrial materials, Bangkok Post reports.
Industry Minister Varawut Silpa-archa said that solar panels installed about ten years ago could begin turning into significant volumes of waste within the next one or two years. According to him, the average service life of such panels is about 15 years.
The ministry proposes concentrating recycling enterprises and hazardous waste disposal facilities in controlled zones. They are to be equipped with centralized wastewater treatment systems and round-the-clock monitoring.
More current news is available on the UA.News Telegram channel Telegram.
The ministry also identifies electric vehicle batteries reaching the end of their service life as a separate problem. Some used batteries can be reused in energy storage systems, but damaged or degraded batteries must be properly disposed of due to their possible content of hazardous substances.
Thai authorities are also reviewing the Factory Act and other regulations governing industrial waste in order to increase penalties for illegal dumping. As the minister noted, current laws, some of which are 40–50 years old, provide for fines of no more than 200,000 baht, potentially making illegal disposal cheaper than proper waste management.
The ministry is cooperating with the Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment, the Department of Special Investigation, and the Customs Department. Possible measures include fines of up to tens of millions of baht, tracking offenders’ financial transactions, and confiscating their assets.
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India overtook the United States (US) to become the largest market for new solar capacity additions outside China in 2025, driven by strong growth in rooftop solar. This would have been unthinkable before PMSuryaghar came into the picture, and perhaps, credit needs to be given where due to the government for ensuring that the scheme has largely delivered on key objectives. Almost 6 million households have availed of the scheme so far.  
According to a latest BloombergNEF (BNEF) report, subsidies and support for decentralised agrivoltaic projects (Mostly PMKUSUM) have contributed to this growth, while the co-location of energy storage systems (ESS) with solar projects can improve project economics by shifting electricity supply to evening peak-demand hours.
Rooftop solar emerged as India’s fastest-growing solar segment, supported by capital expenditure subsidies. Government assistance has also extended to the relatively small segment of decentralised agrivoltaic (agro-PV) projects. Meanwhile, co-locating energy storage with solar projects can improve project economics by shifting electricity generation to evening peak-demand hours.
India added 51 GW (direct current, DC) of solar capacity in 2025, surpassing its previous record set in 2024 by 55%. The country has increased its annual solar additions every year since 2023. BNEF expects India to add another 52 GW (DC) in 2026, allowing it to retain its position as the world’s second-largest solar market this year.
India also recorded a major milestone in wind power deployment, overtaking the US and Germany to become the world’s second-largest wind market in 2025, according to BNEF.
Record additions of 6.3 GW lifted India from fifth place in 2024. The 2025 additions were nearly double the previous year’s total and approximately 50% higher than the previous record set in 2017. The surge included projects that had previously been delayed by land acquisition and grid connectivity challenges.
The acceleration in wind deployment is significant for India’s increasingly solar-heavy power system. Rapid solar capacity additions have pushed daytime electricity prices close to zero on several occasions. Wind power can help diversify renewable generation beyond daylight hours, with wind projects generally performing particularly well during the windier monsoon season.

BNEF projects that India will become the world’s third-largest market for energy storage projects by 2030, excluding pumped hydro storage. Cumulative energy storage capacity is expected to reach 45 GW/138 gigawatt-hours (GWh) by the end of the decade.
Standalone storage auctions have gained momentum with support from federal government subsidies. Under the government’s latest policy revision, viability gap funding (VGF)—a subsidy that covers part of a project’s upfront cost—provides assistance of ₹18 lakh ($18,700) per megawatt-hour. This covers approximately 15%–20% of project capital expenditure.

Government-organised, multi-technology renewable energy auctions increasingly require developers to supply firm, or assured, electricity. This has encouraged power producers to combine renewable energy generation with storage when bidding for contracts.
India has the world’s lowest levelised cost of electricity (LCOE) for utility-scale solar projects, according to BNEF. A significant share of these projects is located in Rajasthan and Gujarat, where clear, sunny weather supports solar generation for much of the year.
The government has also developed numerous solar parks in these states, providing developers with large tracts of flat, contiguous land for project development.

Standalone solar and wind have been India’s cheapest sources of new bulk power generation since 2018, based on BNEF’s LCOE estimates.
In the second half of 2025, the LCOE of Indian solar and wind projects paired with four-hour battery energy storage systems (BESS) fell below that of coal-fired power plants for the first time under BNEF’s mid-case scenario.
Declining battery prices have been a key factor behind this shift. BNEF forecasts that turnkey costs for a four-hour energy storage system could fall to $48 per kilowatt-hour (kWh) in China by 2030, from $62/kWh in 2025. In Europe, costs are projected to decline to $125/kWh from $172/kWh over the same period.
These global declines in battery costs are likely to exert downward pressure on storage costs in India as well. The LCOE of renewable energy systems paired with storage could fall further as developers gain experience from India’s first projects and benefit from improved project execution.
Corporations operating in India signed approximately 2.3 GW of clean power purchase agreements (PPAs) in 2026 through September, making India the largest market in the Asia-Pacific region for such deals during the calendar year.
Meanwhile, the Central Electricity Regulatory Commission (CERC) is tightening deviation settlement mechanism (DSM) rules for renewable energy generators to support grid stability as the share of intermittent generation increases.
In 2025, wind and solar accounted for 16% of India’s electricity generation. Their combined share could rise to 41% by 2035 under BNEF’s economics-led scenario.
Power grids are another major investment area as India expands and upgrades its electricity network to accommodate rising power demand and electrification.
Investment in new connections and grid assets, alongside the reinforcement of the existing network, is expected to average $53 billion annually through 2050.
Renewable energy and storage will require a further $1.5 trillion in investment over the same period. Solar and wind are expected to account for approximately $500 billion each.
Renewable energy assets are projected to attract an average of $40 billion annually through 2050, while energy storage is expected to draw a further $19 billion a year.
Government subsidies have also supported the expansion of standalone energy storage auctions in India. Under the viability gap funding mechanism, eligible projects receive assistance of approximately ₹18 lakh ($18,700) per MWh to cover part of their upfront costs.
The support is designed to cover roughly 15%–20% of project capital expenditure, improving project viability and encouraging investment in standalone storage capacity.
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Following an initial package of measures announced in April, French government spokesperson Maud Bregeon has unveiled additional initiatives aimed at accelerating the electrification of the economy and improving electricity demand flexibility.
The government identified significant untapped potential in the residential sector, particularly through smart management of heating, domestic hot water and electric vehicle (EV) charging. It estimates that these measures could reduce associated energy costs by up to 35%.
To unlock this potential, the government plans to make subsidies for heat pumps conditional on smart-control capabilities from 2027. Households installing such systems could save between €150 ($168.8) and €200 annually.
For EV charging infrastructure, the government intends to work with industry stakeholders to ensure that smart-control functions are enabled by default in new installations. Options under consideration include connecting charging stations to Linky, France’s nationwide smart electricity metering system, or introducing connectivity solutions that automatically schedule charging during off-peak hours. These measures could save households between €70 and €100 per year.
The government also plans to introduce flexibility requirements for industrial energy metering systems.
The plan calls for greater use of Linky smart meters to manage household electricity consumption. Although the meters already support applications such as automated domestic hot water heating, many of their capabilities remain underused. The government intends to encourage their integration with residential energy management systems to improve demand flexibility.
Another measure targets grid connections for solar photovoltaic installations combined with battery energy storage systems. By the end of 2026, the government plans to allow projects with installed capacity of up to 25 MW to benefit from an exemption from the current 17 MW connection limit, provided their maximum power injection into the grid does not exceed 17 MW.
The measure is intended to facilitate grid connections for hybrid renewable energy projects, particularly solar-plus-storage installations, without increasing their maximum permitted grid injection.
France’s energy regulator, the Commission de Régulation de l’Énergie (CRE), has also outlined plans to encourage electricity consumption during periods of high solar generation.
New electricity supply products are being tested for potential commercialization through EDF Obligation d’Achat (EDF OA), the division of state-owned utility EDF responsible for purchasing electricity under France’s renewable energy support schemes.
The products would reflect the typical daily solar generation profile, with output peaking around midday before declining in the late afternoon. The aim is to encourage electricity suppliers to offer tariffs that incentivize consumers to shift demand to periods of abundant, lower-cost solar generation.
Several French energy companies and industry associations have also announced commitments to expand electricity demand flexibility by 2030.
Gimelec, a French trade association representing electrical equipment, automation and digital energy technology companies, aims to mobilize 6 GW of flexibility in commercial and service-sector buildings. It plans to support the installation of energy control and management systems in 50% of existing facilities.
EDF aims to introduce remote-control systems for energy-intensive equipment in five million customer households by 2030, targeting heating, domestic hot water, heat pumps and EV charging. The utility plans to use its EDF & Moi customer app to connect and manage these devices, positioning the platform as a household energy management tool.
French independent power producer Neoen has committed to deploying 1 GW of flexibility capacity by 2030.
Meanwhile, French energy storage and flexibility provider NW Group plans to invest €1 billion by 2030 to add 1.5 GW of capacity to its electricity flexibility platform in France. The company also intends to open the platform to industrial and residential consumers seeking to generate revenue from flexible electricity consumption.
Octopus Energy France has pledged to manage 1.5 million connected devices by 2030, representing an estimated 5 GW to 6 GW of flexible capacity.
The company expects the initiative to deliver €100 million in financial benefits to households and support the deployment of 15,000 remotely controllable heat pumps. It could also underpin a €150 million investment in a heat pump manufacturing facility, subject to the targeted deployment volumes being achieved.
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Residents urge Ottawa County board to intervene in fight over 1,900-acre solar farm  MLive.com
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The India solar industry is currently navigating a dual challenge: a rapid surge in infrastructure investment and a persistent workforce readiness gap. According to the latest Mercom India report, ‘Bridging India’s Solar Talent Gap,’ employers across the utility-scale, manufacturing, and rooftop segments are struggling with fresh graduates who require extensive on-the-job training. This skills deficit threatens to slow the momentum of India’s ambitious renewable energy targets.
To support the evacuation of 135 GW of renewable energy, the Union Cabinet has earmarked ₹60 billion (~$631.11 million) for viability gap funding to deploy 50 GWh of battery energy storage systems (BESS) under the Green Energy Corridor (GEC) Phase-III program. Complementing this, the Central Electricity Authority (CEA) has updated its Manual on Transmission Planning Criteria to include ultra-high-voltage AC systems and refined modeling for BESS and HVDC infrastructure. Furthermore, the CERC has adopted tariffs for 1.8 GW of wind power projects, with rates ranging between ₹3.67/kWh and ₹3.69/kWh, while UPERC approved PPAs for 19.7 MW of solar capacity under the PM-KUSUM scheme at rates between ₹2.91/kWh and ₹2.99/kWh.
For EPC contractors and project developers, these developments signal a shift toward more complex, storage-integrated projects. The talent gap implies that firms must invest more heavily in internal training programs or partnerships with technical institutions to ensure project execution quality. Simultaneously, the focus on data center green power procurement—backed by NITI Aayog’s push for model green tariffs—opens a lucrative new C&I market segment for developers capable of providing round-the-clock (RTC) renewable energy solutions.
The industry is awaiting the finalization of model green tariff and banking principles for data centers. Additionally, the MNRE’s search for an expert institution to support the National Hydrogen Safety Panel marks a critical step in scaling the green hydrogen economy. As India continues to integrate large-scale storage and modernize its grid, the ability of developers to navigate these regulatory shifts while managing a skilled workforce will determine their competitive edge in the broader India renewable energy sector.
Aditya Pathre is the Founder of MVApulse and covers India’s renewable energy sector, including solar, wind, battery energy storage systems (BESS), green hydrogen, transmission infrastructure, renewable energy policy and competitive bidding. His reporting focuses on project developments, market trends, government policies and energy transition across India.
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Neem-grown silver nanoparticles supercharge solar cells with a 54.7% efficiency leap
Dye-sensitized solar cells have long been the scrappy underdogs of the photovoltaics world: cheap, colorful, and able to generate electricity even in diffuse indoor light, yet held back by efficiency numbers that pale next to silicon. Now a team of researchers in India reports a photoanode makeover that pushes these devices significantly closer to the big leagues, using a green synthesis route that starts with something most people would never associate with advanced materials: neem leaves. The work, published in the journal Ionics, describes silver-decorated titanium oxynitride photoanodes that lifted the power conversion efficiency of quasi-solid-state dye-sensitized solar cells by roughly 54.7 percent compared with the unmodified material under identical conditions.
The device at the heart of the study is a quasi-solid-state dye-sensitized solar cell, a variant of the classic Grätzel architecture in which the liquid electrolyte is replaced by a gel-like medium. This substitution matters enormously for real-world deployment. Conventional liquid-electrolyte cells suffer from evaporation, leakage, and temperature instability, which have prevented them from leaving the laboratory in large numbers. Quasi-solid-state designs sidestep those failure modes, but they introduce their own challenge: the gel electrolyte conducts ions more sluggishly than a liquid, so every component of the cell must work harder to keep electrons and ions moving. That makes the photoanode, the workhorse electrode where sunlight is first converted into separated charge, a prime target for optimization.
The photoanode in question is based on TiON₀.₅S₀.₂₅, a titanium oxynitride in which nitrogen and sulfur are incorporated into the titanium dioxide lattice. Pristine TiO₂ is a superb electron transporter but a poor absorber of visible light, because its wide band gap only lets ultraviolet photons through. Doping with nitrogen and sulfur introduces additional electronic states that narrow the effective band gap and extend absorption into the visible spectrum, where most of the Sun’s energy resides. The researchers synthesized this material using a green route based on neem extract, which acts as a natural reducing and stabilizing agent, avoiding the harsh chemicals that conventional synthesis typically demands.
On top of the N, S-modified framework, the team decorated the surface with silver nanoparticles, tuning the loading until they found the sweet spot at 1.9 percent silver by weight. Structural analyses confirmed that the anatase phase of TiO₂ was preserved throughout the process, which is crucial because anatase is the crystalline form that performs best in dye-sensitized solar cells. Interestingly, adding silver actually reduced the crystallite size from 34.52 to 27.90 nanometers while increasing the specific surface area from 52.4 to 66.3 square meters per gram. Smaller crystals with more surface area mean more sites for dye molecules to anchor, more interfaces for charge to cross, and more opportunities for photons to be captured.
Field-emission scanning electron microscopy and high-resolution transmission electron microscopy revealed a porous nanostructure with well-dispersed silver nanoparticles, exactly the morphology a high-performing photoanode needs. X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy, a technique that probes the chemical states of surface atoms, confirmed the presence of nitrogen- and sulfur-containing species together with metallic silver on the surface. This combination is significant: the N and S dopants modify the electronic structure of the TiO₂, while the metallic Ag nanoparticles act as tiny plasmonic antennas that concentrate light and shuttle electrons across interfaces.
Optical studies showed that the Ag-loaded material absorbed significantly more visible light than the pristine version, and photoluminescence measurements revealed a reduced emission intensity, suggesting that excited electrons were being separated more efficiently rather than recombining and releasing their energy as light. In a solar cell, recombination is the enemy: it wastes the energy that photons deliver before that energy can be harvested as electricity. Suppressing recombination is therefore one of the most direct routes to higher efficiency.
Electrochemical impedance spectroscopy and transient photocurrent analysis provided further evidence that the silver decoration was doing its job. The Ag-loaded photoanodes showed lower charge-transfer resistance, meaning electrons could cross interfaces more easily, and a longer electron lifetime, meaning electrons survived longer before being lost to recombination. Together, these measurements paint a picture of a photoanode in which light harvesting, charge separation, and charge transport have all been improved simultaneously, a rare trifecta in materials engineering.
When the team assembled complete quasi-solid-state dye-sensitized solar cells using the optimized Ag(1.9%)/TiON₀.₅S₀.₂₅ photoanode, the devices achieved a power conversion efficiency of 6.56 ± 0.09 percent, an improvement of approximately 54.7 percent over the pristine TiON₀.₅S₀.₂₅ device under identical conditions. While 6.56 percent may sound modest next to the 26 percent achieved by state-of-the-art silicon, the comparison is not really fair: dye-sensitized cells are cheaper to manufacture, work well in low light, and can be made flexible and semi-transparent. In those niches, even a 54.7 percent relative improvement is a meaningful step forward.
The researchers attribute the enhanced performance to three factors working in concert: improved light harvesting thanks to the plasmonic and dopant effects, increased surface area from the smaller crystallites, and facilitated interfacial charge transport thanks to the well-dispersed silver nanoparticles. What makes the result particularly compelling is the green synthesis route. Neem extract, a renewable and widely available plant material, replaces the toxic reducing agents that conventional nanoparticle synthesis typically requires, aligning the manufacturing process with the sustainability goals that motivate solar energy in the first place.
The study, led by D. Shiney Manoj and colleagues with corresponding author P. Ram Kumar at Thiagarajar College of Engineering in Madurai, was supported by a Seed Money Research Grant from the institution. As the world searches for photovoltaic technologies that can be deployed beyond the rooftop silicon panel, quasi-solid-state dye-sensitized solar cells decorated with plant-grown silver nanoparticles offer a glimpse of what sustainable energy innovation can look like when green chemistry and advanced materials engineering meet.
Subject of Research: Materials Science
Article Title: Green-synthesized Ag-decorated N, S-modified TiO₂ photoanodes for quasi-solid-state dye-sensitized solar cells
Article References: Manoj, D. S., Seema, A., Ramasubbu, V., Nichelson, A., Jiji, G., & Kumar, P. R. (2026). Green-synthesized Ag-decorated N, S-modified TiO₂ photoanodes for quasi-solid-state dye-sensitized solar cells. Ionics. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11581-026-07579-9
Image Credits: AI Generated
DOI: 10.1007/s11581-026-07579-9
Keywords: dye-sensitized solar cells, titanium oxynitride, green synthesis, neem extract, silver nanoparticles, quasi-solid-state electrolyte, photovoltaics, plasmonic effect, Green-synthesized, Ag-decorated, S-modified, photoanodes
News Source: Denise Maddox. (October 17, 2026). Neem-grown silver nanoparticles supercharge solar cells with a 54.7% efficiency leap. Scienmag.
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Fujiyama Power Systems expanded its manufacturing operations by commissioning a 2 GW power electronics plant in Ratlam, Madhya Pradesh, in August 2026, serving India’s solar and power electronics markets.
New Delhi [India], October 16: Fujiyama Power Systems Ltd, which began as an inverter and UPS manufacturer nearly three decades ago, is expanding its manufacturing footprint as it builds on its position in India’s power electronics and rooftop solar markets. The company, which sells solar solutions under the UTL Solar and Fujiyama Solar brands, commissioned a 2 GW power electronics plant in Ratlam, Madhya Pradesh, in August 2026.
The facility manufactures solar inverters, UPS systems and related products, taking Fujiyama’s total power electronics manufacturing capacity to approximately 4.2 GW. This represents more than seven times the 567 MW capacity recorded in March 2023.
The business began in 1996 with the establishment of UTL Electronics by Pawan Kumar Garg and Yogesh Dua to manufacture power backup products. Fujiyama Power Systems Ltd was incorporated in 2017. In 2000, the company developed what it describes as India’s first single-card surface-mount technology (SMT)-based inverter, followed by innovations in UPS systems and solar power conditioning units (PCUs). It entered solar PCU manufacturing in 2012.
1 October 2026
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The company’s engineering-led approach continues to underpin its product development, supported by 60+ R&D engineers and scientists at its Delhi facility.
The Ratlam complex also houses a 2 GW solar panel line. Next in the expansion plan are lithium-ion battery capacity of 3 GWh and solar cell manufacturing of 1.2 GW, extending the company’s reach across the rooftop solar value chain.
Fujiyama makes the key inverter components in-house, including transformers, inductors, heat sinks, metal cabinets and circuit boards. This gives it tighter control over design, quality and cost, and less dependence on imported inverter kits.
Fujiyama sold 4.5 lakh inverters in FY26 and 1.4 million units over the past five financial years, primarily serving customers in tier-2 and tier-3 markets. Its product portfolio spans off-grid inverters from 0.6 kVA to 20 kVA, on-grid inverters from 1 kW to 136 kW, hybrid inverters up to 50 kVA and online UPS systems up to 120 kVA.
Fujiyama holds five patents, including one for its rMPPT solar technology, with four more awaiting grant. Its in-house R&D team of 60+ engineers drives product development, supported by a direct feedback loop from over 900 trained service engineers across 25 states. This field input keeps product design anchored to customer needs and real-world performance.
“We started as a power electronics company, and the inverter is still the heart of what we do. In 2000 we built India’s first single-card SMT inverter. Today our inverters power rooftop solar systems across the country. With Ratlam, our power electronics capacity has grown more than seven times in about three years, to 4.2 GW a year.
Our strategy is simple: design in-house, make in India and reach the customer directly. More than 1.4 million families, mostly in tier-2 and tier-3 towns, already rely on our inverters. As PM Surya Ghar takes rooftop solar to millions of homes, we want that demand to be met with Indian-designed, Indian-made products,” said Pawan Kumar Garg, Chairman and Joint Managing Director, Fujiyama Power Systems Ltd.
In FY26, revenue increased 72.3% to ₹2,654.5 crore, while net profit rose 94.5% to ₹304.1 crore. As of June 30, 2026, the company had more than 10,100 channel partners, supporting its reach across residential and small-business markets. It also exports to 10 countries.
The company’s growth comes amid the expansion of India’s rooftop solar sector. The PM Surya Ghar: Muft Bijli Yojana is supporting residential solar adoption, creating opportunities for domestic manufacturers of inverters, panels and associated equipment. Fujiyama is an empanelled national supplier under the programme.
As demand for rooftop solar solutions grows, the company’s focus on in-house engineering, domestic manufacturing and distribution reach will shape its efforts to expand in the inverter segment and strengthen its position across India’s wider clean energy market.
About Fujiyama Power Systems Ltd
With business roots dating back to 1996, Fujiyama Power Systems Ltd was incorporated in 2017 and is an Indian power electronics and energy solutions company operating under the UTL Solar and Fujiyama Solar brands. Its product portfolio includes solar inverters, PCUs, UPS systems, chargers, solar cells, solar panels, and lithium-ion and tubular batteries.
The company operates manufacturing facilities across Uttar Pradesh, Himachal Pradesh, Haryana and Madhya Pradesh. Its manufacturing capabilities include approximately 4.2 GW of power electronics, 3.6 GW of solar panels and 1 GW of solar cells. It is supported by 60+ R&D engineers, over 900 service engineers and a channel network of more than 10,100 partners. The company has supplied 1.4 million inverters over the past five financial years and exports to 10 countries.
Disclaimer: This article is published via a syndicated feed. The content has not been independently verified by Outlook Business, and all views expressed are those of the syndicate. Readers are advised to use their discretion.
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NY rejects Hudson Valley solar farm opposed by Trump administration  Lohud
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GES, a Spain-based renewable energy EPC contractor, has won four EPC contracts to build twelve solar PV plants in Aragon and the Valencia region of Spain. Together, the plants will have a capacity of 583.41 MW, and the contracts are worth €225 million (~ $252.34 million). Three of the contracts have come from new clients, while the fourth has come from a long-standing client for which GES has delivered over 1 GW. Two of the plants are in the province of Zaragoza, and their 93.52 MW is to supply about 47,000 households from the second half of 2027. A third Zaragoza plant of 132.92 MW is to be prepared for a future battery energy storage system. The other nine plants, which add up to 356.97 MW, belong to a developer that is working with GES for the first time.
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Luis Reyes
Oct 17, at 9:00am ET
Anyone who’s spent time around dairy cattle will tell you a cow treats anything new in her pasture the same way. She licks it, and then she rubs on it. Fence post, water tank, the side of your truck, it doesn’t matter. So when a University of Minnesota researcher decided to put solar panels in a cow pasture, the first question wasn’t about electricity. It was how you’d keep a very large, very curious animal from wrecking the glass.
Brad Heins, who runs the dairy research at the university’s West Central Research and Outreach Center in Morris, settled it with a tape measure. He found the tallest cow in the herd, worked out how high she could reach with her tongue, and set the bottom edge of the panels at 8 feet. He’s since admitted that was probably overkill. But the first array went up in 2017, and apart from a few days of the herd licking the panels and rubbing on the poles, the cows have pretty much left it alone.
Which, it turns out, is the question every farmer asks him first.
Heins says he gets an email about panel damage from a farmer at least five times a week. Agrivoltaics is the catch-all term for getting a piece of land to grow something and make electricity at the same time, and here in the US what we mostly get is sheep grazing between rows of panels, because sheep are short and don’t lean on things. When Morris started, Heins says, Minnesota already had sheep grazing under panels. Cows, no.
That first system was small. Thirty kilowatts, split into two banks of 15, with the steel posts set in concrete 6 feet down. Heins has said they “probably built it hurricane-strength,” and the university put the cost at about $90,000, with the extra height adding very little of that. The actual experiment ran in the summer of 2019, and it was about as simple as a cow study gets: 24 crossbred cows, 12 with access to the panels and 12 without, for 28 days.
The two groups gave just as much milk as each other. The shaded cows were dirtier, which the researchers put down to moisture and manure building up under the panels. The difference that mattered was in the cows themselves. The cows out in the sun breathed 78 times a minute, against 66 for the cows in the shade, and ran a full degree Fahrenheit hotter.
One degree doesn’t sound like much. A cow’s normal body temperature sits somewhere around 101.5°F, and one more degree is the kind of change a vet would notice. Heins, asked about it at the field’s dedication, didn’t hedge. “Actually that 1 degree is a big difference,” he told Agweek, and he tied it to milk production, heifer growth and general stress on the animals.
So if you’re a dairy farmer expecting a milk bump from the shade, there wasn’t one in 28 days, and I’d be a little skeptical of anyone selling you panels on that basis. What you’re buying is a herd that’s less heat-stressed. Whether that turns into milk over a whole summer is what the longer research is supposed to tell us.
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The next array came in 2021, a 240-kilowatt array big enough to shade 200 to 250 cows at a time. This time the poles went 6 feet into the ground without any concrete. And here’s a detail that I think gets lost in most of the coverage: the cows don’t live under the panels. The paddocks at Morris are run for grass, not for shade, so the herd only moves into the solar paddock when the grass there’s ready to graze. In the 2023 season that worked out to about 10 days of shade all summer.
That summer was a dry one in western Minnesota, and Heins noticed the grass under the panels came back faster after grazing than the grass in the open paddocks. Of the roughly 25 plant mixes the center has tried, orchard grass, meadow fescue and red clover have done best under the glass. A French solar company saw something similar on a Normandy dairy pasture this year, where the open field browned out in July and the shaded one stayed green through August. Less sun on the ground means less water baking out of the soil, and in a dry year that’s the difference between a second grazing and bare dirt.
I’d be careful reading too much into one dry summer, and Heins hasn’t published a yield number for the grass that I can find. But the direction matches what’s showing up in other pastures.
The field that put Morris on the map is the 500-kilowatt one, dedicated on September 6, 2024, and reported by Agweek as likely the biggest cow-and-solar pasture in the Midwest. Its electricity goes to the University of Minnesota Morris campus, which says it runs carbon-neutral, and its shade goes to the research dairy’s cows.
Getting it built took some arguing. Bryan Herrmann, the campus’s vice chancellor for finance and facilities, said some contractors told the university that panels 8 feet off the ground simply wouldn’t work. A solar contractor from Hudson, Wisconsin, Energy Concepts, took the job and hammered the steel posts 8 feet down into the dirt, no concrete footings, then hung the panels with their bottom edge 8 feet up. No concrete also means that when the panels wear out, you can pull the posts and get the pasture back.
Does a post with nothing holding it but dirt actually stay put? Apparently so. A storm came through with 80-mph winds, damaged trees and buildings in the area, and left the array alone. The company’s president put it down to structural engineering, which is a fairly modest way of saying they’d done the math on the wind load. The panels are angled and spaced for electricity, with one row never shading the next even under the low winter sun, and the shade for the cows is a side effect of that.
The field cost about $731,000, with $452,000 of that from the Legislative-Citizen Commission on Minnesota Resources, which mostly runs on state lottery money. Another 280 kilowatts of bifacial panels were going in at the research center that summer. Bifacial panels catch light bouncing off the ground on their undersides as well as on top, which in a state that spends a good chunk of the year under snow is a pretty neat trick.
One thing I couldn’t find anywhere is how many panels are in that 500-kilowatt field. Agweek went with “hundreds,” and the university’s never published a count, which is a slightly odd thing to leave out of a dedication ceremony.
Here’s where I think the research gets interesting for anyone who isn’t a university. Fixed panels on 8-foot poles are a luxury. The solar industry mostly builds single-axis trackers now, panels that tilt through the day to follow the sun, and when a tracker tilts, one edge drops into cow range. Raising the whole thing costs money a developer would rather not spend. You can get around the reach problem by standing the panels on edge instead, which is what Rutgers did in a New Jersey cattle pasture, but then you give up most of the shade at midday, which is when a cow actually wants it.
So the center’s asked the state for $1,443,000 to build a roughly 255-kilowatt tracker array in an organic pasture and split it three ways: one section left exactly as a developer would build it, one with electric fence wire on brackets along the panel edges, and one raised out of reach on longer poles. The center’s proposal puts 96 Holstein and crossbred cows into four groups of 24 and fits them with GPS collars, at about $400 a cow, so the grazing boundary can be moved around on a screen to keep them off the tilted edges while still letting them get to the shade.
The paperwork’s got the array layout done by October 31, 2026, and the panels installed by June 30, 2027. I couldn’t tell from the commission’s website whether the money’s been approved, so treat those as a plan, not a schedule.
The herd under the existing panels isn’t waiting on any of that. Heins told Sahan Journal, in a story the Associated Press distributed on September 23, 2026, that about 275 cows now graze between the rows of the 500-kilowatt array, eight years into the project, and that “it’s garnered a lot of interest in Minnesota and around the world.”
Agree or laugh out loud?
Olivia Richman · Oct 5, 2026
Olivia Richman · Oct 16, 2026
Olivia Richman · Sep 23, 2026
Luis Reyes · Oct 2, 2026
Luis Reyes · Sep 24, 2026
Luis Reyes · Sep 26, 2026
Olivia Richman · Oct 17, 2026
Chema Bonilla Díaz · Oct 17, 2026
Chema Bonilla Díaz · Oct 17, 2026
Dave McQuilling · Oct 16, 2026
Luis Reyes · Oct 16, 2026
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Deep transfer learning brings solar fault diagnosis and power loss prediction to the edge
Solar photovoltaics has become the fastest-growing source of renewable electricity, and the International Energy Agency expects it to supply roughly a fifth of all generated power worldwide by 2030. Yet the same modules that promise 25 to 30 years of service must survive in open outdoor conditions, exposed to dust accumulation, bird droppings, thermal swings, wind-induced mechanical stress, snow and ice, and photochemical degradation. Field studies across different climatic zones show that dust alone causes energy losses of 5 to 30 percent, while bird droppings and snow accumulation can push losses to 45 percent. When these faults go unnoticed, they quietly erode economic returns and raise the levelized cost of energy for entire solar plants.
Researchers Ramji Tiwari and S. Saravanan, publishing in Results in Engineering, have now built a unified deep learning framework that does something previous systems could not: it classifies six distinct types of photovoltaic surface faults and simultaneously predicts how much power each fault is costing, using a single fine-tuned neural network backbone. The work is explicitly aimed at edge deployment, meaning the trained model is compact enough to run on modest hardware such as a GTX 1060 graphics card, performing inference on 224 by 224 pixel RGB images at roughly 45 frames per second. That speed makes near-real-time monitoring feasible for drones, fixed cameras, and robotic inspection platforms.
The framework’s dataset is one of its most important contributions. Prior studies typically relied on fewer than 5,000 images from a single repository, covering only two to four fault categories, which limited generalization to real-world conditions. Tiwari and Saravanan instead aggregated 12,463 photovoltaic surface images from four public repositories, harmonized their inconsistent labels into a unified six-class taxonomy, and removed near-duplicates using perceptual hashing with a Hamming distance threshold of 10. The six classes are Bird-drop, Clean, Dust, Electrical-Damage, Physical-Damage, and Snow-Covered. The final distribution is imbalanced, with Clean panels accounting for 38.7 percent of images while Snow-Covered and Electrical-Damage represent only 4.9 and 6.3 percent respectively, reflecting the natural rarity of severe faults. Stratified sampling preserved class proportions across the 80:10:10 train-validation-test split, and online augmentation with random rotation, translation, flipping, and scaling boosted minority-class representation during training without introducing artificial samples.
Beyond the image dataset, the authors collected 110 experimental power-loss measurements using a 500 W monocrystalline module at an outdoor test facility. They deposited realistic dust simulants, including cement dust, fine road dust, and soil dust with a median particle size of about 35 micrometers, at seven progressive levels from 5 to 35 grams per square meter. Each level remained on the module for at least 48 hours, with measurements of irradiance, open-circuit voltage, short-circuit current, maximum power point voltage and current, output power, and temperature taken every 15 minutes. Power loss was computed relative to a temperature-corrected clean baseline, yielding a continuous regression target that avoids the boundary artifacts of discretized severity classes.
The classification backbone was built on two state-of-the-art convolutional architectures, ResNet50 and DenseNet201, both initialized with pretrained ImageNet weights and fine-tuned across all layers using the Adam optimizer with an initial learning rate of 1e-4. ResNet50 uses shortcut connections that add the input feature map to the learned residual mapping, mitigating performance degradation in deep networks. DenseNet201 goes further, concatenating feature maps from all preceding layers in each dense block, which enables explicit feature reuse and gives parameter efficiency: approximately 20 million parameters versus ResNet50’s 25.6 million despite greater depth. The power-loss regressor is a ridge regression trained on feature vectors extracted from the second-to-last fully connected layer of the trained classifiers, coupling fault classification and energy-loss prediction through a shared learned representation rather than treating them as separate systems.
The results show DenseNet201 clearly outperforming ResNet50. Test accuracy rose from 85.61 to 87.80 percent, macro F1-score improved from 0.88 to 0.93, Cohen’s Kappa increased from 0.832 to 0.876, and macro-average AUC climbed from 0.945 to 0.975. The largest class-specific gain came in the Bird-drop category, where recall jumped 17 percentage points from 0.65 to 0.82, a benefit the authors attribute to DenseNet201’s dense connectivity preserving multi-scale texture information needed to distinguish scattered bird droppings from irregular dust accumulation. McNemar’s test confirmed the difference was statistically significant, with a chi-squared statistic of 7.6 and a p-value of 0.006. Grad-CAM explainability visualizations showed that DenseNet201 consistently concentrated activation on physically meaningful fault regions, such as localized deposits for Bird-drop, crack edges for Physical-Damage, and discolored cell regions for Electrical-Damage, rather than spurious image features.
The power-loss estimation module achieved an in-sample R-squared of 0.978 with DenseNet201 features, explaining 97.8 percent of observed power-loss variance, with RMSE of 3.3 percent and MAE of 2.5 percent. The authors are transparent that these figures reflect fitting on the 110-sample dataset rather than generalization, and they report a supplementary leave-one-out cross-validated tabular-feature model with R-squared of 0.927, RMSE of 1.79 percentage points, and MAE of 1.47 percentage points as the primary cross-validated evidence of predictability. The practical economic value is substantial: an MAE of 2.5 percent corresponds to roughly 12.5 W of estimation error for a 500 W module, or about 25 kW for a 1 MW plant, translating to approximately USD 7,000 per year at an electricity price of USD 0.08 per kWh with 3,500 hours of annual peak sun.
An ablation study quantified the contribution of each framework component. Replacing pretrained ImageNet weights with random initialization reduced validation accuracy by 12.10 percentage points, confirming that low-level features learned from ImageNet remain highly valuable for photovoltaic fault classification. Freezing the backbone and training only the classification head cost 5.17 percentage points, showing that domain-specific adaptation of convolutional features is essential. Removing preprocessing normalization and data augmentation cost 3.86 and 3.41 percentage points respectively, while batch size variations had only minor influence below 1 percentage point.
The framework maps each continuous power-loss estimate onto a five-level severity scale, from Negligible (0 to 5 percent) through Minor, Moderate, Severe, and Critical (above 35 percent), each with a recommended maintenance response ranging from routine monitoring to emergency intervention. This severity grading transforms automatic image processing beyond mere fault identification into actionable asset management, allowing operators to prioritize cleaning and repairs by their actual effect on energy yield rather than by visual appearance alone.
The authors acknowledge several limitations. The power-loss experiment used a single monocrystalline module under arid-region dust conditions, so generalizability to other module technologies, geographic locations, and bifacial designs remains unproven. The clean-reference power was estimated from a single calibration reading via linear irradiance and temperature correction rather than measured by a continuously monitored parallel reference module, introducing model-based uncertainty into every regression metric. Applied dust level and module temperature were correlated in the dataset, confounding any independent temperature effect. The framework relies on visible-spectrum imagery only, excluding thermal infrared, electroluminescence, and SCADA electrical monitoring that could reveal subsurface damage. Future work directions include Vision Transformers and ConvNeXts for larger datasets, YOLOv11-based fault localization, multimodal data fusion, Digital Twin maintenance planning, SHAP explainability, federated learning across installations, and INT8 quantization or knowledge distillation for further edge compression.
Subject of Research: Deep transfer learning-based fault classification and power loss prediction for solar PV modules: toward edge deployment
Article Title: Deep transfer learning-based fault classification and power loss prediction for solar PV modules: toward edge deployment
Article References: Tiwari, R., & Saravanan, S. (2026). Deep transfer learning-based fault classification and power loss prediction for solar PV modules: toward edge deployment. Results in Engineering, 32, Article 113560. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rineng.2026.113560
Image Credits: AI Generated
DOI: 10.1016/j.rineng.2026.113560
Keywords: Deep, transfer, learning-based, fault, classification, power, loss, prediction, solar, modules, toward, edge
News Source: Ophelia Keating. (October 17, 2026). Deep transfer learning brings solar fault diagnosis and power loss prediction to the edge. Scienmag.
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In India, the rooftop solar subsidy is offered under the PM Surya Ghar Muft Bijli Yojana. Under this scheme, homeowners can claim a subsidy of ₹30,000 to ₹78,000, depending on the size of the on-grid rooftop solar system they install.
To get the subsidy, apply on the national portal (pmsuryaghar.gov.in), choose a registered solar company, and get the system installed. Once the system is commissioned and approved, the subsidy is credited directly to your bank account.
Here are some benefits of the PM Surya Ghar Muft Bijli Yojana:
Lower cost: The subsidy cuts the upfront cost of going solar.
Energy independence: You depend less on the grid and are less affected by rising power tariffs.
Up to 90% savings on electricity bill for years: Most systems recover their cost in 3 to 5 years. After that, you get almost free electricity for the rest of the system's life.
Cleaner environment: Every 1 kW system is said to have the same impact as planting ~39 full-grown trees, so you help reduce pollution.
In this blog, you will get a walkthrough of PM Surya Ghar Muft Bijli Yojana, who can apply, the documents you need, the full online process, and the mistakes to avoid.
The Government of India launched this scheme in February 2024 through the Ministry of New and Renewable Energy (MNRE). The target is to install rooftop solar systems on 1 crore homes in India.
If your system makes more power than you use, the extra units go back to the grid through net metering. Most homeowners know this scheme as PM Surya Ghar Yojana. It is the subsidy programme for rooftop solar through which you can avail a subsidy of ₹78,000 (capped) for a 3 kW or above system size.
The subsidy you receive depends on the size of your solar system. For a 1-2 kW solar system, the subsidy is ₹30,000 per kW. For capacity above 2 kW and up to 3 kW, you get an additional ₹18,000 per kW. The maximum subsidy is capped at ₹78,000 for systems of 3 kW or more.
System Size
Central Subsidy
1 kW
₹30,000
2 kW
₹60,000
3 kW and above
₹78,000 (capped)

 
Please note: The central government has set a maximum subsidy of ₹78,000 for homeowners. So any system of 3 kW or more receives a fixed subsidy of ₹78,000, no matter how large it is. Residents of Uttar Pradesh, Delhi, Chhattisgarh, Uttarakhand, and Rajasthan may also get an extra state subsidy, based on the size of their system. However, these state benefits are not offered in every city. You must check whether your city is covered before you count on the extra amount.
The PM Surya Ghar Yojana covers residential rooftops only. Commercial and industrial buildings do not qualify under this scheme. Housing societies can apply for solar in shared areas, but under separate rules. You can apply if you meet these conditions:
You are an Indian citizen and the legal owner of the property where the system will be installed.
You have a valid electricity connection in your name from your local DISCOM (Distribution Company).
You have not taken any other solar subsidy for your home before.
You choose solar panels that are DCR-compliant (Domestic Content Requirement) and listed under ALMM (Approved List of Models and Manufacturers).
You install a grid-tied rooftop solar system.
You must have the following documents ready from the beginning to apply for the PM Surya Ghar Yojana:
Latest electricity bill with the consumer number and system details (sanctioned load)
Aadhaar card
Mobile number linked to Aadhaar
Bank details with a cancelled cheque
Proof of property ownership, or the owner’s consent if you are not the sole owner.
Note: Requirements can vary slightly by state and DISCOM. Check with your DISCOM if you are unsure.
To apply for the PM Surya Ghar Muft Bijli Yojana, you need to meet the eligibility rules, submit the required documents, choose a registered solar company, and get your net meter approved. Here is the full process, step by step:
Visit the portal: Go to the national portal (pmsuryaghar.gov.in), open the consumer section, and start your application.
Create your profile: Log in and fill in your name, email address, address, state, district, and PIN code. Then save the profile.
Fill in the application: Click "Apply" and enter your personal details and your latest electricity bill information. Upload your ID proof, proof of ownership, and your most recent electricity bill.
Add your bank details: Upload your bank account details and a cancelled cheque. The central subsidy is usually paid by direct bank transfer (DBT), so make sure your bank account is linked to your Aadhaar.
Choose a registered Solar Company: Pick a solar company from the state-wise list on the portal and ask for a quote.
Upload the signed agreement: Sign an agreement with your chosen solar company and upload it to the portal.
Apply for net metering: After the solar company completes the work, submit the system details on the portal and apply for the net meter. Your DISCOM will then issue a commissioning certificate to confirm that the system is live.
Claim the subsidy: Log back into your consumer account and upload the commissioning certificate to claim your subsidy. Once your claim is approved, the money reaches your bank account within 30 days.
Most homes get their subsidy within a few weeks to a couple of months after applying. The installation itself takes only a few days. Most of the waiting time comes from DISCOM approvals and inspections, and this differs from state to state.
Once your claim is processed, the central subsidy goes straight to your bank account, usually within 30 days of commissioning. In total, you can expect the whole process, from subsidy application, to commissioning, to take about 60 to 90 days.
Most delays and rejections happen because of small errors. Avoid these:
Installing panels that are not listed under ALMM
Not linking your bank account to your Aadhaar
Choosing a system larger than your sanctioned load
Having a name on your documents that does not match your Aadhaar
Installing the system before DISCOM feasibility approval

How to Choose the Right Solar Company
Your solar company decides how smooth the whole process will be. A professional solar company saves your time, effort, and money. A local solar company can leave you stuck with delays and rejected claims. Before you choose your solar company, check these points:
Portal registration: The solar company must be registered on the official PM Surya Ghar portal.
DCR panels: Ask for proof that the household solar panels are DCR compliant.
Paperwork support: The solar company should handle your application, DISCOM approvals, and net metering process.
Warranty and after-sales support: Ask about the panel warranty, the inverter warranty, and how service requests are handled once the system is installed.
This is where SolarSquare stands out. As a registered solar company, they look after everything from start to finish, including the subsidy application, DISCOM approvals, net metering, and installation. You don't have to make repeated trips to the DISCOM office or chase paperwork yourself. They also keep the process simple and clear for first-time solar buyers. It’s worth mentioning that SolarSquare is also India’s #1 rooftop home solar company as per the PM Surya Ghar portal data with highest numbers of residential solar panel systems installed in India.
Getting the solar subsidy is simple if you follow the right order. You must ensure that you are eligible for the PM Surya Ghar subsidy and that you have all your documents ready. Apply only on the official portal, and wait for DISCOM approval before installing anything.
Then choose a trusted, registered solar company to guide you through the process. A reliable partner like Solarsquare can take the paperwork off your hands, so you can cut your electricity bill and receive your subsidy without delay.
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Ganesha says it will be an important day for you, Aries. Your energy and confidence are ready to take you to new heights. Today you will be able to express your thoughts with clarity, which will increase your communication skills. New opportunities may arise in the working areas, which you have to be ready to take advantage of. In social life, you can make new meetings, which will prove beneficial for you in the future. This day will be good for solving family issues, and you will be able to establish better relations with your close ones. In the field of health, take care of your routine and resort to yoga or meditation to relieve mental stress. Controlling your expenses will be a smart move, as any sudden financial need may arise. Overall, this day is for you to stay positive, just use your insight and energy properly.
Ganesha says it is going to be a positive day for you. Your sensitivity and intuition will flourish today, allowing you to establish better connections between yourself and others. It is time to connect with someone or refresh old memories. Try to communicate with people close to you, as it will strengthen your relationships. In the field of work, your creativity will be cyclical today. If you are working on a project, your ideas will be new and full of innovation. Do not be afraid to share your ideas, it will give you positive feedback from your colleagues. In terms of financial condition, avoid any big investments. Small expenses will prove to be justified but think well before making any big decisions for the long term. In terms of health, focus on a balanced diet and regular exercise. For mental health, practicing meditation or yoga will help keep you stress-free.
Ganesha says new opportunities are likely to open up for you. You will be in a position to take your creative abilities to new heights. This is the time to share your ideas and make new plans. Your friends and family will support your ideas, so it will be beneficial to take their advice into account. Positive changes are possible in business. This is the right time to work on an important project. You will get an opportunity to use your skills and knowledge properly. But, be careful; in some cases, you will need to control your emotions. In personal life, relationships will deepen. You will try to spend more time with your loved ones. This is a good time for love and companionship. Enjoy emotional moments that will make your relationships stronger. Be health conscious. Dedication to yoga and meditation will give you mental peace. These activities will keep not only your body but also your mind active. Overall, today will be full of possibilities for you. Stay committed to your dreams and work on them.
Ganesha says your day is full of some new possibilities. You will experience grace and stability in your actions. This is the time to focus on your goals and work with determination to pursue your plans. You are likely to get success in your work, especially if you maintain your hard work and dedication. Positive changes can also be seen in your relationships. You will get a chance to spend time with family and listen to them, which will increase mutual understanding and depth. Focus on communication, as it will make your relationships stronger. However, it is also time to make monthly plans. Take care of your financial matters and try to save. This is the time when you can take concrete steps for your future. Your health condition is likely to remain normal but take some rest. Maintaining a mental balance will be important for you. Stay positive and keep faith in your actions!
Ganesha says today will be full of new possibilities and positive energy for you. You will feel a rise in your confidence, which will keep you open to new opportunities. This is the right time to make an important decision. Your spirituality and intuition will be strong, which will enable you to understand and face difficulties. Spending time with friends and family will awaken a sense of happiness and satisfaction in your mind. Relationships with colleagues at work can take a new direction. Cooperation and communication will help solve problems. If you face an obstacle or challenge, remember that you can overcome it. In terms of health, you may need to make a little improvement in your routine. Regular exercise and a balanced diet will give you freshness and energy. Strengthening social relationships and contacting new people will also be beneficial today. This is the time for self-growth and positive change for you, so recognize the energy within you and use it properly.
Ganesha says today will be full of enthusiasm and energy. You will move towards achieving your goals, and your hard work will pay off. Social life will also be active; you will get a good chance to spend time with friends and family. In terms of health, take a little caution. Focusing on meditation and exercise will help reduce mental stress. This is also a good time to take up a new hobby, which can unleash your creativity. Take wise steps in terms of money. Make informed decisions while investing. For potential financial gains, take a look at past projects again. Your career is showing good signs of progress. Your ideas may be appreciated at the workplace, which will increase your confidence. Still, some issues may require restraint. Overall, today will prove to be positive and auspicious for you. Spend it with pride with your loved ones.
Ganesha says today will be a very auspicious and positive day. You will get a chance to clarify your thoughts, which will bring stability to your personal and professional relationships. Your communication skills will increase, and this will open the doors of new possibilities for you. Your creativity and aesthetic sense will be especially strong today. If you are associated with any art or design, your work will be appreciated. This is the right time to express your feelings. If you are confused about a decision, trust your intuition; it will show you the right path. In terms of health, small changes can make your life better. Focus on regular exercise and a balanced diet. In love and relationships, a new understanding will develop, which will strengthen the mutual bond even more. Overall, this day is a sign of positive changes and new beginnings for you. Stay focused on your goals and recognize your inner strengths.
Ganesha says today is a suitable day to highlight your cognitive abilities and business skills. Today, you will be full of clarity and precision in your actions, which will increase your value among your colleagues and superiors. There is a possibility of bringing some changes to your routine, which will bring positive results for you. This is a good time to improve relations with family members. Try to resolve any old disputes, and keep communication open. In terms of health, meditation and yoga will bring mental peace. Also, take some time out of your routine for exercise. From a financial point of view, this is the right time to make a good plan for the right investment. Take a good look at the options available to you and make a wise decision. Overall, today will prove to be a day of new possibilities and positive changes for you. Be full of confidence and stay focused on your goals.
Ganesha says today will be a day full of energy and inspiration. Your confidence will increase and your thoughts will come out with clarity. On this day, you will be able to see some new possibilities in your career, which will bring you hard work. Mutual understanding and harmony will increase your relationship, which will create a happy atmosphere among the family. This is a great time to express your thoughts clearly, so do not hesitate to communicate with your partner or friends. It is important to be health conscious, a little exercise and meditation will maintain your mental and physical health. Overall, this day will bring activity and positivity for you, so make the most of all the opportunities!
Ganesha says it will be a day of information and communication for you. Your mind will be full of ideas and you will be able to express your ideas well. There is a possibility of some new opportunities in professional life, which can prove beneficial for you. It is a good time to strengthen relationships with your colleagues, so work together at the workplace. Your emotional state will also be strong. Time spent with family will give you satisfaction. If you have any old problem going on, then the right time is coming to solve it. However, you need to keep your emotions under control, so that you do not get agitated over small things. In terms of health, try to practice yoga and meditation. It will empower you both mentally and physically. Take informed decisions in financial matters; do not rush into any investments. In summary, this day will be all about communication and cooperation, which will lead to positive changes for you.
Ganesha says there will be a new energy and freshness in your thoughts, which will make your personality even more attractive. Social contacts are likely to increase, which will expand your network. You will be inspired to spend blissful time with your friends and family. Some positive changes can also be seen in the business sector. The results of your hard work will gradually start coming, and this will motivate you to move forward. Keep in mind that while sharing your ideology, work with empathy, this will strengthen your relationship with colleagues. It is important to be health conscious. A little attention and relaxation will give you mental freshness. Practicing yoga or meditation will be beneficial for you. This day will be full of positivity and new possibilities for you. Express your mind openly and do not hesitate to adopt new ideas.
Ganesha says it will prove to be a positive day for you, Taurus. You will feel energetic and full of confidence. The time has come to reap the fruits of your hard work and efforts. The workload may stress you for a while, but you will face all the challenges recognizing your strengths. Sweetness will also remain in your relationships. Spending time with your family and friends will be a source of joy for you. Conversation with someone special can give you a new vision and promote mutual understanding. A special occasion may be organized among friends or family, which will bring happiness and harmony to you. Moments spent with loved ones will give you mental peace. It is important to be health conscious. A little exercise or yoga will give peace to your mind and energy to your body. Your day will be full of happiness and positivity, just keep your thoughts and emotions balanced.
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Chema Bonilla Díaz
Oct 17, at 6:00am ET
Pickup trucks get used for all kinds of things in Texas, and if you’ve spent any time near the coast you’ve probably watched a few of them back a trailer down a boat ramp before sunrise. The Pentagon’s border surveillance program now works pretty much like that, except the boat in the bed weighs about what a mid-size outboard motor does and nobody gets in it.
That boat’s called the Lightfish, built by a San Diego startup named Seasats, and on October 2 the company said a fleet of them had been launched from the Texas coast into the Gulf to look for drug runners and anyone else coming in by water. It’s an extension of a job those boats have been doing on the Rio Grande since January, floating alongside crewed patrols as part of something called Operation River Wall.
So what exactly is out there?
Each Lightfish is about 11 feet long, 3 feet wide and 340 pounds, according to the company. That’s lighter than most jet skis. Two people can carry one down to the water and launch it from a ramp or straight off a tailgate, and that’s basically the whole reason it could show up on a river where, by Seasats’ own account, nobody had run a drone boat for any length of time before.
It’s solar powered. The top of the hull is covered in panels, the panels charge a battery, and the battery turns an electric motor. Seasats’ spec sheet rates the boat for six months on station, a cruise speed of 2 knots, a 5-knot sprint, and seas up to state 6, which works out to waves somewhere between 13 and 20 feet. It’s self-righting, so if a wave rolls it over it comes back up on its own, and there’s a small generator aboard as a reserve for bad weather or power-hungry sensors.
Two knots, by the way, is about 2.3 mph. You walk faster than that.
So this isn’t a boat that chases anyone. It parks itself on a patch of water, points its cameras at the bank or the horizon, and stays put, which is what the industry means by “holding station.” A crewed patrol boat has to come home when the fuel or the people run out. A Lightfish apparently doesn’t, for months at a time.
What rides in the payload bay depends on the job. Seasats says one hull has carried electro-optical and infrared cameras (regular video and heat vision, more or less), signals equipment, and sonar. Reuters puts the price at roughly $240,000 a boat.
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Watching, mostly. Reuters reported on October 2 that the Pentagon has been running a test group of 10 Lightfish on the river since January. In an average month, the Pentagon says, the boats have assisted in 452 detections, 350 apprehensions and 100 turnbacks. Frankly, those are bigger numbers than I expected from a 10-boat pilot.
A turnback is border jargon for a group that starts crossing, realizes it’s been spotted, and heads back the way it came. The boat doesn’t do anything to them. It just sits there with its cameras on, and according to Mark R. Ditlevson, the assistant secretary of war for homeland defense whose office runs the program, that’s often enough. People on the bank see the boat waiting for them and know they’ve “basically been found out,” he told Reuters.
How does a boat with nobody aboard tell a Border Patrol agent anything? Its sensors feed tracking data into military software, Palantir’s Maven and Anduril’s Fortress according to Reuters, and those systems push alerts out to Customs and Border Protection and the Coast Guard. Basically, the boat spots something, a screen lights up somewhere, and a crewed unit decides whether to go take a look. The boat stays where it is.
I’d argue the river is the more interesting half of this story, even though the Gulf is the news. A drone boat on the open ocean is something you’ve seen on this site plenty of times. A drone boat anchored on a river narrow enough to throw a rock across, in water that’s shallow and muddy and full of debris, is a different problem, and 10 of them have apparently been dealing with it for nine months.
Because the Gulf is enormous and the Coast Guard can only be in a few places at once. Offshore surveillance has traditionally meant planes and cutters, and both run into one limitation: they burn fuel and they carry people, so they go out, look, and come back. Seasats CEO Mike Flanigan put it bluntly in the company’s release: “The Gulf is too vast to monitor with crewed hulls alone.”
He’s selling boats, so take that with a grain of salt. But the basic point holds up. A plane covers a lot of water fast and can’t stay. A 2-knot solar boat covers almost nothing fast and can stay for months. Put enough of them in a line and you’ve got a fence of cameras instead of a sweep, which is arguably a better match for the job of waiting around for a go-fast boat that may or may not show up.
That’s apparently the plan. Ditlevson told Reuters that if the program keeps working, Lightfish orders could grow by 50 boats and the fleet could form a radar fence across the Gulf from Texas to Key West. Key West is the far end of the Florida Keys, so that’s essentially the whole U.S. rim of the Gulf. He also said the expansion would come in increments and that his office isn’t wedded to one vendor.
Reuters names Saronic, Saildrone and Splash as companies building similar boats, and a couple of those have been through here recently: Saronic’s 24-foot Corsair stayed behind in Panama after a summer exercise and now patrols with that country’s coast guard, and Splash’s 11-foot Typhoon is a rival hull about as long as the Lightfish, built for speed instead of endurance.
Seasats hasn’t said how many boats went into the Gulf, and neither has the Pentagon. The release says “a fleet,” which could mean five or 50. My guess is it’s closer to the river number than the 50-boat figure, since that one’s still a maybe, but I can’t find anything that pins it down, so your guess is about as good as mine.
That sounds odd for a body of water that produces hurricanes, but it’s how the Pentagon is treating it. Reuters reports the Gulf deployment is a warm-up for testing the boats in the Pacific off San Diego, where the seas are rougher and the swells are bigger. Seasats happens to be based in San Diego, and the company has run Lightfish across the Pacific before, so the boat’s been in big water. Running a surveillance line in it, with boats expected to hold a spot for months, is a different ask.
So the sequence goes river, Gulf, Pacific. The 10 boats on the Rio Grande have been out there since January, the Gulf fleet went in off the Texas coast on October 2, and Ditlevson told Reuters the same day that the up-to-50-boat expansion depends on the results coming back from both.
Agree or laugh out loud?
Chema Bonilla Díaz · Oct 12, 2026
Olivia Richman · Oct 7, 2026
Luis Reyes · Oct 17, 2026
Chema Bonilla Díaz · Sep 18, 2026
Luis Reyes · Sep 18, 2026
Luis Reyes · Oct 14, 2026
Luis Reyes · Oct 17, 2026
Luis Reyes · Oct 17, 2026
Luis Reyes · Oct 17, 2026
Olivia Richman · Oct 17, 2026
Chema Bonilla Díaz · Oct 17, 2026
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Alex Greer strategically utilized a program that links farmers with solar developers to enhance his sheep business. By securing grazing contracts across 38 acres in Asheboro and Rowan counties, he faced hurdles like controlling vegetation and installing predator-proof fencing. Interestingly, studies indicate that sheep grazing can bolster soil health and remain financially viable compared to mechanical mowing over time. Greer’s journey exemplifies the promising intersection of solar farming and agriculture.

Representative AI image of sheep grazing beneath solar panels, showing how solar farms can provide valuable pastureland for farmers and support sustainable sheep farming. Image Credits: ChatGPT.

Alex Greer strategically utilised a program that links farmers with solar developers to enhance his sheep business. Image Credits: Wikimedia Commons.

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Flick Fact: The $16.5 million solar farm in the middle of B-N?  The Pantagraph
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The proposed scheme, near Selby, has faced objections from residents
Plans to build a battery energy storage system and 500MW solar farm across swathes of land near Selby could be changed following objections from people living nearby.
Light Valley Solar Limited wants to build on 2,520 acres (1,020 hectares) of land between the villages of Escrick, Monk Fryston, Hambleton, Chapel Haddlesey and South Milford.
The development has faced opposition, with conerns raised about the loss of agricultural land, the impact on the rural landscape and the potential harm to wildlife.
In response the firm has outlined nine proposed amendments, including removing solar panels from an area near homes, creating new wildlife habitats and altering construction access routes.
Opponents have also questioned the scale and location of the scheme, arguing that it would industrialise large areas of countryside and affect the character of nearby villages.
Among the changes to the scheme that have been proposed is the removal of solar panels from land south of Milford Lodge and Milford Lodge Cottage.
The land would instead become an area of grassland managed to provide habitat for ground-nesting birds.
The developer said the change followed discussions with North Yorkshire Council about bird habitat provision, the Local Democracy Reporting Service said.
In addition, the removal of panels would increase the distance between the development and Milford Lodge Cottage, following representations from residents.
The developer has also been in discussions with Sherburn Aero Club and says removing panels near a proposed emergency landing strip would improve safety for aircraft making emergency landings.
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Orb Energy marks two decades in India with approximately 450 MW of installed solar PV capacity and plans to exceed 1 GW by 2030.
October 17, 2026. By News Bureau
Orb Energy has completed 20 years of operations in India, reporting approximately 450 MW of installed solar photovoltaic (PV) capacity, more than 175,000 systems and 95,000 customers served across the country. The company aims to exceed 1 GW of installed solar capacity by 2030, with a focus on rooftop solar solutions and financing for Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises (SMEs).
Founded in Bengaluru in 2006, Orb Energy initially focused on providing solar power to semi-urban and rural markets facing unreliable electricity supply. Over the years, the company expanded its operations into grid-connected rooftop solar, particularly for SMEs, as declining solar costs and the introduction of net-metering policies improved the viability of such installations.
According to JMK Research & Analytics, Orb Energy ranked among India’s top three rooftop solar companies in 2025. The company has also typically ranked among the country’s top five rooftop solar companies over the past six years, according to JMK Research & Analytics and CRISIL.
In 2017, Orb Energy established a solar panel manufacturing facility in Bengaluru. Its operations subsequently brought together manufacturing, system design, installation and after-sales service. The company also introduced an in-house solar financing facility to help SMEs adopt rooftop solar without collateral or an upfront down payment. Cumulative disbursements through this facility have reached nearly INR 350 crore.
The company has received institutional backing to support its operations and financing activities. In 2019, Shell acquired a 20 percent stake in Orb Energy. In 2022, the US International Development Finance Corporation extended a USD 20 million loan to support the company’s in-house credit facility for SMEs.
Commenting on the 20-years of operation, Damian Miller, CEO and Co-Founder of Orb Energy, said the company’s growth reflected the trust of its customers and the contributions of its employees and partners.
When Orb Energy began operations in 2006, solar panels cost around 40 times more than they do today, according to the company. At the time, solar power was largely used for off-grid applications, including remote electrification and backup power. The company initially developed a branch network to serve customers across South India, which at its peak comprised 170 branches in five states.
As grid-connected solar adoption increased, Orb Energy shifted its focus towards rooftop installations for SMEs. Its financing model was developed to address the upfront investment barriers faced by businesses seeking to adopt solar energy.
As it enters its third decade, the company plans to expand its installed solar capacity beyond 1 GW by 2030, continuing to focus on rooftop solar adoption among businesses.

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⚡ Quick Read
As large-scale solar installations expand across diverse geographical regions, the risk of lightning-induced damage remains a critical concern for developers and EPC contractors. While traditional Lightning Protection Systems (LPS) using Franklin rods are standard, they do not always prevent transient overvoltage during direct strikes on PV modules or mounting structures. A research team in Indonesia has recently proposed a novel grounding strategy to mitigate these risks by optimizing grounding-point locations and evaluating various configurations to improve surge dissipation.
The study utilized an equivalent electrical circuit model developed in ATPDraw 7.2 software, simulating an array of ten 200 W solar panels. The researchers modeled the electrical characteristics of frames, mounting structures, and electrodes under a simulated lightning strike with a peak amplitude of 50 kA and an impulse waveform of 1.2/50 μs. The simulation tested two primary configurations: direct grounding through PV module frames and grounding through mounting structures.
Key findings indicate that soil resistivity plays a major role in transient voltage distribution. As soil resistivity increased from 30 Ωm to 3,000 Ωm, peak voltages shifted from the injection point toward the grounding connection. Notably, the study revealed that introducing a second grounding point provided substantial benefits, reducing transient voltages by 47.5% to 54.8% for frame-grounded systems and 43.2% to 50.7% for mounting-based grounding. The researchers concluded that grounding through mounting structures generally yielded lower maximum voltages due to reduced electrical resistance.
For EPC contractors operating in India, where lightning activity is prevalent in many regions, these findings offer a practical pathway to enhance system resilience. By strategically placing grounding points closest to potential lightning injection points and adopting dual-grounding configurations, developers can significantly lower the risk of transient overvoltage. This approach not only protects the PV modules but also ensures that the overall system remains within the safety limits prescribed by IEEE Std 80. Incorporating these findings into the design phase can lead to more robust infrastructure, reducing long-term operational expenditure (OPEX) related to component replacement.
The industry is expected to evaluate these simulation results against real-world field data. As the India renewable energy sector continues to scale up, the adoption of advanced grounding techniques will become increasingly vital to protect multi-megawatt assets. Future project designs may integrate these findings to refine EPC standards, ensuring that large-scale solar farms are better equipped to withstand extreme weather events while maintaining grid stability.
Aditya Pathre is the Founder of MVApulse and covers India’s renewable energy sector, including solar, wind, battery energy storage systems (BESS), green hydrogen, transmission infrastructure, renewable energy policy and competitive bidding. His reporting focuses on project developments, market trends, government policies and energy transition across India.
India’s Power Sector Intelligence Portal
MVApulse is an independent publication covering India’s renewable energy sector including solar, wind, BESS, transmission, green hydrogen, EPC and power markets.
Copyright © 2026 MVApulse. Powered by Swadi Innovative Technologies Pvt Ltd.

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⚡ Quick Read
As the demand for land-efficient renewable energy solutions grows, the integration of agrivoltaic systems has become a focal point for researchers and developers. A recent study conducted by a team from Sweden and Italy has investigated the performance of semitransparent, magenta-colored cadmium telluride (CdTe) thin-film PV panels. Unlike conventional crystalline-silicon solar panels, which are opaque and block significant portions of the light spectrum, these magenta panels are engineered to transmit specific blue and red wavelengths that align with the absorption regions of plant chlorophyll pigments.
The field experiment took place at Kärrbo Prästgård in central Sweden during the 2024 growing season. The trial compared broccoli grown in an open-field control plot with crops cultivated beneath two distinct CdTe PV systems. These systems featured nominal transparency levels of 50% and 70%, resulting in average photosynthetically active radiation (PAR) transmittance values of 13.2% and 19.2%, respectively. Each system utilized 21 panels from Chinese manufacturer Advanced Solar Power, installed at a height of 1.5 meters with a 6-degree tilt.
The results indicated that broccoli grown under both PV systems achieved fresh head weights of 173.7 g (50% transparency) and 168.5 g (70% transparency), compared to 187.6 g in the open-field control. While the difference was not statistically significant, the researchers noted a 25-day delay in crop maturity for the agrivoltaic plots. Despite this, the researchers favored the 50% transparency configuration due to its higher PV cell density and comparable crop performance to the 70% variant.
For EPC contractors and solar developers, this research highlights the potential for wavelength-selective agrivoltaic systems to solve land-use conflicts. By customizing the light spectrum, developers can maintain agricultural productivity while simultaneously generating electricity. This technology offers a sophisticated alternative to traditional opaque panels, which often limit the types of crops that can be grown underneath. As India continues to scale its renewable energy capacity, such innovations could be critical for projects in regions where land availability is constrained by agricultural requirements.
The next phase for this technology involves scaling these experiments to larger commercial footprints to assess the economic viability of CdTe thin-film modules in diverse climates. As the India renewable energy sector continues to expand, integrating advanced agrivoltaic solutions will be essential for developers looking to optimize land value and secure community support for large-scale solar installations.
Aditya Pathre is the Founder of MVApulse and covers India’s renewable energy sector, including solar, wind, battery energy storage systems (BESS), green hydrogen, transmission infrastructure, renewable energy policy and competitive bidding. His reporting focuses on project developments, market trends, government policies and energy transition across India.
India’s Power Sector Intelligence Portal
MVApulse is an independent publication covering India’s renewable energy sector including solar, wind, BESS, transmission, green hydrogen, EPC and power markets.
Copyright © 2026 MVApulse. Powered by Swadi Innovative Technologies Pvt Ltd.

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Letter to the Editor (Shaw Local News Network)
I would rather see a farmer stay on his property and his home with a 20-year lease with a solar farm than go bankrupt. Then the bank sells it to a Mining Co. such as a gravel pit or a data center that would pull all of our resources.
Tina Uselding
McHenry

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⚡ Quick Read
The global solar energy landscape is undergoing a structural transition as the industry moves away from the unprecedented growth rates previously dominated by China. BloombergNEF (BNEF) has released its latest market outlook, projecting 584 GW of global solar installations for 2026. This figure marks a 10.8% decline from the 655 GW anticipated for 2025. The revised forecast reflects a more pronounced slowdown in the Chinese market than analysts initially anticipated, coupled with steady, organic growth in the rest of the world.
Data from BloombergNEF indicates that China, which deployed a staggering 383 GW of solar capacity in 2025, is expected to see a 29% decline to 271 GW in 2026. This contraction is attributed to market saturation and a strategic policy shift that is redirecting capital toward energy storage solutions rather than pure-play solar capacity expansion. In the first half of 2026, China installed approximately 71.8 GW, a sharp drop compared to the 212.2 GW recorded during the same period in 2025.
Conversely, markets outside of China are showing resilience. Global capacity outside of China is projected to reach 313 GW, slightly outperforming earlier expectations. Growth is particularly notable in emerging markets such as India, the Philippines, Nigeria, and Malaysia. In several of these regions, the expansion is driven almost exclusively by residential and commercial rooftop solar installations rather than utility-scale projects.
For EPC contractors and solar developers in India, these findings signal a shift in the investment climate. With utility-scale solar growth cooling in major global hubs, non-utility solar has emerged as the largest sector for renewable energy investment. Indian developers should note that the ‘chugging along’ growth in the Indian market is increasingly supported by decentralized solar applications. As global module supply chains adjust to China’s reduced domestic demand, Indian players may find more favorable pricing environments, though they must navigate the increasing complexity of integrating energy storage into project designs.
The industry is moving into a phase of maturity where ‘breakneck’ growth is being replaced by sustainable, diversified deployment. As the India renewable energy sector continues to scale, the focus will likely shift toward grid integration and the hybridization of solar with battery energy storage systems (BESS). Stakeholders should prepare for a market where residential and commercial segments provide a critical buffer against the volatility of large-scale utility tenders, ensuring long-term stability in the broader energy transition.
Aditya Pathre is the Founder of MVApulse and covers India’s renewable energy sector, including solar, wind, battery energy storage systems (BESS), green hydrogen, transmission infrastructure, renewable energy policy and competitive bidding. His reporting focuses on project developments, market trends, government policies and energy transition across India.
India’s Power Sector Intelligence Portal
MVApulse is an independent publication covering India’s renewable energy sector including solar, wind, BESS, transmission, green hydrogen, EPC and power markets.
Copyright © 2026 MVApulse. Powered by Swadi Innovative Technologies Pvt Ltd.

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With Southeast Asia’s largest electricity bills rising even higher, Filipinos invest in rooftop panels.
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Philippines solar power boom: Iran war spurs demand for renewable energy sources
Manila, Philippines – Keith Cantera and his family have been thinking about having their own solar power grid at home for years. But spending up to $5,000 for solar panels was nothing to scoff at, so they put the idea on the back burner.
It all changed this year when the United States-Israel war on Iran rattled global energy markets and sent electricity prices soaring. From paying a monthly bill of about $150 before the war began in late February, Cantera said his family went to forking out as much as $220.

Eight months later, they are having solar panels installed on their rooftop.
“The cost is about the same as paying our electric bills for three or four years based on the current rate,” Cantera said. “But in the fifth year, we’ll have recovered our investment, and electricity will essentially be free.”
Cantera is one of a growing number of Filipino homeowners turning to solar power in a country that had Southeast Asia’s highest electricity costs even before the war. They were comparable only to Singapore, where the average income is more than 10 times higher.
A report by the energy think tank Ember estimated that rooftop panels had nearly doubled in the Philippines since early 2025.
And in the first months of the war from March to May, the rush for solar power led to $407m in panel imports, according to government trade data from China, where most panels are manufactured. The Philippines became the biggest single overseas market for that period. Only the Netherlands bought more, but it redistributes them to the rest of Europe.

Lexus Grepo, CEO of the solar power supplier Solarmaxx, can attest to the boom.
“There is a 30-day wait because solar panel shipments can’t keep up,” Grepo said. “In March, we had 40 projects, which was almost triple our monthly clientele. Since then, we have been setting up 25 to 30 systems a month.”
Grepo does not expect demand to slow down even if tensions in the Middle East ease and shipping routes for energy supplies reopen.
“I think people now realise that the world is an unpredictable place, so they have to be ready for any eventuality. Filipinos now see that they don’t necessarily have to be at the mercy of the global energy market.”
The Philippines, one of the few countries in the region where electricity is not subsidised, relies on imported coal and gas for more than 70 percent of its power mix. The value of its currency, the peso, which has slid to a record low of more than 63 to the US dollar, is making these imports even costlier.
In late March, President Ferdinand Marcos Jr declared a national energy emergency in response to the war ⁠and what he described as the “imminent danger” posed to the national energy supply. Still, electricity rates have continued to increase.

The shift to solar is also partly driven by anger at electric companies that have come under scrutiny for charging customers for so-called system losses, which include illegal connections.
Cantera said learning about having to pay for someone else’s electricity consumption was the last straw.
“Who would agree to paying for something that you did not use? It’s not like the money we spend for electricity just fell from heaven,” he added.
But while the soaring demand is real, the upfront cost of a solar power system is still too high for most Filipinos. The government in March launched a new initiative offering loans for residential rooftop installations, but these are available only to public sector workers.
What officials hope can bring power rates down for the majority of people are the dozens of renewable energy projects in the pipeline, including a 3,500-hectare (8,650-acre) solar farm north of the capital, Manila, that is projected to be the largest in the world. When fully operational, the project is expected to generate 850 megawatts of electricity for 2.4 million households.
But some consumers said such projects could take years to complete, leaving them with ballooning electricity bills unless they take action themselves.
“It’s just so unpredictable nowadays. You have the impending El Nino weather pattern. There’s still war, the continuing fuel price hikes and so much more,” Cantera said. “So why not utilise a natural resource?”

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China has proposed export prohibitions or restrictions on 12 solar PV technologies covering polysilicon, silicon wafers, TOPCon, back-contact, HJT and perovskite-silicon tandem cell manufacturing. It has also introduced temporary pre-export registration requirements from October 16, 2026, until the revised catalogue is formally implemented.
October 17, 2026. By Mrinmoy Dey

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TP Solar Limited, the solar manufacturing arm of The Tata Power Company Limited and a wholly owned subsidiary of Tata Power Renewable Energy Limited (TPREL), produced 1 GW of solar modules and 0.9 GW of solar cells during the second quarter of FY27, covering July to September 2026. For the six months from April to September 2026, the company manufactured a total of 2 GW of solar modules and 1.8 GW of solar cells. The production figures reflect the ramp-up of manufacturing operations at its facility in Tirunelveli, Tamil Nadu.
TP Solar operates a 4.3 GW solar cell and module manufacturing facility at the site, one of India’s largest single-location facilities of its kind. Tata Power, through TPREL, has invested nearly ₹4,300 crore in establishing the plant to strengthen domestic manufacturing capabilities across the solar value chain.
The facility manufactures solar cells and modules using Tunnel Oxide Passivated Contact (TOPCon) and Monocrystalline Passivated Emitter and Rear Cell (Mono PERC) technologies. Its products include modules compliant with Domestic Content Requirement (DCR) norms and models approved under the Approved List of Models and Manufacturers (ALMM). DCR modules are manufactured using cells produced at the facility.
The plant incorporates artificial intelligence and machine learning-based systems and Automated Guided Vehicles (AGVs) to support manufacturing operations, material movement and production efficiency. These technologies are intended to improve process control and support higher levels of automation.
Nearly 80% of the facility’s workforce comprises women, making it a notable example of women’s participation in India’s solar manufacturing sector. The company said its workforce composition reflects its focus on inclusive employment alongside the development of domestic manufacturing capacity.
The facility supports Tata Power’s strategy to expand its presence across the renewable energy value chain and reduce reliance on imported solar components. Domestic production of cells and modules is also aligned with India’s efforts to strengthen local supply chains for renewable energy projects.
The Tata Power Company Limited is a vertically integrated power company and part of the Tata Group. Its total operational and under-construction capacity exceeds 26 GW, including approximately 17.7 GW of clean and green energy capacity and around 8.8 GW of thermal generation capacity.
Tata Power also operates across transmission and distribution, serving more than 13 million customers. Its businesses include over 7,800 circuit kilometres of transmission lines, including projects under development, and an electric vehicle charging network with more than 7,000 public charging points across 717 cities and towns.
The company has established 4.9 GW of integrated solar cell and module manufacturing capacity, signed 2.8 GW of pumped hydro storage projects and set a target of achieving net-zero emissions by 2045. TP Solar’s production performance supports its broader focus on domestic solar manufacturing and the expansion of India’s renewable energy infrastructure.
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After spending more than $129,000 on rooftop solar — almost $100,000 more than the state average — a Virginia resident says the deal has not produced the savings he expected.
Marcus Evins told 8News that the environmental benefits and lower utility costs made solar panels appealing, but after installing a 45-panel system on his Richmond home through a company called Top Tier Solar Solutions, the promised savings never materialized. Instead, his electric bills hit $400.
Records reviewed by 8News suggest other customers have raised similar concerns: the Virginia Attorney General complaint database shows 21 complaints involving Top Tier Solar Solutions, while the Better Business Bureau lists 352 customer complaints. 
“This is not at all been what I expected, and if I had the opportunity to do it all over again, I probably would not have gotten solar panels,” Evins told 8News. 
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He also provided the station with documents showing that his solar provider estimated he’d save 80% to 90% every month, with his electric bill hovering around $40 or less. 
For homeowners, going solar can be one of the best ways to save money on home energy — but only if the installer, design, and financing terms hold up under scrutiny. 
While solar panels are legitimate tech, it’s important to do research by getting multiple quotes and looking up information on the companies, such as their Better Business Bureau reputation and any customer reviews online. 
One of the best places to use is the comparison shopping site EnergySage, which is like Expedia for solar panels, to get free solar installation estimates and compare quotes without giving your contact information to anyone unless you decide to move forward.
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To get started, just answer a few questions about your home — no phone number required. Within a day or two, EnergySage will email you the best local options for your needs, and their expert advisers can help you compare quotes and pick a winner.
Evins said his family did not immediately panic when the bills stayed high. 
“We trusted the process, we gave it some months and in probably about four to six months we started asking questions,” he told 8News.
As the mismatch continued, Evins said he sent a demand letter to the installer and its financing company raising concerns about the companies’ communication, his understanding of the agreement, and the lack of savings. He said he was also told the system was operating correctly and that noticeable savings might take a year to appear.
Evins said he requested a technician’s diagnostic report explaining why his utility bills did not reflect the anticipated savings, but he was not given one.
💡Go deep on the latest news and trends shaping the residential solar landscape
In a statement to 8News, the financing company, GoodLeap, which was not directly involved in the installation, said, “GoodLeap has stepped in to help thousands and thousands of homeowners where contractors have gone bankrupt and systems need to get to full installation, all done at no cost to the homeowner.” 
The lender added that 12 of Evins’ panels are not working and that it is coordinating repairs with the installer while discussing compensation.
If you’re considering a solar system for your home, the Better Business Bureau says that solar customers can protect their investments by understanding roof conditions, household energy use, and warranty terms. It also recommends getting competing estimates and exploring available incentives and financing options. 
With EnergySage‘s help, the average person can save up to $10,000 on solar purchases and installations. EnergySage’s solar map shows the average cost of a home solar panel system by state and details solar panel incentives for each state, helping homeowners get the best price on rooftop solar panels and access available incentives.
Adding battery storage to a solar setup is also one of the best ways to protect your home during outages, save money on energy, and go off-grid. Homeowners can explore EnergySage for information about home battery storage options, including competitive installation estimates.
Evins’ experience shows how quickly the math on rooftop solar can get murky. 
• A new homeowner was stunned when the bill hit $420 after installing solar.
• After hearing customer-service horror stories, one homeowner sought advice on avoiding solar scams before signing.
• Former EnergySage COO Charlie Hadlow broke down the mystery of solar costs for cautious homeowners.
• Rooftop systems can lose performance when owners overlook cleaning and repair basics after installation.
• In the Philippines, researchers identified the trustworthiness of providers as a major barrier to home solar.
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“This work presents the first functional validation of submerged solar cells.”
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Solar buildouts are reaching some unexpected frontiers: deep under ocean waters.
Off Weizhou Island on China’s southwestern coast, researchers generated electricity from sunlight at a depth of 10 meters — nearly 33 feet — helping to set a new benchmark for the technology.
Findings from the effort to test the efficacy of underwater solar panels were published in the journal Joule last month. 
As Euronews reported, the panel material used in the installation was nonstandard. Instead of the more typical silicon, the researchers used perovskites, described by Futurism as a calcium titanium oxide mineral.
Because blue and green wavelengths can penetrate the ocean’s surface, the cells were designed to capture that light.
“This work presents the first functional validation of submerged solar cells practically operating at a water depth of up to about 10 meters, greatly broadening their application scope,” study co-author Wen-Hua Zhang, a Yunnan University professor, said in a press release.
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Futurism pointed to how widely China is already deploying solar, citing panels “on the side of rainy mountains, on floating coastal platforms, and above bustling highways.” These examples highlight how aggressively developers are seeking new places to generate electricity.
Finding success with installing solar panels underwater opens up another possibility for crowded coastal regions, where land can be expensive and difficult to dedicate to large energy projects. If solar can work in more spaces, cities and companies could add clean power more flexibly, without competing as directly with housing, roads, or agriculture for land.
Expanding sources of local clean electricity could help reduce reliance on fuel-burning power plants. For households and businesses, this could mean a more diverse, resilient, economic energy supply, while nearby communities could also benefit from a reduction of the air pollution tied to conventional power generation.
These articles explore other ways solar may be moving into watery environments, from offshore waters to submerged settings:
• U.S. Navy researchers created a consistent self-polishing effect that could help underwater panels stay efficient.
• A Chinese energy company unveiled surface ocean solar platforms to generate power offshore.
• Researchers say floating solar near the equator could expand clean power for billions.
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So-called balcony solar setups are becoming legal across the US. Here's the latest.
Staff Writer
Staff Writer
October 17, 2026, 9:00 am ET

Plug-in solar systems are easy to set up and can save consumers money on their power bills, but they’re still illegal in many states. Utah was the first to legalize backyard and plug-in solar, but other states have since caught on, and more are working on their own pathway to legalization.
Also: My favorite travel chargers pack a few tricks – one even has its own screen
As we’ve covered before, these plug-in solar setups (also commonly called “backyard solar”) are plug-and-play systems consisting of one or more solar panels, an inverter, and a battery. The system connects to a home’s standard 120-volt outlet, automatically routing solar-generated electricity from the battery to the nearest running appliance.
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These systems are restricted because most US household electrical systems aren’t designed to receive electricity through a standard wall outlet. Electrical codes, utility regulations, and equipment certification requirements in the US make them difficult to install legally.
Ten states have already legalized backyard and plug-in solar systems, so residents there can already purchase and install systems like the EcoFlow Stream in their homes. Here’s the current status of the states that have already successfully passed legislation, legalizing such devices for consumer use.
Data sourced from Solar.com.
About two dozen states are still in the process of legalizing plug-in solar. Some bills have stalled until the next legislative session reconvenes in 2027, while others are going through committee hearings.
Balcony solar bills H.5175 and S3143 are advancing in Massachusetts, and the SUNNY Act is pending governor approval in New York. Bills in other states like Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, and Washington, DC have reached committee hearings.
Also: I’ve been testing solar gadgets for a long time – they’re finally worth buying
Most states have stalled plug-in solar bills until the next legislative session in 2027, including Alaska, Arizona, Delaware, Hawaii, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Minnesota, Missouri, North Carolina, and Oklahoma.
Unfortunately, plug-in solar bills have failed in Georgia, New Mexico, Oregon, Washington, and Wyoming, so if you live in one of those states, these kinds of devices are technically illegal to operate. This doesn’t mean that it won’t eventually clear the legislative slate in these states, but lawmakers will need to file a new bill to reintroduce them after making necessary revisions.
Whether you can immediately set up your balcony solar panels or not after the systems are legalized in your state will depend on your home situation.
Also: Are online solar calculators accurate? I tested a 200W panel for 1 year to find out
Generally speaking, the bills in question focus on preventing utility companies from blocking plug-in solar projects. These bills can’t preempt bans on these systems by landlords or HOAs, though supplementary bills have been introduced in some states to include protections for HOAs and landlords.
Plug-in solar is illegal because the electrical systems in traditional American homes aren’t designed to receive power from a standard wall outlet. Rooftop solar systems are professionally installed and designed so the energy harvested by the panels flows through a circuit breaker and into your outlets. Plug-in solar, in turn, introduces electricity directly into an outlet, bypassing the electrical panel.
In a plug-in solar setup, nearby appliances draw energy supplied by the breaker and the solar inverter, but the wiring could carry more current than the breaker alone would allow before it trips. But it’s not solely about safety.
Also: I recommend you don’t run these appliances on your power station – even if you can
Installing your own solar panels means less reliance on local utilities. These companies are the biggest regulatory obstacle for plug-in or balcony solar setups. Their rules and regulations on solar energy are designed for rooftop panels, not plug-and-play systems, so legislation should push utility companies to change that.
There’s also the elephant in the room: utilities would make less money off their services if plug-in solar becomes widely popular. When consumers purchase less electricity, they contribute less to grid costs.

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Chemical Mixture Erases Crystal Defects to Boost Perovskite Solar Cell Power
Perovskite solar cells have spent more than a decade tantalizing the photovoltaics community with a seductive promise: a semiconductor that can be printed like ink, layered on top of conventional silicon, and tuned to harvest sunlight with remarkable efficiency. Yet for all their promise, these manufactured crystals have been held back by a stubborn, invisible enemy. Deep inside their crystalline lattices, atomic-scale defects form during fabrication, trapping and dissipating the very energy the material is supposed to deliver. Now a team led by researchers at Princeton Engineering, the University of California-San Diego and Sungkyunkwan University in Korea reports a surprisingly elegant fix, and the results, published in the journal Science, suggest that the perovskite revolution may have just moved considerably closer to reality.
The new technique hinges on a counterintuitive insight about how perovskites crystallize. By adding a mixture of zinc bromide and methyl ammonium chloride early in the fabrication process, the researchers discovered they could dramatically reduce the number of defects that form in the crystal structure as the material solidifies. The consequences of that seemingly small intervention are striking. In defect-free perovskites produced this way, electrons retain the excess energy they absorb from sunlight roughly ten times longer than in untreated material. According to Dane deQuilettes, assistant professor at Princeton and a senior author on the paper, the improvement could translate into a one percent gain in power generation even for the most cutting-edge perovskite solar cells already in existence — a meaningful margin in a field where incremental gains are fiercely contested.
To understand why those microseconds matter, it helps to grasp what actually happens inside a working solar cell. When sunlight strikes a semiconductor, photons transfer their energy to electrons, lifting them into an excited state. The whole point of a photovoltaic device is to harvest that excess energy as electricity before the electrons relax back down and release it as heat. Defects in the crystal lattice act like traps along this pathway, snaring excited electrons and squandering their energy before it can be collected. The longer electrons can hold onto their excess energy — a property measured in microseconds in these experiments — the more opportunities there are to extract useful power. In deQuilettes’ measurements, electrons in the treated perovskites retained their energy for up to 300 microseconds, roughly a hundred thousand times longer than in many other semiconductors.
The discovery itself was born of serendipity. A few years ago, Jason Yoo, a first author on the paper who was then a researcher at the Korea Research Institute of Chemical Technology, noticed that his samples were behaving in ways he could not explain. He reached out to deQuilettes, whose laboratory specializes in developing tools to probe how electrons behave and interact inside perovskites. “He told me the samples were behaving like nothing he had seen before,” deQuilettes recalled. “He asked if I could help study them.” What deQuilettes found when he examined the samples amazed him: the extraordinary carrier lifetimes that would eventually form the basis of the Science paper.
The chemistry behind the breakthrough is as subtle as it is effective. The key, deQuilettes explained, is that the two added chemicals — zinc bromide and methyl ammonium chloride — must have a lower melting point when combined than either does alone, much as adding salt to ice lowers its freezing point. Such mixtures are known as eutectics, and the paper’s title, “Volatile eutectics to tailor crystallization for perovskite optoelectronics,” reflects this principle. By introducing a volatile eutectic during the early stages of fabrication, the researchers changed the way the perovskite crystal grows, steering it toward a more ordered lattice with fewer of the atomic-scale imperfections that plague conventionally processed films. “We opened up this new class of chemical mixtures that improve the performance of perovskites,” deQuilettes said.
The broader context makes the advance especially significant. Most solar cells installed around the world today are made of silicon, a material prized for its durability but constrained by its physics and its energy-intensive manufacturing. Perovskites, by contrast, can be prepared from liquid precursors and printed in sheets, like ink on newsprint, potentially making them cheaper and more sustainable to produce at scale. Increasingly, the two technologies are being combined rather than competing: a thin coat of perovskite layered over a silicon solar cell forms a tandem device that generates about 40 percent more power than a cell made from either material alone. The catch has always been that the printing and layering process tends to introduce those damaging atomic-level defects, blunting the perovskite layer’s contribution. Fewer defects mean a more efficient perovskite layer, which in turn means more efficient tandem modules rolling off future production lines.
The timing could hardly be more pointed. Global electricity demand is climbing rapidly, driven in no small part by the explosive growth of artificial intelligence and the datacenter infrastructure that underpins it. “The whole solar industry has been asking, what are the next set of technologies that are going to contribute to energy production?” deQuilettes noted. A one percent improvement in power conversion may sound modest, but in the economics of utility-scale solar — where installations span thousands of acres and margins are measured in fractions of a cent per kilowatt-hour — even single-digit percentage gains compound into substantial additional generating capacity. And because the improvement is achieved through chemistry during fabrication rather than through expensive post-processing, it is the kind of change that manufacturers could in principle adopt without redesigning their entire production workflow.
Perhaps the most intriguing implications reach beyond photovoltaics altogether. Because electrons in the treated perovskite persist in their excited state for hundreds of microseconds — an eternity by semiconductor standards — the material opens possibilities that conventional semiconductors simply cannot offer. “Energy is living in the material for so long, it broadens what’s actually possible with a semiconductor,” deQuilettes said. Long carrier lifetimes are coveted not only in solar cells but in a range of optoelectronic applications, from light-emitting devices to photodetectors and potentially quantum technologies, where the ability of a material to hold onto excitation energy determines what device architectures are feasible. The researchers emphasize that the discovery has raised more questions than it has answered. “It’s been really eye-opening,” deQuilettes added, suggesting that the eutectic approach may be only the first entry in what could become a broad family of defect-mitigating chemical mixtures.
The study was a genuinely international effort. In addition to deQuilettes at Princeton and Yoo and Bong Joo Kang at the Korea Research Institute of Chemical Technology, the author list spans Connor J. Dolan, Zhewen J.D. Deng, Jack R. Palmer, Kelly X. Vences and David P. Fenning at the University of California-San Diego; Seongsik Nam, Jinho Lee, Kyu Min Kang, Daesoo Kim, Jang Hee Cho, Donghyuk Chung and Seong Sik Shin at Sungkyunkwan University in Korea; Rushik Desai and Arun Mannodi-Kanakkithodi at Purdue University; Niranjana Mohan Kumar, Mariana I. Bertoni and Arkita Chakrabarti at Arizona State University; Yanqi Luo, Barry Lai, Zhonghou Cai, Martin V. Holt and Tao Zhou at Argonne National Laboratory; Andrew M. Kiss at Brookhaven National Laboratory; and In Sun Cho at Ajou University and Dong Hyun Kim and Jun Hong Noh at Korea University. That breadth of expertise — spanning synthesis, ultrafast spectroscopy, synchrotron characterization and computational modeling — reflects the multidisciplinary challenge of understanding and controlling defects at the atomic scale.
For a field that has weathered its share of hype and hard lessons, the new result offers something refreshingly concrete: a reproducible chemical strategy, published in a peer-reviewed journal, that measurably extends carrier lifetimes by an order of magnitude and points toward real gains in device performance. Perovskites have always been crystals of extraordinary promise; the challenge has been coaxing that promise out of an imperfect lattice. With volatile eutectics now shown to tailor crystallization in a way that suppresses defects at their source, researchers have a new tool — and a new class of chemistry to explore — in the long effort to build better solar technology, one crystal at a time.
Subject of Research: Defect mitigation in perovskite solar cells using volatile eutectic chemical additives during fabrication
Article Title: Building better solar tech, a crystal at a time
Article References: Building better solar tech, a crystal at a time. (n.d.). Original publication
Image Credits: AI Generated
DOI: Not provided
Keywords: perovskite, solar cells, crystal defects, eutectics, photovoltaics, tandem solar cells, semiconductors, carrier lifetime, zinc bromide, methyl ammonium chloride, Princeton University, Science journal
News Source: Denise Maddox. (October 16, 2026). Chemical Mixture Erases Crystal Defects to Boost Perovskite Solar Cell Power. Scienmag.
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“They paint the conduit to the roof color, you can barely see it.”
Photo Credit: iStock
A homeowner planning a 19-kilowatt rooftop solar system wanted everything to look just right after the installation was finished, but they said in Reddit’s r/TeslaSolar forum that they ran into a snag when Tesla informed them that attic conduit runs are “no longer offered.”   
Other Tesla customers, however, said that was not what happened on their homes, with several reporting attic conduit on installations of their own.
The issue surfaced from a homeowner who said they were moving ahead with a solar lease and had been told, “They are telling me, they do not offer hidden conduit anymore.” 
The homeowner said they were especially worried about aesthetics because their main electrical equipment sits on the front of the house, which they thought could make any exterior conduit look “terrible.” 
Want to go solar but not sure who to trust? EnergySage has your back with free and transparent quotes from fully vetted providers in your area.
To get started, just answer a few questions about your home — no phone number required. Within a day or two, EnergySage will email you the best options for your needs, and their expert advisers can help you compare quotes and pick a winner.
In the replies, other users’ experiences suggested the outcome of the installation could depend on the market, the crew, the home’s design, or the installer’s judgment. 
“Installed yesterday with attic run,” one Redditor shared. 
“It is also possible perhaps that your local area doesn’t offer it,” another speculated.
On its website, Tesla says that its designers “optimize solar panel locations for the highest production and arrange them for the most optimal aesthetic based on the useable roof space.” 
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To get started, just answer a few questions about your home — no phone number required. Within a day or two, EnergySage will email you the best local options for your needs, and their expert advisers can help you compare quotes and pick a winner.
While your solar goals will determine whether leasing or buying is right for you, going solar is undeniably one of the best ways to save money on home energy. Homeowners comparing installers can try EnergySage to get free solar installation estimates and compare quotes.
Not everyone believed an exterior conduit would be a drawback. One homeowner with an outside run said, “They paint the conduit to the roof color, you can barely see it,” 
“Interior conduit runs are absolutely not a must,” another remarked. “For some houses it just doesn’t even make any sense.” 
Others noted that the concern could go beyond appearance, though. One described exterior conduits as “a soft spot for a leak” and pointed to the potential for clogging or “critter damage,” at least if unmonitored for long periods of time.
💡Go deep on the latest news and trends shaping the residential solar landscape
Getting multiple quotes from reputable solar installers can help you understand your options — and weigh the pros and cons of different approaches — before you sign a contract. 
For homeowners still comparing installers, pricing, and equipment options, EnergySage is a great resource to connect with vetted providers. With EnergySage’s help, the average person can save up to $10,000 on solar purchases and installations. 
EnergySage’s solar map also shows the average cost of a home solar panel system on a state-by-state level, along with details on solar panel incentives for each state. Together, it can help homeowners get the best price for rooftop solar panels.
Adding battery storage to a solar setup is also one of the best ways to protect your home during outages, save money on energy, and go off-grid. Homeowners who want to compare battery options alongside panel quotes can explore EnergySage for information about home battery storage systems, including competitive installation estimates.
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Sri Lanka experienced a nationwide power outage on Saturday due to instability in its electricity system, with authorities working to restore supplies, Anadolu Agency reported.
The National System Operator has asked owners of rooftop solar photovoltaic systems to disconnect their installations until further notice to support efforts to restore electricity.
Energy Minister Anura Karunathilake said a breakdown at the Upper Kotmale Power Station was suspected to have caused the outage.
Authorities reported power disruptions in several parts of the island as efforts to restore electricity supplies continued.
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Wind and solar power facilities in Tongxin, Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region,China, Oct 14, 2026. /VCG
Editor’s note: Xu Xiaohua is chairman of Anhui Huasun Energy Co., Ltd., vice chairman of the Finance Committee, co-chair of the Perovskite Committee of the China Photovoltaic Industry Association, and chairman of the Supervisory Board of the Anhui New Energy Chamber of Commerce. The article reflects the author’s opinions and not necessarily the views of CGTN.
Recently, relevant Chinese authorities have introduced specific measures governing export controls on photovoltaic (PV) cell manufacturing equipment and technology. In light of industry practice, several observations are worth sharing.
Controls aim to safeguard China’s competitive advantage in the global PV industry
Over more than two decades, China’s PV sector has built a fully integrated industrial chain spanning polysilicon, wafers, cells, modules, and core manufacturing equipment, securing a pivotal position in global markets. This hard-won advantage is the fruit of relentless effort, sustained investment, and continuous innovation by generations of PV pioneers. It also serves as a critical pillar for maintaining China’s manufacturing competitiveness in the global energy transition.
The global PV industry is at a critical juncture, defined by accelerating technology iteration and intensifying market competition. As the key vehicle for core process technology, PV manufacturing equipment embodies China’s accumulated mass-production experience and industrial scale-up expertise. Imposing necessary controls on cutting-edge core equipment that represents next-generation PV technology can help prevent the unwarranted transfer of critical technology and process know-how, safeguarding China’s global competitive edge and long-term development potential in the PV industry. This policy arrangement enables China to retain strategic initiative in global PV technology competition. In essence, it is a legitimate measure to safeguard national strategic interests and preserve the industry’s long-term competitiveness.
View of a photovoltaic power station on mountains, Rizhao City, Shandong Province, China, Oct 13, 2026. /VCG
Controls demonstrate a measured and rational governance philosophy
The policy follows a category-based, targeted management philosophy. Instead of resorting to simple, blanket restrictions across the board, it applies targeted regulatory controls to relevant equipment based on differences across technology generations. Equipment that has achieved commercial maturity and boasts ample market supply continues to enjoy space for normal international trade, whereas highly sensitive core equipment at the technological frontier is subject to cautious, prudent management.
This institutional framework reflects the principles of pragmatism, targeted policy implementation, and balanced oversight, maintaining a rational, measured stance: It respects industrial reality and focuses on critical segments and core equipment, while also leaving necessary room for mature application and large-scale deployment of related technologies. For PV cell manufacturers, this regulatory approach will not disrupt their routine overseas business expansion. Ultimately, enterprises’ international competitiveness hinges on their manufacturing processes, mass-production experience, and capacity for continuous innovation. By maintaining a relatively open approach to mature equipment, the policy underscores a commitment to balancing security and development. Furthermore, it reflects the wisdom, vision, and strategic responsibility of a major power actively participating in and regulating international trade.
A rooftop photovoltaic power generation base in Fangxian County, Hubei Province, China, Oct 13, 2026. /VCG
Policy implementation requires coordination across the entire industry chain
The implementation of export controls on PV equipment is inseparable from coordinated efforts by industry associations, government authorities, cell and module manufacturers, and equipment producers. Enterprises concerned must further strengthen compliance awareness and operate in strict accordance with relevant policy requirements. At the same time, they must also continue to scale up R&D investment and improve their capacity for independent innovation to leverage technological progress to underpin their international competitiveness.
Safeguarded by measured and rational controls, China’s PV sector is well-positioned to contribute even greater wisdom and industrial momentum to the global energy transition.

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Some builder-installed panels may satisfy basic requirements without covering real household demand.
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Climbing monthly electric bills pushed one Southern California homeowner to look for ways to get more out of solar.
The homeowner said their electric bill is back to $350 to $400, and that in previous months they received a credit on their bills. However, it seems those days are gone.
They said the home was built in 2021, but the solar system that came with it no longer meets the household’s needs. “The system installed is undersized – only 10 panels. No battery backup,” they wrote.
In a Reddit post, the homeowner said they have a single-story California house of about 2,000 square feet and confirmed with SoCal Edison, their electric provider, that the property is on NEM 2.0. 
Want to go solar but not sure who to trust? EnergySage has your back with free and transparent quotes from fully vetted providers in your area.
To get started, just answer a few questions about your home — no phone number required. Within a day or two, EnergySage will email you the best options for your needs, and their expert advisers can help you compare quotes and pick a winner.
They also said they received bill credits in December 2025 and January 2026, but their bills were back up to roughly $350 to $400.
They considered several paths to alleviate the high cost. One was to wait in hopes that technology improves and prices fall, finance a different system with a loan, sign a 25-year power purchase agreement with a 3.5% annual escalator, or add only a limited number of panels so they wouldn’t be moved to NEM 3.0.
Replies largely centered on protecting the value of NEM 2.0 and avoiding problems when the house is eventually sold. 
One commenter said that “the nem 2.0 piece is actually huge here and changes the math a fair bit,” while also warning that a long PPA may not make sense for someone planning to sell in 15 to 20 years.
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The conversation also pointed to an issue with some builder-installed solar: the panels may satisfy basic requirements without covering real household demand. One commenter told the homeowner that builders often “just slapped on the minimum to check a box.”
For homeowners dealing with high energy bills, going solar remains one of the best ways to save money on home energy. EnergySage can help by offering free solar installation estimates and a way to compare quotes side by side.
One commenter put it into perspective: “Nobody wants to inherit a 25 year contract with a 3.5% escalator and it’ll scare off buyers or force you to buy it out at an inflated price when you list.”
Commenters said the safest move may be to keep any solar addition fairly modest. One commenter suggested adding about four to six panels to cover the shortfall while staying below the NEM 2.0 threshold, and another recommended a battery-based approach, writing, “Use the battery when the rates are highest.”
💡Go deep on the latest news and trends shaping the residential solar landscape
Shopping tools can also help reduce the chances of overpaying for an upgrade. With EnergySage’s help, the average person can save up to $10,000 on solar purchases and installations. EnergySage’s solar map shows the average cost of a home solar panel system by state, along with solar panel incentives for each state. Together, those resources can help homeowners get the best price for rooftop solar panels and access available incentives.
Adding battery storage to a solar setup is one of the best ways to protect your home during outages, save money on energy, and go off-grid. For a homeowner trying to get more value from daytime generation instead of letting it go to waste, storage can be especially valuable. Homeowners can also explore EnergySage for information about home battery storage options, including competitive installation estimates.
One commenter shared his coworker’s setup: “He has two Tesla power walls and enough panels to power his AC and charge his and her Teslas for their commutes,” he continued, “he’s made as much as $30 in one day.”
These stories look at how homeowners are navigating rising power bills and shifting solar rules. They cover batteries, net metering, local California programs, and savings trends that can shape rooftop solar payoffs.
• In California, PG&E customers found the battery changes everything when NEM 3.0 credits plunge.
• As bills rise, one California city made rooftop solar into relief for low-income homeowners.
• In Ohio, one homeowner learned net metering may leave half the electric bill untouched.
• U.S. homeowners pushed back when critics claimed solar is worth the investment only with incentives.
Get TCD’s free newsletters for easy tips, smart advice, and a chance to earn $5,000 toward home upgrades. To see more stories like this one, change your Google preferences here.
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“One night it was raining very heavily and I started to see these (damp) spots being created.”
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Homeowners in one Edinburgh neighborhood say a council-backed retrofit project intended to make older buildings safer and more energy-efficient instead left them dealing with leaks, damaged interiors, and bills topping £20,000 ($26,500).
For residents who initially backed the upgrades, the aftermath has turned a housing- and climate-focused effort into an expensive test of trust.
A project in Lochend meant to modernize older tenements and bring them closer to current efficiency and building standards is now drawing complaints from residents, who told STV News the work went badly wrong.
After the work, homeowner Aga Barys said water coming through the roof affected several flats on her floor, leaving her to bring in builders to repair the damage.
“The cost after fixing everything was over £7,000 [$9,300],” she said.
She added that owning her flat leaves her responsible for more than £20,000 ($26,500) in retrofit charges, including a council management fee. Residents said the upheaval and the size of the bill have damaged confidence in work they had supported.
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“There is something systematically wrong with how they are doing the retrofits. We support this work and were really glad this kind of project was rolling out after so many years of neglect,” Barys stated.
The case highlights a familiar source of conflict in mixed-tenure buildings, where private owners and council tenants can run into disputes over both disruption and costs.
When several households share roofs and common areas, retrofitting older properties can be both complicated and costly. The council said the affected tenement blocks were built in the 1920s and require essential repairs and upgrades.
Another owner, Rita Cicellini, said her home still does not appear to be fully finished.
“What they needed to do the roof, they basically exposed it. One night it was raining very heavily and I started to see these (damp) spots being created. It doesn’t feel like the work is finished. It looks like they came with a chainsaw,” she explained.
Problems like these can make communities more wary of future housing upgrades.
Backed by tenants’ union Living Rent, residents said similar projects should not be expanded elsewhere without stronger oversight and better protections for the people living through the work.
Follow-up work has already begun. STV News reported that contractors paid for repairs to Barys’ property and are expected to return to Cicellini’s home to carry out additional work.
The council said it has support measures in place for owners facing large bills. Councilor Tim Pogson, housing, homelessness and fair work convener, said private owners can spread payments over 15 years and may also qualify for Scottish Government grant funding toward some of the work, depending on their personal circumstances.
Pogson also said the council has “a team of dedicated case officers available to support and answer questions from owners” and remains committed to “safe, warm, and well-maintained homes” through its city-wide housing improvement program.
The central question is whether those assurances will translate into better delivery next time.
As Barys put it, “We don’t ask for a free service. We want to pay our fair share, not live in the conditions that we have been suffering in for over a year.”
Similar tensions show up in other housing and home-upgrade disputes, from mold after a leak repair to contractor damage and HOA battles over rooftop panels.
• A renter said a bathroom leak repair left black mold worsening inside the apartment.
• In one neighborhood, contractors destroyed a lawn during work and deepened homeowner frustration.
• Across many HOAs, solar panels for homes still face neighborhood restrictions.
• One new homeowner found an HOA blocked solar plans despite promises of savings.
Get TCD’s free newsletters for easy tips, smart advice, and a chance to earn $5,000 toward home upgrades. To see more stories like this one, change your Google preferences here.
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PrepayPower raised electricity prices by 8.8% and gas prices by 10.6% in June.
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PrepayPower is holding electricity and gas rates steady for around 200,000 customers, with no increases due before at least March 2027.
After a year of rising energy costs, that kind of price certainty could make it easier for households to budget and avoid unexpected jumps in top-up costs.
According to RTÉ, the freeze covers about 180,000 electricity accounts and 60,000 gas accounts at PrepayPower, Ireland’s largest pay-as-you-go energy supplier.
Because customers with both services appear in each category, the total number of households affected is about 200,000.
For those customers, the company says it will not raise prices again until at least March 2027. Pay-as-you-go households often feel price changes immediately when topping up, particularly during winter, when heating and electricity use usually rise.
The move also follows a similar price freeze introduced by PrepayPower, its sister company Yuno Energy, and Electric Ireland.
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The announcement does not lower bills outright, but it does reduce the risk of another increase in the middle of winter.
Most major energy providers have increased prices, and PrepayPower itself raised electricity prices by 8.8% and gas prices by 10.6% in June, RTÉ reported.
RTÉ also cited Central Statistics Office figures showing that in September, prices for energy products — including electricity, gas, and other fuels — were up 15.3% in the year to September.
The freeze does not reverse earlier increases, but it does reduce the likelihood that bills will rise again during one of the most expensive times of year for home energy use.
Alongside the freeze announcement, Ireland’s Commission for Regulation of Utilities has brought in stronger winter protections for customers.
Under the CRU’s updated rules, repayment plans must match what customers can realistically afford, any upfront payment must be optional rather than mandatory, and people in debt must be given at least 18 months to repay.
The regulator also says suppliers should first try to resolve problems through their own support systems before directing struggling customers to outside groups such as MABS or SVP.
Existing winter safeguards are staying in place as well: no more than 15% of a prepayment meter top-up can be used to recover legacy debt, suppliers must still tell prepay customers in debt about alternative payment options, and the €200 ($224) fee for switching from a gas pay-as-you-go meter to a credit meter will remain suspended.
In explaining the decision, PrepayPower said the freeze is happening “despite rising wholesale energy costs and concerns over European gas supplies at a time when most customers are fearing energy price increases”.
These stories examine how regulators and energy companies elsewhere are handling household energy costs. They cover a U.K. price-cap increase, billing strategies in Great Britain, solar programs, and other ways customers can trim electricity expenses.
• In the U.K., a regulator-set price cap is pushing household gas and electricity bills higher.
• In the U.K., solar panels installed cost-free are helping homeowners cut long-term energy bills.
• Across the U.S., comparing home electricity options is helping households avoid costly utility deals.
• Dominion Energy customers can shift use during peak times to reduce electric bills.
Get TCD’s free newsletters for easy tips, smart advice, and a chance to earn $5,000 toward home upgrades. To see more stories like this one, change your Google preferences here.
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“Sounds like both your agent and selling agent are taking advantage of you.”
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In California, a buyer in escrow discovered the property’s solar agreement was not settled after all. Instead of an already-paid system, they were told the seller wanted to pass along a 25-year contract, which they feared would leave them with higher costs over time. 
In Reddit’s r/solar, the buyer said the seller wanted to transfer a “power purchase agreement,” or PPA, to them. Previously, their agent had told them that it was already paid off.
“I don’t know anything about solar and need help/advice,” they implored. The buyer added that the PPA, which started in 2023, would cost about $240 per month. As a concession for not paying off the system, the sellers offered a $15,000 credit.   
Several commenters pushed back on the idea that the transfer was unavoidable. 
Want to go solar but not sure who to trust? EnergySage has your back with free and transparent quotes from fully vetted providers in your area.
To get started, just answer a few questions about your home — no phone number required. Within a day or two, EnergySage will email you the best options for your needs, and their expert advisers can help you compare quotes and pick a winner.
One wrote, “Oh, the escrow can CERTAINLY ‘go through’ …seller needs to pay it off. Sounds like both your agent and selling agent are taking advantage of you.” Others said the buyer should insist on a payoff or be willing to walk away from the 2013 resale home.
A third asked, “So you don’t want cheaper power?” 
Going solar can be one of the best ways to save money on home energy if you compare the terms carefully. As EnergySage notes, with a PPA, the “difference between what you’d pay the utility and what you pay the PPA provider is your savings.” If you’re considering solar, EnergySage lets homeowners get free solar installation estimates and compare quotes.
For many commenters, the bigger concern with the PPA was what the payment could become over the life of the deal. One explained that with a 3% escalator, today’s $240 monthly charge could climb to more than $400 before the term is over.
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Want to go solar but not sure who to trust? EnergySage has your back with free and transparent quotes from fully vetted providers that can help you save as much as $10k on installation.
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The thread also highlighted considerations beyond the electric bill, including the possibility of reroofing and the solar company’s role in removing and reinstalling the panels. Some noted that a future sale could get tangled if the transfer paperwork isn’t handled properly.
“If this house has shingles, and the lease /ppa has an escalator, this will likely end up costing you over $100K by the time the lease is paid off,” one person warned. 
Whether a PPA is right for you depends on your goals, and not every PPA is the same. In this case, Reddit users recommended asking for written information about assignment terms, fees, escalation rates and timing, and any buyout or prepayment provisions.
For anyone shopping for solar from scratch, EnergySage is a great resource to understand your options. With EnergySage’s help, the average person can save up to $10,000 on solar purchases and installations. EnergySage’s solar map shows average system costs by state and details solar panel incentives for each state; together, these tools help homeowners get the best price on rooftop solar panels and access available incentives.
💡Go deep on the latest news and trends shaping the residential solar landscape
Adding battery storage to a solar setup is one of the best ways to protect your home during outages, save on energy costs, and go off-grid. It can also make solar more useful when production doesn’t fully match household demand. Homeowners can explore EnergySage for information about home battery storage options, including competitive installation estimates.
Solar deals can get especially messy during a home sale, and these stories cover issues buyers and homeowners may run into. 
• In California, buyers considering a prepaid solar lease were told the power could come liability-free.
• In Pennsylvania, a homeowner fielding a sales pitch asked who owns the panels before signing.
• EnergySage’s former COO broke down the mystery of solar costs and the terms that drive them.
• In Ohio, a homeowner learned net metering may leave half the bill untouched.
Get TCD’s free newsletters for easy tips, smart advice, and a chance to earn $5,000 toward home upgrades. To see more stories like this one, change your Google preferences here.
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The law comes as rooftop solar grows in Texas, with households looking for ways to cut electricity costs.
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Residential solar companies and individual salespeople in Texas now face registration requirements as the state steps in to police rooftop solar sales.
With that shift, regulators can monitor the industry, investigate consumer complaints, and penalize businesses that break the rules.
The Residential Solar Retailer Regulatory Act requires residential solar businesses and salespeople to register with the Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation, and it authorizes TDLR to handle complaints and pursue enforcement against companies that violate the statute, KXAN reported.
State Sen. Judith Zaffirini, D-Laredo, championed the law after hearing from Texans across the state who raised concerns about solar sales practices. It was intended to address complaints from Texans who said they were misled about expected savings and available incentives before signing long-term contracts.
The law comes as rooftop solar grows in Texas, with households looking for ways to cut electricity costs. The new rules are meant to add guardrails to a fast-growing part of the energy market.
As more Texans adopted rooftop solar, reports of troubling sales experiences also increased. KXAN investigators reported on complaints connected to solar panel deals.
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Some of those complaints involved promises of lower utility bills that customers later said never materialized. Others focused on financing terms and incentives that consumers said they didn’t fully understand when they signed the contracts.
The scrutiny hasn’t been limited to the legislature. As KXAN reported, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton sued a San Antonio-based solar company, alleging it misled customers about warranties and financing and used deceptive sales tactics.
According to Paxton’s office, customers were left with systems that didn’t work properly. For families who entered lengthy contracts expecting savings, that can mean years of unexpected costs tied to equipment that doesn’t work as promised.
TDLR now oversees this, and it has become the main state regulator for residential solar retailers and salespeople. For homeowners who think a company used deceptive tactics or failed to follow the law, that creates a more defined agency to contact.
Homeowners still have five days to back out of a solar deal, which gives them time to review contract terms after a sales presentation. Zaffirini has also urged consumers, as KXAN reported, to review contracts carefully, ask questions, and not sign anything they don’t fully understand.
TDLR has delayed enforcement of contract disclosure requirements and the development of education brochures until November to give retailers more time to adjust, KXAN reported.
People who continue to run into problems can file complaints directly with TDLR, whose enforcement powers now include investigations and fines. Zaffirini has also said she plans to monitor how the law works in practice and, as KXAN reported, return to the issue in the 2027 legislative session if more changes are needed.
Zaffirini said to KXAN, “Texans deserve honest and transparent transactions, not deceptive sales tactics.”
Here’s more context on the consumer and homeowner issues tied to rooftop solar in Texas and beyond. The stories cover aggressive sales encounters, Texas property-rights fights, and HOA disputes over solar installations.
• New homeowners said a utility-linked ‘free solar’ rep turned aggressive after seeing their bill.
• In Texas, residents warned a new property law could sharply limit rooftop solar and wind choices.
• In Austin, a homeowner argued they can’t stop you from adding rooftop solar despite HOA pressure.
• One homeowner was stunned when an HOA violation notice arrived two years after solar installation.
• Homeowners weighing solar said a firm HOA policy still left them worried about lawsuits.
Get TCD’s free newsletters for easy tips, smart advice, and a chance to earn $5,000 toward home upgrades. To see more stories like this one, change your Google preferences here.
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