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China’s Ministry of Commerce and Ministry of Science and Technology have published a draft revision of the Catalogue of Technologies Prohibited and Restricted from Export. The proposal adds 40 technologies, including 12 related to photovoltaic manufacturing, and is open for public comment until 15 November 2026.
An interim pre-export registration requirement took effect on 16 October, the day the draft was announced. It applies to planned transfers of listed technologies, including deals already underway but not yet completed.
The draft proposes an outright ban on exports of production processes and related equipment manufacturing technology for perovskite silicon tandem solar cells. The ban covers tandem cells produced on wafers of at least 182 mm with conversion efficiencies of 30% or higher. It also covers slot die coating processes for perovskites with coating widths of at least 1.1 metres.
Controls would extend to large area modules. Single junction perovskite modules measuring at least 1 square metre and achieving efficiencies of 18% or higher would fall within the proposed prohibited category, as would perovskite tandem modules of the same size with efficiencies of at least 28%.
Other proposed prohibitions include cold hydrogenation fluidised bed processes for trichlorosilane production with annual single line capacities of at least 250 000 metric tons, and silane based fluidised bed processes with annual capacities of at least 20 000 metric tons. The draft also covers processes for manufacturing silicon wafers no thicker than 70 micrometres, certain edge passivation technologies for thin crystalline silicon cells, and related equipment manufacturing know how.
Technologies proposed for the restricted category could be transferred overseas only with government approval and the necessary licences. These include polysilicon plant engineering technologies for production lines with annual capacities of at least 30 000 metric tons, advanced crystal pulling processes and wafer cutting processes.
The draft also covers high-performance manufacturing processes for tunnel oxide passivated contact, back contact and heterojunction solar cells. These include deposition, passivation, diffusion and metallisation technologies. The heterojunction provisions include certain p type technologies assessed under air mass zero illumination conditions relevant to space applications.
Finished solar cells and modules would not be directly affected by the proposed measures. However, transfers of controlled manufacturing know how through technology licensing, overseas production line installation and commissioning, equipment exports and on-site technical support could be prohibited or require government approval.
Companies must register planned exports of listed technologies, including qualifying key equipment, through the Ministry of Commerce online system before transfer. The requirement covers intellectual property transfers, overseas technology licensing, changes in ownership or control involving foreign entities, and transactions in progress.
China’s Ministry of Commerce said the proposals address national security concerns as photovoltaic technologies increasingly find applications in aerospace, defence and other sensitive sectors. It said technologies below the specified thresholds, as well as finished products made using controlled technologies, fall outside the proposed scope.
The ministry added that the measures do not target any particular country, region or company. If adopted, the controls could reinforce China’s position in advanced photovoltaic manufacturing by limiting overseas access to some of its most sophisticated production technologies.
Author: Bryan Groenendaal






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“Our Eversource bills are absolutely bonkers.”
Photo Credit: Getty Images
Faced with an electric bill nearing $700 a month, one Massachusetts homeowner is weighing whether to cash out $48,000 in Nvidia stock to pay for a roof replacement and solar panels.
Before buying an EV, the homeowner said summer power costs were already running $500 to $600 a month, and their house also uses about $2,000 a year in oil heat.
Posting on Reddit’s r/PersonalFinance forum, the original poster pointed to Massachusetts utility costs as the reason their bills feel so steep. 
OP wrote, “We’re in MA, and our Eversource bills are absolutely bonkers,” adding, “I want to get on solar, but we would need a new roof as well… We don’t have liquid funds to pay outright, so I would probably need to sell some stocks. I have some NVDA from 2024, now worth $48,000 and am wondering about selling that.”
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.
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They then asked the subreddit, “this may be a case of spending money to save money, but just wanted to get some other opinions… Are people still able to make money these days selling back to the grid?”
Solar appealed to OP due to a combination of practical reasons. Their roof is over 20 years old, the property gets strong sun exposure on both sides, and they hoped a project could wipe out about $3,000 a year in electricity costs while possibly setting up future savings on oil as well.
Yet, the replies pushed back on the idea that panels automatically erase their utility bill. The top comment read, “Don’t just assume solar -> no power bill.” 
At the same time, another Massachusetts commenter who had already moved to heat pumps and an all-electric home said their setup hit break-even at about five years and may cover close to 100% of use, depending on how much the EV is driven.
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A few commenters said the key question wasn’t whether solar helps, but how much of a Massachusetts bill it can offset. One former Massachusetts resident said their system “essentially eliminated” more than 90% of their electric bill, while noting that chasing the remaining share often stops making economic sense because of diminishing returns.
Examples from other homeowners showed how broad the price range can be. A South Shore commenter shared quotes of roughly $19,715 for a 6,887-kWh system and about $23,987 for an 8,262-kWh option once roofing and engineering expenses were factored in, then later mentioned a 15,383-kWh quote delivered at $20,568.
Rather than deciding based on the stock sale first, many people urged the homeowner to model the energy side carefully. 
They suggested reviewing net metering and time-of-use policies and considering cheaper demand-cutting steps, such as insulation, windows, or HVAC upgrades, including Massachusetts’ heat pump programs, before committing. As one commenter put it, “Insulation is the big one.”
💡Go deep on the latest news and trends shaping the residential solar landscape
Still, going solar can be one of the best ways to save money on home energy, particularly when utility rates are this high. Homeowners can use EnergySage to get free solar installation estimates and compare quotes to see whether the math works. 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 details on solar panel incentives for each state.
For more on the tradeoffs behind rooftop solar, these stories cover soaring power bills, upfront costs, and the savings that can add up over time. 
• As utility rates climb, rooftop solar can save you from decades of higher bills.
• One homeowner argued for investing in rooftop solar instead of the stock market for steadier returns.
• Across the United States, the average U.S. homeowner could save $50,000 with rooftop solar.
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By Colleen Howe
BEIJING, Oct 18 (Reuters) – China has proposed export controls on 12 technologies used to make solar equipment, citing national security concerns, as part of a broader revision that also covers AI and biotechnology.
The ministry of commerce proposed adding the photovoltaic technologies to China’s export-control list, it said in a statement on Friday, adding that greater oversight is needed because solar technologies are increasingly being used in sensitive areas like aerospace and national defense.
Chinese officials held initial talks with manufacturers about potential curbs on advanced solar-panel manufacturing technologies, Reuters reported in April, a move that could threaten plans by US firms such as Tesla to expand production in the US.
Beijing has also curbed exports of solar-manufacturing technology to India, Reuters has reported. Analysts say China is seeking to preserve its dominance as India tries to build up domestic manufacturing and shake off reliance on China.
Export restrictions aim to “guard against the risks of technologies from running out of control or being improperly disseminated, while safeguarding normal international exchanges and cooperation in science and technology,” the ministry said.
Exporters must now register certain overseas technology transfers until the export-control catalogue is formally updated. Public consultation on the proposal will close on November 15.
China would ban technologies including those used to make some thin wafers, perovskite and tandem solar cells, as well as large-scale fluidized-bed polysilicon production technologies.
Perovskite is an emerging technology that offers the potential of increased conversion efficiency. Tandem cells combine perovskite and silicon layers to capture more of the sunlight spectrum.
Fluidized-bed technology for producing polysilicon — a key building block for solar panels — is less expensive and more energy-efficient than the dominant Siemens process.
China would also restrict, but not prohibit, exports of advanced solar cell manufacturing technologies, including TOPCon, HJT and XBC.

(Reporting by Colleen Howe; Editing by William Mallard)
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More than 45% of all silicon-based solar module production in the United States during 2027 is forecast to take place within a radius of roughly 100 miles from the centrally located I-45 Industrial Corridor in Texas, dominated by assembly plants in the Greater Dallas and Greater Houston regions.
These findings are taken from the latest updates to Terawatt PV Research’s new Solar Manufacturing USA Quarterly report that forecasts the capex and production of domestic U.S. solar manufacturers out to 2030.
The state’s ascent to the top of the domestic landscape has been driven by a select group of multi-gigawatt manufacturers. Companies such as SEG Solar, Canadian Solar, Waaree Energies, and TOYO Solar have chosen Texas for its efficient deployment of capital. Often by retrofitting existing industrial infrastructure, these manufacturers have significantly minimized the time between site commitment and manufacturing ramp, skipping the lengthy construction timelines associated with massive greenfield projects.
The broader appeal of Texas as a manufacturing powerhouse extends beyond the availability of empty warehouses or the solar sector alone. Texas has aggressively positioned itself as a leading national destination for advanced industries by leveraging pro-business fiscal policies and targeted economic incentives. Consequently, the state has built a highly attractive operational launchpad that is drawing significant aerospace, automotive, and high-tech expansions alongside the solar manufacturing boom.
It is noteworthy that several companies also have major plans for new silicon-based cell factories in Texas from 2027 onward, complemented by an emerging network of raw material suppliers rushing to meet the rapid uptick in regional module assembly. Then, of course, there is Tesla. Quite possibly, by 2030, this highly integrated silicon-based ecosystem could make it increasingly difficult for other states to compete on inward investment packages. More importantly, it will cultivate a specialized, highly skilled factory workforce in Texas on a scale that the U.S. solar industry has never seen before.
To register your interest in the Solar Manufacturing USA Quarterly report, please send an email to: [email protected]
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A Normal Camera That Can Detect Solar Cell Efficiency
Commercial cameras can be remarkably powerful instruments, producing images with exquisite detail that mimic real life, and in laboratory settings, specially designed cameras can photograph objects in the infrared region of the spectrum, invisible to the naked eye. Now, researchers from the University of Stuttgart, the Research Center Jülich, and the German company Solarzentrum Stuttgart have shown that a camera most people could buy at an electronics store can be transformed, with only minor modifications, into a quantitative scientific instrument capable of measuring the efficiency of solar cells. The work, published in The Journal of Applied Physics by AIP Publishing, challenges the long-standing assumption that this kind of measurement demands expensive, carefully calibrated industrial equipment.
The quantity at the heart of the study is electroluminescent quantum efficiency, a value commonly used to determine how well a solar cell converts light into electricity. When a solar cell is electrically biased, it emits a faint glow in the infrared, and the intensity of that luminescence is directly related to the cell’s voltage. Generally speaking, the higher the luminescent quantum efficiency, the better the solar cell, because a more efficient device radiates more light for a given electrical input. Measuring this value has traditionally required dedicated scientific cameras whose response to light must be precisely characterized, a process that adds significant cost and complexity to quality control in photovoltaics manufacturing and research.
Our approach shows that even a relatively inexpensive consumer camera can provide quantitative results when its physical response is properly modeled and calibrated, said author Jürgen Werner. The key insight of the team is that the camera does not need to be a purpose-built scientific detector as long as the way it responds to incoming photons is fully understood. By constructing a suitable physical camera model, the researchers could convert raw pixel brightness into absolute luminescent quantum efficiency, turning an ordinary photograph into a map of local solar cell quality.
The camera the team selected was already primed for the experiment because it lacked an internal infrared-blocking filter, a component that is normally present in most commercial cameras. Manufacturers install these filters so that consumer photographs look natural to the human eye, but their removal opens a window into the near-infrared, where solar cells emit their electroluminescence. Cameras with this filter removed are also popular for artistic infrared photography and for capturing images of the night sky, which means the hardware required for the measurement is accessible to hobbyists as well as laboratories.
To suppress unwanted visible light, the researchers added a long-pass filter in front of the camera lens. This optical component blocks shorter wavelengths, including the visible background light that would otherwise contaminate the signal, while allowing the longer infrared wavelengths of the electroluminescence to pass through to the sensor. The result is a clean infrared electroluminescence image that can later be analyzed based on brightness, with the pixel values encoding quantitative information about the emitting device rather than merely a pretty picture.
An electroluminescence image contains much more quantitative information than simply showing bright and dark regions, said Werner. With a suitable physical camera model and calibration, it can provide absolute luminescent quantum efficiency and, therefore, information about the local quality of a solar cell or module. This local dimension is particularly important in practical photovoltaics, where defects, cracks, or degraded regions within a single cell or module can drag down overall performance even when the rest of the device is healthy. A calibrated consumer camera can therefore reveal exactly where a solar module is losing efficiency, something that previously required laboratory-grade imaging systems.
The implications for the solar industry could be substantial. Quality assurance in photovoltaics manufacturing relies on electroluminescence imaging to spot defects on production lines, and field inspections of installed modules use the same technique to identify degradation caused by weathering, microcracks, or faulty connections. If the physical model developed by the Stuttgart and Jülich teams proves robust across different consumer cameras, the barrier to performing absolute quantum efficiency measurements could drop dramatically, allowing smaller companies, research groups in developing institutions, and even advanced inspection services to carry out measurements that were once the exclusive domain of well-funded laboratories.
The methodology also carries broader lessons for experimental physics. The study demonstrates that the limiting factor in many optical measurements is not the detector itself but the degree to which its response is understood. A consumer camera sensor, with its Bayer color filter array, its nonlinear response curve, and its manufacturer-specific processing, is a far messier detector than a scientific CCD, yet the researchers showed that all of these quirks can be folded into a physical model. Once calibrated, the messy detector becomes a quantitative one. This modeling philosophy could extend well beyond photovoltaics, wherever faint light emission carries information about the underlying device.
The researchers plan to expand the camera’s capabilities in future work, keeping an emphasis on using commercially available technology. Our next step is to use the calibrated camera to determine quantum efficiencies and open-circuit voltages of further, previously uncharacterized solar cells and modules, said Werner. The same model should also be applicable to photoluminescence measurements and potentially to measurements performed in daylight. Photoluminescence imaging, in which sunlight or a laser excites the solar cell and the emitted light is analyzed, is another cornerstone technique in photovoltaics characterization, and daylight operation would be transformative for field inspections, where modules currently must often be measured in darkness or under controlled conditions.
The article New Camera Model for Absolute Quantum Efficiency Measurements from Electroluminescence of Solar Cells or Modules is authored by Jürgen H. Werner, Georgette Udo, and Liviu Stoicescu, and it appears in The Journal of Applied Physics on Sept. 22, 2026. As solar energy continues its rapid global expansion, the demand for fast, affordable, and accurate efficiency measurements grows with it, and this study suggests that the tools required may already be sitting in camera shops around the world. With a removed infrared filter, a long-pass filter, and a well-built physical model, an ordinary camera becomes a window into the invisible light that reveals exactly how good a solar cell really is.
Subject of Research: Electroluminescence-based quantum efficiency measurement of solar cells using a calibrated consumer camera
Article Title: A normal camera that can detect solar cell efficiency
Article References: A normal camera that can detect solar cell efficiency. (n.d.). Original publication
Image Credits: AI Generated
DOI: Not provided
Keywords: solar cells, electroluminescence, quantum efficiency, consumer camera, photovoltaics, infrared imaging, camera calibration, The Journal of Applied Physics, solar cell efficiency, long-pass filter, open-circuit voltage, photoluminescence
News Source: Katie Riggs. (October 18, 2026). A Normal Camera That Can Detect Solar Cell Efficiency. Scienmag.
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By Colleen Howe
BEIJING, Oct 18 (Reuters) – China has proposed export controls on 12 technologies used to make solar equipment, citing national security concerns, as part of a ​broader revision that also covers AI and biotechnology.
The ministry ‌of commerce proposed adding the photovoltaic technologies to China’s export-control list, it said in a statement on Friday, adding that greater oversight is needed because solar technologies are increasingly being used in sensitive areas like aerospace and ‌national ​defense.
Chinese officials held initial talks with ⁠manufacturers about potential curbs on ⁠advanced solar-panel manufacturing technologies, Reuters reported in April, a move that could threaten plans by US firms such as Tesla to expand production in the US.
Beijing has also curbed ​exports of solar-manufacturing technology to India, Reuters has reported. Analysts say China is seeking to preserve its dominance as India ⁠tries to build up domestic manufacturing ⁠and shake off reliance on China.
Export restrictions aim ​to “guard against the risks of technologies from running out of control ​or being improperly disseminated, while safeguarding normal international exchanges ‌and cooperation in science and technology,” the ministry said.
Exporters must now register certain overseas technology transfers until the export-control catalogue is formally updated. Public consultation on the proposal will close on November ⁠15.
China would ban technologies including those used to make some thin wafers, perovskite and tandem solar cells, as well as large-scale fluidized-bed ⁠polysilicon production technologies.
Perovskite is ‌an emerging technology that offers the potential ⁠of increased conversion efficiency. Tandem cells combine perovskite ​and ‌silicon layers to capture more of the sunlight ​spectrum.
Fluidized-bed technology ⁠for producing polysilicon — a key building block for solar panels — is less expensive and more energy-efficient than the dominant Siemens process.
China would also restrict, but not prohibit, exports of advanced solar cell manufacturing technologies, including TOPCon, HJT and XBC.
(Reporting by Colleen Howe; Editing ​by William Mallard)
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China’s solar panel exports extend slump in September  TradingView
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China proposes export controls on solar-manufacturing technologies  Reuters
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BEIJING (Oct 18): China has proposed export controls on 12 technologies used to make solar equipment, citing national security concerns, as part of a broader revision that also covers AI and biotechnology.
The ministry of commerce proposed adding the photovoltaic technologies to China’s export-control list, it said in a statement on Friday, adding that greater oversight is needed because solar technologies are increasingly being used in sensitive areas like aerospace and national defence.
Chinese officials held initial talks with manufacturers about potential curbs on advanced solar-panel manufacturing technologies, Reuters reported in April, a move that could threaten plans by US firms such as Tesla to expand production in the US.
Beijing has also curbed exports of solar-manufacturing technology to India, Reuters has reported. Analysts say China is seeking to preserve its dominance as India tries to build up domestic manufacturing and shake off reliance on China.
Export restrictions aim to “guard against the risks of technologies from running out of control or being improperly disseminated, while safeguarding normal international exchanges and cooperation in science and technology,” the ministry said.
Exporters must now register certain overseas technology transfers until the export-control catalogue is formally updated. Public consultation on the proposal will close on Nov 15.
China would ban technologies including those used to make some thin wafers, perovskite and tandem solar cells, as well as large-scale fluidised-bed polysilicon production technologies.
Perovskite is an emerging technology that offers the potential of increased conversion efficiency. Tandem cells combine perovskite and silicon layers to capture more of the sunlight spectrum.
Fluidised-bed technology for producing polysilicon — a key building block for solar panels — is less expensive and more energy-efficient than the dominant Siemens process.
China would also restrict, but not prohibit, exports of advanced solar cell manufacturing technologies, including TOPCon, HJT and XBC.
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First Solar wins CII National Award for environmental best practices 2026 for closed-loop solar module recycling  AL Circle
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Current conditions in Dubuque, IA
Winifred Sylvah unlocks the door to access her farm patch at a solar generating facility in Big Lake, Minn.

Winifred Sylvah unlocks the door to access her farm patch at a solar generating facility in Big Lake, Minn.
BIG LAKE, Minn. — Winifred Sylvah picked a handful of plump cucumbers on a cold, wet September morning as raindrops trickled off rows of solar panels in the background.
They’ve been a productive plant for Sylvah on a new plot of land at a solar farm in Big Lake. She’s already harvested about 140 pounds of cucumbers, with rows more waiting to be picked. Sylvah is one of three farmers working the land in between and outside the rows of a 1-megawatt solar array in Big Lake.
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Partly cloudy skies. High 72F. Winds NE at 10 to 20 mph..
A few clouds. Low 66F. Winds ENE at 10 to 15 mph.
Updated: October 18, 2026 @ 2:25 am
October 18, 2026

FILE PHOTO: Workers are seen at a production line manufacturing solar photovoltaic components at a factory in Huzhou, Zhejiang province, China February 12, 2019. Picture taken February 12, 2019. Lin Yunlong/Zhejiang Daily via REUTERS/ File Photo
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Fine-Tuned Molecular Design Pushes Organic Solar Cells Toward 19.67% Efficiency and Lasting Stability
Organic photovoltaic cells have long promised a future of lightweight, flexible, and low-cost solar energy, yet one stubborn obstacle has kept them from widespread commercialization: the trade-off between power conversion efficiency and long-term operational stability. A research team based at the Department of Chemistry of Southern University of Science and Technology (SUSTech) in Shenzhen now reports a molecular design strategy that appears to dissolve much of that trade-off, delivering devices that combine a power conversion efficiency of 19.67 percent with remarkably low energy loss and outstanding durability under both continuous illumination and elevated temperature. The study, published as an open access Research Article in CCS Chemistry, the flagship journal of the Chinese Chemical Society, demonstrates that subtle, deliberate adjustments to molecular fine structure can simultaneously optimize the crystallinity and miscibility of the active materials that determine how well an organic solar cell converts and retains energy.
The central challenge addressed by the team concerns non-fullerene acceptors, or NFAs, the electron-accepting molecules that have driven the recent surge in organic photovoltaic performance. In a bulk heterojunction solar cell, a donor polymer and an acceptor molecule are blended together to form an interpenetrating network through which photogenerated charges must travel. For efficient charge generation and transport, the acceptor molecules need to pack into ordered, crystalline domains with close π-π stacking, the parallel overlap of their conjugated π-electron systems that facilitates electron delocalization. Yet excessive crystallinity can cause the acceptor to separate from the donor polymer, degrading the miscibility of the blend and producing a coarse, unstable morphology. Historically, molecular designs that pushed crystallinity upward tended to sacrifice blend compatibility, and designs that preserved compatibility tended to leave behind disordered packing and large nonradiative energy losses, the fraction of absorbed photon energy dissipated as heat rather than converted into charge.
The SUSTech group, led by corresponding author Professor Feng He, approached this dilemma through what the researchers describe as fine molecular engineering. Rather than redesigning the acceptor scaffold wholesale, the team made selective, targeted modifications to a parent molecule designated 7C-2F, which is built around a 1,4-diazahexane core. From this starting point, three new non-fullerene acceptors were synthesized by independently controlling two structural variables: the length of the side chains attached to the molecular framework and the degree of π-conjugation in the terminal groups, the electron-deficient end units that largely govern the optical and electronic properties of the acceptor. This modular approach allowed the researchers to isolate the effect of each structural change on molecular packing, blend morphology, and device behavior.
The first structural variable, side chain shortening, produced two acceptors named 7C-BO-2F and 7C-eC9-2F. The second variable, extension of the π-conjugation of the terminal groups, produced a third acceptor named 7C-N2F. Although these two strategies act on different parts of the molecule, the study found that both converge on the same set of physical outcomes. Each modification improved molecular crystallinity, meaning the acceptor molecules adopted more ordered solid-state packing, and each shortened the π-π stacking distance, the spacing between adjacent conjugated planes in the crystalline domains. Closer stacking strengthens electronic coupling between molecules, which promotes efficient charge transport. Critically, the enhanced order also suppressed nonradiative energy loss, the dominant remaining channel through which modern organic solar cells squander potential voltage.
The photovoltaic results underscore how consequential these fine structural adjustments proved to be. When the acceptor 7C-eC9-2F was paired with the donor polymer PM6 in a conventional bulk heterojunction device, the system achieved a power conversion efficiency of 19.67 percent, a figure that places it among the highest-performing organic photovoltaic systems reported. Equally significant is the energy loss of only 0.539 electron volts, a remarkably small value for an organic solar cell. Nonradiative losses arise when excited molecular states decay without emitting photons or generating charges, and suppressing them is widely regarded as the principal route to raising the efficiency ceiling of organic photovoltaics. The fact that the same molecular features that tighten crystalline packing also curtail these losses illustrates the internal coherence of the design strategy: efficiency gains and morphological improvements flow from a single, unified structural logic rather than from competing optimizations.
Stability, the perennial weak point of organic solar cells, is where the new acceptors distinguish themselves most decisively. Devices based on 7C-eC9-2F were subjected to two standard accelerated aging tests. Under continuous illumination, the time required for the device efficiency to fall to 80 percent of its initial value, a benchmark denoted T80, reached 2728 hours. When the devices were held at 65 degrees Celsius, a temperature representative of real-world rooftop operating conditions, the T80 value reached 1242 hours. In both tests, the 7C-eC9-2F devices significantly outperformed the control systems included in the study. The researchers attribute this durability to the optimized molecular aggregation states and the clear, well-defined microstructure of the active layer, which maintains its charge-generating and charge-transporting architecture even under sustained thermal and optical stress. In effect, the same crystallinity that boosts efficiency also anchors the morphology against the gradual coarsening that typically degrades organic photovoltaic devices over time.
The improved performance stems from a convergence of factors that the authors identify as the mechanistic foundation of the work. Sophisticated molecular engineering of the acceptors produced optimized aggregation states, improved crystallinity, suppressed nonradiative recombination, and a well-defined microstructure. These properties collectively promote efficient charge generation and transport while ensuring morphological durability. The balance between crystallinity and miscibility, often treated as an unavoidable compromise in acceptor design, is here resolved by structural tailoring so precise that both properties improve together. The side chain and terminal group modifications act on the molecular fine structure in ways that tighten packing within acceptor domains without provoking the macroscopic phase separation that would destroy blend compatibility, a result the researchers link directly to the simultaneous gains in efficiency and stability.
Beyond the bulk heterojunction architecture, the team also evaluated the new acceptors in quasi-planar heterojunction, or Q-PHJ, devices, an alternative fabrication geometry in which the donor and acceptor layers are deposited in a more layered arrangement rather than as a fully intermixed blend. The acceptors delivered excellent photovoltaic performance in this structure as well, demonstrating good fabrication adaptability. This cross-process applicability matters for practical manufacturing, because different deposition and annealing protocols impose different demands on material systems. An acceptor that performs well across multiple device architectures offers device engineers substantially more flexibility than one optimized for a single fabrication route, and the Q-PHJ results suggest that the benefits of the fine structural tailoring are intrinsic to the molecules themselves rather than dependent on any particular processing window.
The research was carried out by a team whose co-first authors are Dr. Mingpeng Li, Dr. Waqar Ali Memon, and postdoctoral fellow Xue Lai, all senior visiting scholars in the Department of Chemistry at SUSTech, with Professor Feng He serving as corresponding author. The work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China and the Shenzhen Natural Science Foundation. The study was published on 11 September 2026 under the title Subtle Structural Tailoring Enables Improved Crystallinity and Miscibility for High-Efficiency, Stable Organic Photovoltaics, and the authors report no conflict of interest. The article is available as diamond open access, with no fees for authors or readers, consistent with the publishing model of CCS Chemistry.
The broader significance of the study lies in the design guidance it offers for the next generation of organic photovoltaic materials. By demonstrating that selective control of side chain length and terminal group conjugation can raise crystallinity, shorten π-π stacking distances, suppress nonradiative energy loss, and preserve blend miscibility all at once, the work provides a practical molecular blueprint for overcoming the efficiency-stability trade-off that has constrained the field. The performance of the PM6:7C-eC9-2F system, with its 19.67 percent efficiency, 0.539 electron volt energy loss, 2728-hour illumination T80, and 1242-hour thermal T80 at 65 degrees Celsius, constitutes a concrete benchmark for what fine molecular engineering can achieve. As organic photovoltaics move from laboratory curiosities toward commercial devices, strategies of this kind, which treat molecular fine structure as the primary lever for both efficiency and intrinsic stability, are likely to shape the material systems that carry the technology into practical deployment.
Subject of Research: Organic photovoltaic materials and molecular engineering
Article Title: Fine-structure regulation improves crystallinity and compatibility to achieve efficient and stable organic photovoltaics
Article References: Fine-structure regulation improves crystallinity and compatibility to achieve efficient and stable organic photovoltaics. (n.d.). Original publication
Image Credits: AI Generated
DOI: Not provided
Keywords: organic photovoltaics, non-fullerene acceptors, molecular engineering, solar energy, CCS Chemistry, energy loss, device stability, bulk heterojunction, Fine-structure, regulation, improves, crystallinity
News Source: Bethany Barker. (October 18, 2026). Fine-Tuned Molecular Design Pushes Organic Solar Cells Toward 19.67% Efficiency and Lasting Stability. Scienmag.
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Renewables: new incentives on the way – from auctions to grants, how they work and how to access them  Il Sole 24 ORE
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A utility-scale PV plant is being added to a state-owned hydroelectric power plant in what would be Zambia’s second such co-located facility.
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ISLAMABAD — Every day, Mohammed Saber places a single rectangular solar panel on the roof of the bamboo-and-tarpaulin shack that he and his family have called home for years, the last stop on their journey after fleeing the Myanmar military’s brutal crackdown on the Rohingya in 2017.
The panel is part of a portable solar kit given to the Rohingya refugee family as humanitarian aid six years ago. It’s been the family’s primary source of electricity, making daily life much easier in the camp for the displaced in Teknaf, Bangladesh.
“We can now charge our phones, cook with light, children can study at night and use fans during the hot season,” said Saber, 35.
From the flood zones of Nepal to refugee camps in Africa, experts say solar energy is increasingly becoming part of disaster relief as technology improves, costs fall and humanitarian organizations recognize that having access to electricity is a fundamental need.
Renewable energy solutions are needed more than ever, they say, as climate change drives and intensifies extreme weather while wars, sanctions and political upheavals keep fossil fuel prices volatile.
When disasters strike and humanitarian needs surge, solar kits can become an invaluable resource, says Sarah Rosenberg-Jansen, a research fellow at the Stockholm Environment Institute, an independent research and policy institute specializing in sustainable development.
These solar kits — all-in-one, compact units that are not reliant on utility companies — are easy to move and recharge, according to Rosenberg-Jansen.
“In emergency situations, solar kits can be deployed immediately,” she said, adding that they are particularly useful in situations with rapidly rising floodwaters, changing front lines in a conflict, or for areas where damaged roads make travel difficult.
In terms of function, the kits can be “anything from solar lanterns to solar home systems, solar torches, solar heating pads, to electric cook stoves that use solar as their energy source,” she said.
Rosenberg-Jansen also pointed out that solar panels are not prone to price shocks like fossil fuels, which can be difficult and costly to transport to a disaster zone.
Only a few decades ago, solar energy was a luxury, she added, but as technology evolved, mindsets and the price tag changed. Now it’s more affordable, thanks to the scaling up of mass manufacturing and technology advancement.
It’s also so much easier to use, said Yuriy Boyechko, CEO of Hope For Ukraine, a nonprofit based in the United States that provides solar kits to families living in war-torn Ukraine.
Information for this article was contributed by Ayub Khan Dkl of The Associated Press.

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#RHD #Dainikshiksha #Dainik Amader Barta

To increase the use of renewable energy in government facilities, an initiative has been launched to install solar power panels on the rooftops of more than 400 buildings belonging to the Roads and Highways Department (RHD).
The solar panels with capacity of 5,144 kilowatts (kW) will be installed in these establishments and other unused spaces under the department in phases from the current fiscal to 2029-30 fiscal year.

Through this initiative, the department aims to reduce electricity costs for government offices, decrease dependence on the national grid, lower carbon emissions, and contribute to achieving the nation's renewable energy targets, RHD Chief Engineer Md. Moniruzzaman confrimed .
RHD officials said solar power systems with a combined capacity of 410 kW have already been installed at different RHD facilities, generating about 25,000 units of electricity per month.
The RHD chief engineer mentioned that for the current fiscal 2026-27, steps have been taken to invite tenders for the installation of solar power systems with a capacity of 284 kW.
Additionally, he said, preparations are underway to install further systems with a capacity of 960 kW, while this initiative will be expanded in phases to increase the use of solar power across public facilities.
According to the RHD's roadmap, the targets for solar power capacity installation are as follows: 1,244 kW in the 2026-27 fiscal year, 1,200 kW in 2027-28, 1,200 kW in 2028-29, and 1,500 kW in the 2029-30 fiscal year. The cumulative target for the four fiscal years is 5,144 kilowatts.
The initiative involves utilising not only the rooftops of different departmental buildings but also unused open spaces for solar power generation. Plans are currently underway to develop projects for establishing megawatt-scale solar power plants in these locations.
Moniruzzaman said installing solar panels on the rooftops of government buildings allows for electricity generation without the need for additional land.
He said if the electricity generated during the day is consumed within the respective offices, the dependence on the national grid will decrease, which will lead to cost savings on electricity and enhance efficiency in energy management.
He further emphasised that the use of solar power is crucial for reducing dependence on fossil fuels and lowering carbon emissions.
Consequently, the RHD has devised a plan to identify and utilise all its facilities that offer potential for solar power generation.
The officials said the department views the installation of solar power systems on government building rooftops not merely as a means to generate electricity, but as a comprehensive initiative aimed at reducing energy costs, maximising the utility of existing infrastructure, and promoting green energy.
Experts consider this RHD initiative to be well-aligned with the nation's broader goals for expanding renewable energy.
Muzaffar Ahmed, Chairman of the Sustainable and Renewable Energy Development Authority (SREDA), said Bangladesh is actively transitioning away from fossil fuels toward clean energy sources, such as solar and wind power.
In particular, increasing the use of solar energy will contribute to achieving the country's 'net-zero' climate goal by 2050, he said. The role of the RHD in this endeavor is truly commendable, he added.
According to policy information released by SREDA, the Renewable Energy Policy 2025 sets targets for renewable energy to account for 20 percent of total electricity generation by 2030 and 30 percent by 2040.
Achieving these goals requires a focus on expanding rooftop solar power, large-scale solar power plants, and other renewable energy sources. In this context, it is significant to utilise the buildings and unused land belonging to large government entities like RHD for solar power generation.
By installing solar panels in phases on the rooftops of the department's various offices, engineering facilities and other buildings, a portion of its required electricity could be generated. This would help meet some of the daytime electricity demand at these offices and reduce the load on the national grid.

However, the success of this initiative will depend on the effective operation and maintenance of the installed solar power systems, the efficient use of the electricity generated, and proper grid integration.
Furthermore, regularly evaluating data – such as the amount of electricity generated at each facility, the portion consumed on-site, and the resulting cost savings will make it easier to assess the project's overall effectiveness.
Source: BSS
#RHD #Dainikshiksha #Dainik Amader Barta

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CCA’s Mark Francis has been pondering if it’s okay for cathedrals to not bank ethically if they have solar panels. He’s run the numbers and the results are in.
The transition to renewable energy is a vital part of the fight against climate change. So it’s always very good news to hear that a cathedral or church is considering having a solar photovoltaic (PV) system installed on its roof. Solar PV generates electricity.
Solar is good!
Installing solar PV typically has a significant impact on the emissions related to the use of energy at a cathedral or a church. The emissions saving may look a little like this for a solar system on a cathedral roof;
We certainly want more renewable energy in the UKs energy mix, and at CCA we applaud the many cathedrals and churches that have installed solar PV or are going through the process of doing so.
Fossil Fuel-Free Banking is very good!
So much good is happening in the Church of England to tackle climate change, but many parts of the church, including cathedrals, are still banking with banks that invest in new fossil fuel energy generation.
CCA has recently launched an ethical banking table which highlights this issue and indicates which Church of England cathedrals still bank with fossil-fuel-funding banks.
This generates an interesting question: What would be the impact of – say – £70,000 invested with Barclays Investment Bank ?
Given that most cathedrals will have far more than £70,000 in the bank, making the right choice around banking can have an even greater impact than the significant impact of installing solar.
Both/and, not either/or
No one cathedral, church, individual or organisation can do everything we need to do to tackle climate change, but excusing ourselves from doing one thing because we’ve done another is a dangerous route to go down. We all need to do as much as we can to reduce emissions if want to avoid the worst impacts of climate change.
If a cathedral can, it should install solar AND move to a bank that doesn’t invest in fossil fuels.
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Dunhuang City in northwest China’s Gansu Province is home to the country’s first 100-megawatt molten-salt tower solar thermal plant, a pioneering mega-project that underpins the city’s status as a green energy hub and sets an example for Chinese clean energy projects.
In the plant’s mirror field, 12,000 heliostats track the sun in concentric-circle arrays, reflecting sunlight onto the top of a 260-meter solar power tower. Each mirror covers more than 100 square meters and stands as far as 1.5 kilometers from the tower, requiring milliradian-level precision in angle adjustment to keep the reflected sunlight on target.
To maintain reflection efficiency, workers clean the mirrors before sunset each day with specialized machines and tailored cleaning methods that adjust with the seasons, avoiding water marks and scratches.
As a solar thermal demonstration project, the station was completed and began operation in 2018. Unlike conventional thermal units, which start and stop less often over the year, its operation is closely tied to local weather, with roughly 150 start-stop cycles annually. That frequent cycling puts valves and other components under metal fatigue.
After years of research, imported components of the station are gradually substituted by up-to-standard domestic products, providing a technical reference for similar projects and serving as a test field for Chinese equipment makers.
With its rich and diverse renewable resources, Gansu Province is powering itself and the whole country with wind, solar, thermal power, and new-type energy storage systems, and Dunhuang achieved full-year citywide green electricity supply in 2025.
Gansu’s green power is also being sent to Hunan and Shandong provinces via ultra-high-voltage lines and will soon reach Zhejiang, helping drive China’s nationwide green energy transition.
Mega solar power farm in Gansu powers China’s green energy ambitions
China’s first-ever multi-generational space rice research has taken a new step toward humans’ ability to fully grow food in orbit, with the Shenzhou-23 crew completing another round of sample collection, sowing, and storage aboard the Tiangong space station.
The research project aims to study the molecular mechanisms behind rice’s multi-generational genetic stability and environmental adaptability in microgravity. Over the past week, the three astronauts collected a new batch of samples, which will be returned to Earth for scientists to analyze at the phenotypic and molecular levels, helping reveal how long-term microgravity affects rice genetic stability.
China’s space rice research began in 2022, when the Shenzhou-14 crew conducted the world’s first full life-cycle rice cultivation experiment in space. During that mission, six rice seeds were grown aboard Tiangong for 120 days, producing 59 first-generation space-grown seeds that the crew returned to Earth.
On May 24 this year, the Shenzhou-23 spacecraft carried a new batch of rice seeds into orbit. The seeds fall into two groups: ordinary seeds that have never left Earth, and third-generation descendants bred on the ground from the 59 space-grown seeds harvested in 2022. Both are Chinese japonica varieties known for their adaptability and three- to four-month growing cycle.
After more than four months in orbit, the Shenzhou-23 crew has reached the first harvest and begun second-generation cultivation using two propagation methods. The aim is to compare how space-flown and Earth-grown rice adapt to space, and to explore how different propagation methods affect second-generation space rice.
The second-generation space rice is expected to mature during the Shenzhou-24 mission, scheduled for later this year.
While the 2022 experiment covered a full life cycle “from ground seed to space seed,” this year’s research advances to “from ground seed to space seed to space seed” — a repeating cycle that researchers hope could provide important theoretical support for in-situ crop production beyond Earth — the ability to grow food in space without relying on resupply from Earth. Such a capability is considered essential for humanity’s future exploration of deep space.
China’s multi-generational space rice research advances toward growing food in orbit
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China’s solar panel exports extend slump in September  Reuters
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Nigeria’s Minister of Power, Joseph Tegbe
The people of Talasse in Balanga Local Government Area of Gombe State have received a major boost in electricity supply with the commissioning of a 1-megawatt (MW) solar mini-grid project expected to benefit about 6,000 households and businesses.
At the commissioning ceremony on Saturday, the Minister of Power, Joseph Tegbe, urged residents to protect the newly installed electricity infrastructure against vandalism, theft and other criminal activities that could threaten its sustainability.
The minister stressed that the facility was provided for the benefit of the community and future generations, warning that its destruction or misuse could undermine the investment and deprive residents of its long-term benefits.
“These assets have been built for you, for your benefit and for the posterity of generations to come. I urge you to protect them. Do not allow vandals or other criminals to destroy what has been provided for our collective good,” he said.
He noted that reliable electricity would help local businesses operate more efficiently, improve livelihoods and create economic opportunities for young people.
Mr Tegbe commended the Rural Electrification Agency (REA), the project developer, the Gombe State Government, traditional rulers, community leaders and other stakeholders for their contributions to the project.
He said the initiative aligned with the federal government’s commitment to expanding electricity access, strengthening energy security and promoting sustainable development through renewable energy solutions.
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Also speaking Governor Muhammadu Yahaya, described the commissioning as a milestone in his administration’s drive to expand reliable and affordable electricity access to rural communities.
He recalled that construction began on November 6, 2025, noting that the project had been completed in less than a year.
According to him, Talasse had remained without connection to the national grid for more than 17 years, limiting economic activities and forcing residents to rely on expensive alternative energy sources.
He added that the state planned to introduce additional solar mini-grid projects with a combined capacity of 4MW in Akko, Dukku, Funakaye, and Kaltungo local government areas, while ongoing projects in Filiya and Gelengu had reached 90 per cent completion.
He said the broader rural electrification programme was expected to extend improved electricity access to 80 communities across the state.
The governor also disclosed that his administration would complement rural electrification with productive-use equipment, including rice milling machines, electric flour grinders and groundnut oil-processing machines, to promote agro-processing, reduce production costs and create employment opportunities.
He called for proper maintenance and responsible use of the facility, urging residents to protect the investment against theft, vandalism and illegal connections.
Mr Yahaya commended the federal government, the Rural Electrification Agency, the World Bank, technical partners and the Talasse community for their contributions to the project.
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Investing.com — China has proposed export restrictions on 12 solar manufacturing technologies, citing national security concerns, in a move that could affect overseas production plans and reinforce Beijing’s dominance in the global photovoltaic industry.
China’s Ministry of Commerce announced the proposal on Friday as part of a broader revision of its technology export-control catalogue, covering artificial intelligence and biotechnology.
The ministry said tighter oversight was necessary because photovoltaic technologies are increasingly used in sensitive sectors, including aerospace and national defence.
Under the proposed measures, China would prohibit exports of certain technologies used to manufacture thin silicon wafers, perovskite and tandem solar cells, alongside large-scale fluidised-bed polysilicon production systems.
Perovskite technology offers the potential for higher solar conversion efficiency, while tandem cells combine materials to capture a broader spectrum of sunlight.
Fluidised-bed polysilicon production is also more energy-efficient and less expensive than the conventional Siemens process.
Beijing would separately restrict, rather than prohibit, exports of advanced solar cell manufacturing technologies, including TOPCon, heterojunction technology (HJT) and XBC.
The proposed controls could complicate overseas manufacturers’ efforts to expand domestic solar production.
Chinese officials previously discussed potential restrictions with manufacturers, raising concerns about expansion plans by U.S. companies, including Tesla (NASDAQ).
China has also tightened access to solar manufacturing technology for India, which is seeking to develop domestic production and reduce reliance on Chinese suppliers.
The proposal reflects Beijing’s efforts to maintain oversight of strategically important technologies while protecting its position in the global solar supply chain.
The commerce ministry said the measures were intended to prevent the uncontrolled spread or misuse of sensitive technologies while preserving legitimate international cooperation.
Exporters must register certain overseas technology transfers pending the formal revision of the export-control catalogue.
Public consultation on the proposal will close on November 15.
If implemented, the restrictions could increase uncertainty for international solar manufacturers seeking access to Chinese production expertise.
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Representative AI image of a dairy farm combining solar energy with agriculture, allowing cows to graze beneath solar panels while crops continue to grow on the same land. Image Credits: ChatGPT.

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A pioneering dairy farmer in northern New York is merging the realms of agriculture and solar energy by partnering with a solar developer on a transformative agrivoltaics initiative. Image Credits: Wikimedia Commons.

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“Clear information, realistic expectations and strong consumer protections will be essential to building confidence.”
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Legal approval for plug-in solar kits in the U.K. means households can try solar power without installing a full roof array, with potential bill savings of up to £110 a year.
REAL says the new option could make lower-cost home solar available to more people, but it also tells consumers to verify that any kit they buy complies with the government’s updated safety standards.
As of August 27, plug-in solar is permitted nationwide, according to Renewable Energy Magazine. The group said this first stage covers panel-only products, while systems that include batteries are being left out until more evidence is reviewed.
In bright conditions, a single kit can run a fridge, TV, Wi-Fi router, laptop, phone charger, and Xbox S at the same time, REAL said. The systems are rated at up to 800 watts, which the group said is enough to cover up to 20% of a typical household’s electricity use, without installation charges or reliance on grid electricity.
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.
REAL, which runs the Renewable Energy Consumer Codes (RECC), said the policy change followed independent testing of key electrical components and added that products meeting the rules are compatible with U.K. home wiring.
“Clear information, realistic expectations and strong consumer protections will be essential to building confidence in this new market,” said Catherine Cousins, interim director of consumer codes at REAL.
For renters and flat residents, the policy could matter most because those groups have often had limited access to rooftop solar. Cousins said, “Plug-in solar has the potential to make renewable energy more accessible, particularly for people who may not previously have been able to install rooftop solar, such as those living in flats or rented accommodation.”
Going solar is one of the best ways to save money on home energy. If a full rooftop system is an option, homeowners can try EnergySage to get free solar installation estimates and compare quotes.
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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 U.K.’s framework is also stricter than Germany’s; balcony solar is already widely used there, and about half a million new devices were plugged in during 2025.
MCS figures put certified solar installations at nearly 150,000 in the first half of 2026, 17% above the prior fastest start to a year in 2025, about one every 74 seconds.
Before buying, consumers should make sure any plug-in system is marketed as fully approved and compliant with government safety standards. REAL also said buyers should confirm that their property is suitable and check whether they need permission from a landlord, freeholder, or building owner, or through planning or listed-building consent, before putting panels on a balcony or other outdoor space.
The group also advises consumers to review product details closely, understand maintenance and warranty terms, keep proof of purchase, and be wary of exaggerated savings promises or pressure to buy quickly. The systems are expected to appear online and in stores, with major retailers such as Currys, B&Q, Screwfix, and Amazon having worked with the government on the rollout.
💡Go deep on the latest news and trends shaping the residential solar landscape
For homeowners considering a bigger investment, EnergySage can be especially useful. 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 details on 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. It can also help homeowners use more of the electricity their panels generate instead of sending it elsewhere. Explore EnergySage for information about home battery storage options, including competitive installation estimates.
“Plug-in solar is a simple, affordable way for households to take control of their energy bills and start saving straight away. From this summer, we’re giving more families the ability power their homes with clean homegrown energy,” said Energy Secretary Miatta Fahnbulleh.
Plug-in solar is part of a larger push to make home solar more affordable and accessible.
• In the U.S., advocates say renter-friendly plug-in solar panels could unlock wider home energy access.
• In Maine, lawmakers advanced a bill to provide American renters new access to plug-in solar systems.
• In Colorado, officials backed removing barriers and red tape for residents unable to go solar.
• In the U.K., record levels of rooftop solar show how quickly national demand is rising.
• In North Lincolnshire, a free solar panel scheme reached a milestone with bill-cutting potential.
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RDH to install solar panels on rooftops of 400 buildings  Bangladesh Sangbad Sangstha (BSS)
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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.
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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.
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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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