Clean Energy Finance Forum

In California, the nation’s most populous state, every newly-built home must now come with enough solar panels to satisfy its electricity needs. It’s a quiet revolution tucked into the building codes approved unanimously by the California Energy Commission in 2018.

Early this month, three community-choice aggregators and one municipal utility serving much of California’s San Francisco Bay Area launched a 30-megawatt distributed energy storage-plus-solar solicitation. It breaks ground on multiple fronts.

California officials reacted with outrage on Monday to PG&E's power shutoff, but the utility stood by its decision and even state regulators seemed to acknowledge the difficult situation.

Los Angeles has been sitting on a contract for record-cheap solar power for more than a month — and city officials declined to approve it because of concerns raised by the city-run utility’s labor union, which is still fuming over Mayor Eric Garcetti’s decision to shut down three gas-fired power plants.

Peaker replacement by battery storage has begun in California. Substituting bulk gas power is another matter entirely.

Los Angeles Power and Water officials have struck a deal on the largest and cheapest solar + battery-storage project in the world, at prices that leave fossil fuels in the dust and may relegate nuclear power to the dustbin.

The push by California and other states to revive a century-old technology — called “pumped-hydro storage” — underscores the limitations of modern batteries.

A steep global decline in the price of solar modules in recent weeks is nearly offsetting the effect of the Trump administration’s 30 percent tariff on imported panels, the chief executive of a major United States solar company said.