Your daily dose of photovoltaic technology developments and solar news

Solar photovoltaic system integrators and developers take note: there will soon be many megawatts of rooftop projects open for bidding. The California Public Utilities Commission has okayed a solicitation process in which Southern California Edison will offer independent project developers long-term contracts to install 250MW of PV on commercial rooftops.

Three solar photovoltaic power systems were commissioned last week on the rooftops of the BMG facility in Glauchau in the Saxony region of Germany. The >2.4MW installations, equipped with 33,400 First Solar thin-film PV panels, were developed by Colexon Energy.

Owens Corning and SunEdison announced that this past September, the two companies completed the activation of a 440kW roof-mount photovoltaic solar system at Owens Kearny, New Jersey facility. The activation took place just one day before SunEdison was awarded the first energy stimulus grant in the solar industry, which came under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.

Duke Energy has selected four sites to install photovoltaic systems as part of the first phase of the utility's distributed solar energy generation program in North Carolina. More than 20,000 modules will be deployed on the quartet of commercial/industrial rooftops, with a total installed capacity of more than 4.6MW. The projects are part of Duke Energy's plans to invest some $50 million to construct and own a total of 10MW of solar PV in the state, under the terms of the North Carolina Solar Photovoltaic Distributed Generation program approved earlier this year by the NC Utilities Commission.