Felicity Carus

A leading venture capital firm is considering making its first investment in an early-stage solar start-up despite seeing its competitors lose hundreds of millions of dollars.

Construction will begin in a "matter of weeks" on the first utility-scale solar plant to be built on a Native American reserve it was announced today at the National Clean Energy Summit in Las Vegas.

First Solar will start a 100MW manufacturing line for crystalline silicon cells for the residential distributed market from the end of next year with production scaling from 2015, it was revealed yesterday.

Yieldcos like the one launched by NRG Energy last week could transform access to capital particularly for distributed solar generation, said a leading renewable energy adviser

Solar is under attack in Arizona and is now the subject of a TV advertisement claiming it wastes ratepayers' money. Felicity Carus reports on the fierce debate raging over who is behind Arizona's assault on solar.

The US solar industry yesterday welcomed the appointment of Gina McCarthy as head of the Environmental Protection Agency, marking an end to months of Republican wrangling over the presidential-nominee.

Last month US president Barack Obama launched a multi-billion initiative to bring power to the African people. But with little of this money so far directed towards developing solar capacity in a continent ideally suited to it, Felicity Carus asks whether the money is being wisely spent.

Tapping into the trillion-dollar securities market for portfolios of solar projects moved a significant step forward at a meeting last week of the Solar Access to Public Capital (SAPC) working group.

California governor Jerry Brown got Intersolar North America off to a rousing start in San Francisco yesterday. Reporting from the event, Felicity Carus says recent hard times for solar in the US are not overshadowing a new mood of optimism for the industry.

The gulf in confidence separating the downstream and upstream solar markets continues to grow as investments in third party lease companies continue to boom, according to second quarter data released by the Cleantech Group yesterday.