As the year comes to an end, we bring you a recap of the most-read stories throughout 2025. Undoubtedly, the US has taken most of the focus in the list with more than half of the top ten stories, two of which centre on its president, Donald Trump. The rest of the list includes stories involving Chinese solar companies and the Iberian blackout.
Here, PV Tech runs down its top ten stories of the past 12 months.
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10 – Trump executive order seeks to limit access to solar deployment subsidies
8 July: Days after signing the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act”, US president Donald Trump issued an executive order to tighten restrictions on renewable energy tax credits. The order instructed the US secretary of the Treasury to tighten the definition of the “beginning of construction” for solar PV and wind projects eligible to receive tax credits from the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA).
9 – US solar could lose 60GW by 2030 due to executive order
13 August: This article is closely tied to the previous one, as it looked at the outcome of stricter rules for the “beginning of construction” for solar projects. An analysis from Clean Energy Associates forecast a loss of 60GW of planned capacity in the next five years if strict rules were adopted following Trump’s executive order in July 2025.
8 – US utility-scale solar PV LCOE tightens to US$38-78/MWh in 2025 – Lazard
17 June: The latest edition of Lazard’s report about the US levelised cost of energy (LCOE) showed that utility-scale solar PV’s LCOE tightened for a third year in a row. Utility-scale solar PV remains one of the most competitive energy generation technologies among all technologies, along with onshore wind.
The article comes with two charts showing the LCOE difference between different technologies as well as the evolution of LCOE throughout the years.
7 – Over-voltage triggered Iberian blackout – report
6 October: Six months after the April blackout in Spain and Portugal, the European Network of Transmission System Operators for Electricity (ENTSO-E) released its report that ruled out renewables as the leading cause. Instead, the results of the investigation pointed to a cascading chain of events compounded by a lack of voltage control.
6 – China’s top four solar manufacturers suffer US$1.54 billion in losses in H1 2025
3 September: 2025 continued to be a downturn for Chinese solar manufacturers, with the top four companies posting more than US$1.5 billion in cumulative losses in the first half of the year, which a decrease of 10% from the same period in 2024. Out of the top ten companies, only Canadian Solar and DMEGC remained profitable during the first half of 2025.
5 – JA Solar subsidiary added to US forced labour prevention list
15 January: At the beginning of 2025, the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) added a subsidiary of the Chinese major company JA Solar to the Uyghur Forced Labour Prevention Act (UFLPA) entity list, along with 37 other companies.
At the time, the reason for adding the subsidiary to the list was due to the alleged sourcing of polysilicon from the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR), according to the DHS. Weeks later, an investigation from the Solar Stewardship Initiative highlighted that said facility had ceased production in 2018.
4 – The top 10 PV module suppliers in 2024
10 January: A top ten most read articles list could not be complete without a story from PV Tech’s Market Research team. This article is in itself a listicle highlighting the most top ten PV module suppliers in 2024, which were all Chinese companies. Jinko Solar retained the top spot in 2024 and has been the leading module supplier by volume seven times in the last nine years.
3 – California AB 942 removes controversial residential PV policy
17 July: Over the summer, the California Senate Energy, Utilities and Communications Committee amended Assembly Bill 942 (AB 942) and removed a net metering amendment that would have affected residential solar owners’ rates when acquiring a home or property.
In its previous iteration, AB 942 sought to have customers buying a property with an existing solar system switch their net energy metering (NEM) tariff to the most current one instead of inheriting the one from the previous owner, which would have resulted in a decline in net metering payments.
2 – ‘Rogue’ devices found in Chinese solar inverters raises cybersecurity alarm in Europe
14 May: Cybersecurity concerns was among one of the key topics in 2025 for the European market, a trend that was recently covered in our end of year coverage earlier this month here. A report from news agency Reuters said that US officials had uncovered unexplained communication equipment inside some Chinese-made inverter devices. Although happening in the US, this raised alarms in Europe with calls to “rigorous audit and validation tools” and a fully transparent software bill of materials (BOM).
1 – What Trump’s executive orders mean for US solar PV
21 January: This year’s most-read story comes from the US and, more specifically, one day after Trump’s inauguration. On his first day back in office, Trump signed a raft of executive orders outlining his administration’s plans for the duration of his second presidency. Among the executive orders signed that day, some challenged the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), while Trump called, at the time, for an end to the “Green New Deal”, which encompasses the IRA and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (BIL).
