News in Brief: Santa Barbara, California, is the 30th US city to vote in a 100% renewable energy mandate, North Carolina legislators instate a competitive bidding process and leasing programme for solar PV while South Carolina's SCE&G launches the state's largest community solar programme; there's also more community solar online in Texas, and the Massachusetts Department of Energy Resources releases its final guidelines for its solar incentive SMART programme.
Following on from the successful year for solar that was 2016, the US market added 2,044MW of new capacity in Q1 2017 alone. As installations grow, prices continue to fall to new lows and utility-scale system prices dropped below US$1/Watt for the first time according to GTM Research.
California broke a new renewable energy record earlier this month, generating 80% of its overall energy capacity in one day solely from clean energy sources.
California-based electric utility Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E) announced that it will build eight solar projects in California with a total generation capacity of 53MW.
News in Brief: NV Energy partners with CLEAResult for a low-income solar pilot programme, San Jose green lights California’s largest community choice programme, Crius Solar partners with Solar Alliance and Campbell's Soup gets a 4.4MW solar array.
PV inverter manufacturers SMA Solar, SolarEdge and Enphase have all recently reported first quarter 2017 financial results. As already highlighted by PV Tech, US residential PV installers have reported softer than normal sales in the quarter and dependence on the US market for SMA Solar and Enphase, coupled to continued pricing pressure took a toll on revenues.
