SolarReviews Weekly News: SunPower Producing in Oregon, Solar Grows in Northeast
Last week SunPower announced that it had started manufacturing in Oregon, under a year after announcing it would take over the SolarWorld facility. It’s just in time, too, as demand in the Northeast, Georgia and other states is growing.
SunPower in now producing its 19 percent efficient P-Series photovoltaic solar panels in Oregon—less than a year after announcing it would purchase the SolarWorld Americas facility and just four months after the sale was completed. The company will soon start fulfilling its customer orders with the US-made panels.
In the Northeast solar is growing stronger as the appetite for more solar grows, creating new types of contracts. Last week two new unique contracts were announced in the region. One impacts multiple states and the other New York.
The contract in New England marks the first time rooftop solar has been bundled and sold wholesale on the electric grid. The grid operator ISO New England, which serves Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island, signed a contract with Sunrun to bundle the power from 20 megawatts of its rooftop solar and Brightbox energy storage systems installations in the region to provide energy to the electric grid akin to baseload energy from other sources like centralized power plants.
Meanwhile in Buffalo, NY, five institutions, led by the University at Buffalo and including SUNY Buffalo State, SUNY Erie, the City of Buffalo, as well as Erie County bended together to create a request for proposals for 100 megawatts of commercial rooftop solar. The institutions will directly benefit from the solar installations on their rooftops but will use their collective bargaining power to help reduce the costs.
Solar also is growing in the Southeast, too. Last week Georgia Power announced that it plans to add another gigawatt of wind and solar power in its 20-year plan. In addition, the utility would stop generating at four of its coal-fired power plants and increase energy efficiency measures by 1.6 GWs. The utility and its parent company, Southern Power has said it wants to produce low-to no-carbon electricity by 2050.
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