Category Archives: News

Articles about important news in the solar and energy industries.

Highlights from LBNL’s 2021 Tracking the Sun report

In case you missed it, solar has been in the news quite a bit recently: the Biden Administration announced a goal for solar to produce 40% of the nation’s electricity by 2030; the Department of Energy released a corresponding Solar Futures Study that lays out just how to reach that lofty goal; the inclusion of clean energy incentives (including for solar!) is at the forefront of the debate around the infrastructure and budget reconciliation bills; the latest Solar Market Insight report from the Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA) and Wood Mackenzie just dropped; and we recently released our own biannual Marketplace Intel Report. There’s a lot going on! 

Amidst this solar news frenzy, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) just released their annual Tracking the Sun report, the best resource for tracking the state of residential solar installations in the U.S., and complete with publicly-available data sets with info on nearly 80 percent of all of the solar panel systems installed in the country. Here are some of the highlights from the report:

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Can I still buy Panasonic solar panels? Yes–and there are no signs of that changing

In February 2021, Panasonic announced that during fiscal year 2022 (ending in March 2022), it will stop manufacturing photovoltaic (PV) modules (aka solar panels). This announcement created some confusion about Panasonic’s future role in the solar industry, causing some to wonder if the company will stop selling solar panels altogether. But this is not the case! The company stated that it will “continue to sell outsourced photovoltaic modules as it has been doing in North America.” We sat down with Panasonic to get the inside scoop on their future in the clean energy industry.

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