NERC report: Upgraded grid will handle national RPS

Italian firm opens 65MW geothermal plants in Nevada

Ohio PUC sets rules for 25% RPS

Indiana catches up with neighbors, approves 15% RPS

FERC OKs incentive for $10 billion Midwest wind transmission line

Following on to Monday’s story about the rising fortunes of thin-film PV relative to silicon, today’s Wall Street Journal reports that FirstSolar will sell 48 MW of PV modules to Sempra Generation, of San Diego, for installation at a solar farm in southern Nevada. Sempra doesn’t have a customer for the power yet, but the company is confident it will sell to one of the many utility companies scrambling to meet an RPS goal.

Sempra already has 10 MW of FirstSolar panels at the site, [...]

Schuco Designs a Cooler Module

Schuco has redesigned its photovoltaic modules to help them stay cool. As they heat up in the sun, today’s silicon PV cells lose about one half percent of their power for every degree Celsius. Schuco engineers used the Flomerics FloVENT computational fluid dynamics (CFD) software to model energy absorption and reflection, and to simulate heat flow out to the aluminum frame and surrounding air. By optimizing heat flow, Schuco gets a cooler, more powerf [...]