Ready for our sample of top solar energy news stories? Today’s solar power rundown is medium bodied with dark notes of gooseberry and a smooth finish… Can you taste the oaky tannins? Am I not making sense? That’s because I got into the GetSolar archives this morning and may have drank too much solar-powered wine…

Enough banter. Here’s what’s solar news today:

Solar energy company Green2V will open a new headquarters in New Mexico, via the Victoria Advocate. This is good news for New Mexico solar and New Mexico jobs, as the company expects to hire 1,500 workers over the next five years. The company’s CEO Bill Sheppard had the following to say: “Green2V will manage every aspect of the solar generating installation, from the sand to produce the wafers for solar cells to the financing of important projects. We are sand to kilowatts.”

If you’ve read this blog before, you know that large-scale solar installations are best suited for marginal land. What we don’t want, in other words, is vast expanses of solar arrays eating up arable land and driving up food prices. (Remember what happened with corn-based ethanol in 2008?) Bulgaria seems to agree: on Wednesday the government proposed a ban for building solar power installations (and wind farms) on “quality arable land,” via Chem.info. The ban, it seems, is intended to curb a rapid increase in renewable-energy development. The amount of electricity Bulgaria gets from renewables rose by over a quarter last year, to nearly 10 percent.

In solar industry news, Solar Thin Films, Inc. a manufacturer of (get this) solar thin-film technology, is close to acquiring BudaSolar Technologies Co., a Hungary-based company that makes the equipment that makes solar-thin film, via a press release on CNNMoney.com.

Trina Solar (NYSE:TSL), a Chinese maker of solar panels, announced it will supply panels for projects in Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand, via PRNewswire. Among the installations is a 2.2-megawatt job headed up by Grenzone, a solar installation outfit specializing in mid- to large-size projects in southeast Asia.

Finally, it appears bankers may love solar energy for reasons beyond the sector’s tremendous upside potential. The Boston Globe reports that MassMustual will this month install more than 500 solar panels atop its Springfield headquarters, a move that will save the company around $100,000 a year. The system will incorporate solar electric (photovoltaic, or PV) panels and solar water heating technology to produce the combined equivalent of 130,000 kilowatt-hours (kWhs) annually, enough to supply around 25 average Massachusetts homes.

That’s all for today. Thanks for reading. Come back and see us again tomorrow.