After months of much debate over whether or not U.S. public land should be used to harness renewable energy, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar ended the discussion yesterday by approving two large-scale solar energy projects in California.

Through the California Solar Initiative’s (CSI) Research, Development, Deployment and Demonstration (RD&D) Program, the state is awarding SunPower a $1.8 million grant that will allow the solar technology company to research large-scale solar energy storage.

The plan is called the Renewable Auction Mechanism (RAM). It would would work much in the same way a Feed-in Tariff (FiT) system works, with the difference being that rates of the tariff would be set by an open bidding process. This would help in two ways: It would drive down high consumer rates and bring in returns for solar developers that are still within reason.

Last week, Richmond received some well-deserved recognition for its solar efforts. The Northern California Solar Energy Association (NCSEA) gave the city two awards: first place in watts per capita installed and second place in overal watts installed. The figures used to give out the awards were based on the 2009 Solar Installations Report. The report has been submitted each year since the implementation of the CSI.

Coming to us via a press release is news that Southern California Edison (SCE) has awarded contracts totaling nearly 60 megawatts’ worth of solar electric projects. According to agreements signed with a number of independent power producers — like Tioga Solar, SunEdison Utility Solutions, Photon LLC and others — solar panels will be installed on [...]

Judging from number released a couple of weeks ago, San Jose can rightfully claim to be “the most” solar city in California. The California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) on July 9 released an annual report on solar energy, detailing (among other things) the progress of the California Solar Initiative (CSI). A roadmap for installing 1,750 megawatts [...]

The California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) last week issued its annual assessment of the California Solar Initiative, a $2.2 billion effort to install 1,940 megawatts (MW) of solar capacity across the state by 2016. On balance, the commission’s findings are positive: Three years into the state’s 10-year solar program, California is already 42 percent of [...]

According to data provided by the California Solar Initiative (CSI), Laguna Beach, California ranks third of all cities in Southern California’s Orange County in number of solar homes.

The California Solar Initiative manages solar incentives for the state’s three investor-owned utilities: Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E), Southern California Edison (SCE), and San Diego Gas and Electric (SDG&E). PG&E and SDG&E just met their last CSI goals for residential solar capacity and have scaled their rebates back accordingly, from the previous $1.10/w to the [...]

Tomorrow, California’s state legislature will vote on lifting the current cap on the amount of energy in the state’s energy portfolio that can come from net-metered solar installations. Set at 2.5 percent, the net metering cap once seemed generous but now seems low–dangerously low, in fact, for the California solar industry. Successful solar incentives have [...]