Blessed with lots of sunshine, Arizona is a great place to install solar panels. Thanks to a pro-business climate and its close proximity to big markets, like California, the state is turning out to be a great place to make solar panels, too. Consider that the two world’s two biggest solar panel manufacturers have Arizona-based [...]

It’s a sign of the times: the site of a former General Motors vehicle testing facility will soon house a manufacturing plant dedicated to making clean-energy-producing solar panels. First Solar, the Tempe, Arizona-based maker of advanced thin-film solar modules, today announced it will build a its new U.S. manufacturing plant in Mesa, Arizona. The company [...]

Pilkington North America Inc. — the Toledo, Ohio-based manufacturer and marketer of safety glass for both buildings and cars — is set to partner with Hull & Associates Inc. to install a 250-kilowatt (kW) ground-mounted solar photovoltaic (PV) system on a former brownfield in Toledo.

Locke has appointed Bruce Sohn, President of First Solar, the largest manufacturer of thin-film photovoltaic (PV) modules in the world, to head the group. First Solar is based in Tempe, Arizona and has manufacturing plants in Germany, Malaysia, and Perrysburg, Ohio.

According to market Watch, the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) approved the project’s 25-year PPA with Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E) on June 3, and construction of the plant is slated to begin this calendar year. The agreement with PG&E was central to First Solar constructing the plant because the utility delivers electricity to much of California north of Los Angeles.

Well ahead of the German solar subsidy cuts slated for July 1, German demand for solar modules from powerhouses Suntech Power Holdings Co Ltd. and First Solar has been high—high enough to have prompted the former to add 1 gigawatt in production capacity in Shanghai over the following three years, and high enough to  have [...]

In August 2008, Tempe, Arizona-based First Solar (NASDAQ: FSLR) inked a large scale PPA with PG&E. But the Topaz Solar Farm is now set to open in 2014, a year behind schedule.

Just how green are the solar panels gracing your rooftop? For most home- and business-owners, it’s still difficult to tell—but, if rankings are your thing, the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition’s 2010 Solar Company Survey and Scorecard may be a good starting point. Released earlier this week, the San Jose-based organization’s report surveyed 25 of the world’s [...]

Industry cost leader First Solar (NASDAQ: FSLR) soon may face increased competition in the thin-film solar market in the form of GE, which is making the switch from traditional silicon to cadmium-telluride—the same material that First Solar uses—in its production of solar panels. Apparently following the same logic as the Arizona-based solar giant, GE’s research arm [...]

For some time now, we’ve seen American solar panel manufacturers struggle to keep costs low enough to compete with their Chinese and Japanese counterparts. Last year, Massachusetts-based Evergreen Solar (NASDAQ: ESLR) had to move solar panel assembly to China (though retaining its manufacturing facility not far from Boston) in order to cut back on costs [...]