A military authorization law recently signed by President Obama could lead to a solar standoff between the U.S. and China — now the world’s largest producer of solar panels.

One of the nation’s strongest supporters of solar energy policy is still in critical condition today in Arizona’s University Medical Centre after being shot in the head on Saturday morning outside of a Safeway near Tucson, Arizona.

A new Maryland law scheduled to take effect on January 1st will require state utility companies to purchase more solar power.

On Thursday, the Obama Administration released a much-anticipated draft of the federal government’s plan to build solar energy projects on public land throughout the United States (at 10,000 pages, it reads more like a novel). So in an effort to save you a whole lot of time, we’ve whittled out the details of what the plan — officially called the Draft Solar Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement — actually entails.

The word out of Washington late this week was that Senators and the Obama Administration have agreed on a plan to extend the U.S. Treasury Department’s Treasury Grant Program for another year.

The expiration clock continues to tick on a federal solar grant that many clean energy advocates credit with jump-starting the solar and wind energy economy in the United States. And with few options left, supporters of the federal program have descended upon Capitol Hill in a final effort to convince a lame duck congress to extend the program.

Many Florida homeowners who applied for rebates when installing energy-efficient air conditioning and solar energy systems as part of the Florida Solar Rebate Program have waited quite a while for that check in the mail.

Leaders of the U.S. solar industry will have one last shot at convincing the current congress to extend a key federal solar incentive before a new republican controlled congress takes over at the beginning of 2011.

The U.S. Department of Energy (DoE) revealed a new program yesterday intended to clearly show homeowners across the country exactly where their home ranks in energy efficiency and precisely how much money they can save by making improvements.

All three men sent out the same message: economics, not environmentalists, will save the world.