Xcel Energy caused quite a stir back in February, when it temporarily stopped accepting applications for its popular solar incentive program and asked state regulators for permission to cut the rebate by almost 90 percent, from $2.00 per watt to $0.25 per watt. The move threatened to pour cold water on the state’s growing solar energy [...]

Black Hills Energy, a Colorado utility company, on Monday announced the suspension of it solar energy rebate program through the end of the year, issuing the following notice on its website: Thank you for your interest, indeed. Prior to the announcement, Black Hills’ solar rebate program offered homeowners who installed solar panels a rebate of [...]

Cogentrix Energy in Charlotte, North Carolina – a branch of Goldman Sachs Group Inc. – has signed its first power-purchasing agreement (PPA) for its concentrated photovoltaic (CPV) plant currently in the works in southern Colorado.

CSU has reached a deal with an unnamed private company and Xcel Energy to add 3.3 megawatts of solar energy to a university solar facility on CSU’s Foothills Campus that already has a rating of two megawatts and accounts for 10 percent of the campus’ energy needs.

Minnesota isn’t exactly the first state that comes to mind when most people think of solar, but the Lone Star State and its associated utility companies are making significant strides toward a renewable energy future: Xcel Energy, the Minneapolis-based utility company that services a wide swath of Midwestern states—including Colorado, another burgeoning state for solar—unveiled yesterday [...]

North America’s largest solar energy services provider, SunEdison, and Xcel Energy’s regional operating company, Southwestern Public Service Company, today announced a deal for five photovoltaic (PV) solar installations in New Mexico. Together the installations will total 50 megawatts (mWs) of solar generation capacity — enough to power more than 10,000 homes. To be sited in [...]

Minnesotans looking to install a solar photovoltaic (PV) system have reason to be hopeful for the New Year. As we reported on this blog in June, Minneapolis-based Xcel Energy has been developing plans to introduce in Minnesota their Solar Rewards program, its solar rebate initiative already on offer in Colorado and New Mexico. If the [...]

Armed with a net-metering agreement and enough grid-tied solar panels, you could literally eliminate your monthly electricity bills. Poof! Gone. But, as this story from KMGH Denver demonstrates, you’d still need the utility’s infrastructure to make the arrangement work. Solar energy customers are worried a new fee proposed by Xcel Energy would punish new customers [...]

A little over a week ago, Xcel Energy publicized details of a three-year program to conserve energy. Under the so-called Conservation Improvement Plan, the Minneapolis-based utility aims to save over 1,100 gigawatt hours of energy between 2010 and 2012. As reported by Reuters, The company said in a release the plan would save money for [...]

A lot of what we do here at GetSolar involves helping individuals and businesses answer the following question: Does solar PV make sense for me? The short answer, we usually say, is that there is no single answer — it depends. The ROI and payback for a particular system are the product of a host [...]