Here are the Top 3 stories about solar industry happenings that Electrek readers got most excited about in 2023. In an agrivoltaic study I reported on in March, UCLA engineers put a semi-transparent solar roof on a greenhouse, and some pretty cool things happened with the roof and the plants. It may look…

When two new Montana wind farms come online, the state will have more nameplate capacity in wind than in coal. Nameplate capacity is the maximum rated output in megawatts when a source of power operates in optimal conditions. According to US Energy Information Administration (EIA) data, Montana coal plants provided 1,631 megawatts (MW) of…

Agrivoltaics – when land is used for agriculture and solar power generation – isn’t new to the US, but vertical agrivoltaics are. US solar developer iSun is working with German agrivoltaics company Next2Sun to install the US’s first vertical agrivoltaics system. Next2Sun installs bifacial solar panels on its patented vertical mounting system. It says its system is…

Duke Energy is piloting a floating solar farm in Florida – the state’s first – on an existing cooling pond in Polk County. The almost 1-megawatt (MW) floating solar array features more than 1,800 solar panels that float on top of two acres of the water’s surface on the pond – which used to…

ChargePoint had its first large-scale deployment of its new Express Plus Power Link 2000 DC fast-charging platform. The Power Link system, capable of delivering charging speeds up to 500kW, debuted as the charging hardware and software driving the Mercedes-Benz HPC NA public charging network. “With the deployment…

Photo by Sam Forson on Pexels.com The UK, which felt the punch of Storm Pia today, set a new wind energy generation record in just a half hour this morning, according to National Grid Electricity System Operator data. The wind energy generation record of 21.8 gigawatts (GW) of clean electricity was set between 8 and…

Danish renewables giant Ørsted just committed to building the world’s single-largest offshore wind farm, Hornsea 3. The world’s single-largest wind farm The 2.9 GW Hornsea 3, which is located 160 km (99 miles) off the Yorkshire coast, is expected to be completed at the end of 2027. It will be Ørsted’s third gigawatt-scale project in…

Photo by Los Muertos Crew on Pexels.com India’s Waaree Energies today announced that it will open its first US solar panel factory in the Houston area. The large solar panel manufacturer, which already supplies panels to the US, will open its factory in Brookshire, just east of Houston. It will have the initial capacity to…

A solar electric truck climbed the world’s highest volcano using solar power alone – and set a new world record for altitude for an EV. A Swiss team called Peak Evolution, which is sponsored by Austrian transport and logistics company Gebrüder Weiss, successfully climbed the western edge of Ojos del Salado, 6,500 meters above sea…

Reno, Nevada-based startup World4Solar‘s freestanding modular solar canopy can be installed in less than a day. December 19 update: I said I would update with prices when World4Solar released debuted this product, so I’m keeping my promise. Sort of. World4Solar announced the costs for the HelioWing 5, but not the HelioWing 7. (Yes, I…