Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers (D) announced on Tuesday that the state had joined the U.S. Climate Alliance, making it the 20th state, plus Puerto Rico, to pledge to uphold the Paris climate agreement goals. Momentum behind local-level climate action continues to grow, and since the start of the year, three others have also joined the alliance: Michigan, New Mexico, and Illinois. This comes as federal action on climate change under the Trump administration continues to slide backwards.

See what you need to know about selling a house with solar panels at Maximum Real Estate Exposure.

A trend of planting wildflowers on solar sites could maintain habitat for disappearing bees and butterflies

Britain will get more of its electricity from renewable energy sources than fossil fuels as early as next year, according to a new report from the energy analysts group EnAppSys. The transformation is being driven by a surge in offshore wind farms currently under construction or about to begin operating, CleanTechnica reported.

For more than half a century, a coal plant in the city of Holyoke, Massachusetts spewed pollution into the air. Now, the plant is closed, and 17,000 solar panels and a battery storage system–the largest in the state–send clean power to the grid. Later this year, as the coal plant’s smokestacks come down, the rest of the site will be developed for new industry.

“It’s not just a dream that one day you’ll be able to farm without fossil fuels. It’s real. It’s here,” says Tony Neale.

From an economic perspective, the core challenge of climate change is that the standard way of doing things — the dirty, carbon-intensive way — is typically cheaper than newer, lower-carbon alternatives. Solving the problem means driving down the cost of those alternatives. Simple, right? But in practice, it’s not so simple. In fact, we still don’t have a very good grasp on exactly what drives technological innovation and improvement. Is it basic scientific research? Early-stage R&D? Learning by doing? Economies of scale?

It seems we jumped the gun when we called the SolarImpact the world's first ocean-going solar yacht based just off its CAD renders. There's another company out there with boats in the water, and the Silent 55 can cruise for up to 100 miles (160 km) per day for weeks at a time on solar power alone.

NovaSolix hopes to use carbon nanotubes to capture a broader portion of the sun's electromagnetic spectrum, a process they hope will yield a 90% efficient solar cell at a tenth of the cost of modern solar modules.

Juan Shannon is in the process of turning the grounds of Thompson Elementary School — abandoned for two decades — into Parker Village, a $5 million smart neighborhood and urban farming operation.

If other states follow the California proposal to require solar on all new home builds, the United States could have three times as much solar power as it does now, reckon analysts at Environment America who have produced a new report on the issue. Installing solar panels on all new US homes built from 2020 to 2026 would result in more solar energy capacity than the entire country currently has installed, the analysts say. “By 2045, installations on new homes would total 203 gigawatts, or 3.5 times as much solar capacity as the nation currently has installed,” the authors calculate.

Scientists are developing flexible, thin-films that will be more resilient and have wider uses than current solar technology

See-through solar materials that can be applied to windows represent a massive source of untapped energy and could harvest as much power as bigger, bulkier rooftop solar units, scientists report today in Nature Energy. Led by engineering researchers at Michigan State University, the authors argue that widespread use of such highly transparent solar applications, together with the rooftop units, could nearly meet U.S. electricity demand and drastically reduce the use of fossil fuels.

NovaSolix hopes to use carbon nanotubes to capture a broader portion of the sun's electromagnetic spectrum, a process they hope will yield a 90% efficient solar cell at a tenth of the cost of modern solar modules. By John Weaver.

Electric vehicles enable owners to have more choices for the sources of energy to power their vehicles.

True story.

The sunbeams falling on the globe can create energy that is more than adequate to satisfy global energy requirements

An Australian-first trial is creating ‘green’ hydrogen gas made from renewables to power Sydney homes. Energy company Jemena has partnered with the Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA) in a $15 million trial to convert excess solar and wind power into hydrogen gas, which will be stored and used in Jemena’s New South Wales gas network.

Could allow us to generate electricity using supercritical carbon dioxide.

As hurricanes tore apart Caribbean islands and crippled their energy infrastructure, renewables consistently outperformed fossil fuels.