Sunday, 5 July 2026

Four new members joined the Alabama Public Service Commission (PSC) under appointments Governor Kay Ivey made on Wednesday, and two will take office in January as the first Black commissioners the body has ever seated. In its 145-year run, the PSC has never had a Black commissioner, Inside Climate News reported.

Those appointments precede a larger overhaul. A law passed this year grows the commission from three seats to seven starting in 2027, and future members will win their seats by congressional district instead of statewide ballots.

The same law hands the next governor power to name Alabama's first secretary of energy, a cabinet-level post that will set the PSC agenda. Reversing that secretary on questions currently held by commissioners will demand a vote of five of the seven members.

Both sitting commissioners, Jeremy Oden and Chris Beeker III, cleared the way for the shift after losing their reelection bids in Republican primaries this year.

Alabama Power anchors the docket the reshaped commission will inherit. Residential customers of the utility carry the highest total electric bills among the country's 100 largest utilities, driven by above-average rates and heavy electricity use, a 2025 Inside Climate News analysis found. Rate cases and resource decisions affecting those bills now pass through a commission that will nearly double in size before 2027.

Two community solar projects built by Nexamp and TurningPoint Energy are now running on a reclaimed coal mine site in Woodford County, Illinois. The Minonk site sits on a mine that worked the Colchester Coal Seam from the 1870s to the 1940s.

The two arrays can produce 9.8 megawatts and hold nearly 17,000 panels across roughly 40 acres. Output feeds ComEd's grid, and Nexamp says every solar module was manufactured in the US.

More than 650 participants have signed up, leaving the projects close to fully subscribed. About 450 residential customers take power from one array, while roughly 200 low-income households are served by the second. Rush University Medical Center and the College of DuPage together take 40% of the projects' electricity offtake, according to the developers.

The residential and low-income mix matches the community solar carve-outs Illinois built into its subscriber rules. Anchoring 40% of demand with two large institutional buyers gives the arrays a firm revenue base while smaller subscribers fill the rest.

All of that output now routes into ComEd's grid from a site that once shipped coal.

Europe added 25.3 GWh of energy storage in 2025, and InfoLink Consulting, as reported by pv magazine, expects annual additions to reach 35.1 GWh in 2026.

The forecast lands as the battery supply chain enters what InfoLink Consulting CEO Corrine Lin calls a new phase marked by structural tensions, with prices across the chain no longer moving in a single direction and cost pass-through turning less linear.

That break from the old pattern matters most where upstream input costs and delivered system prices stop tracking together. Developers writing fixed-price engineering, procurement and construction contracts carry more exposure when the two move out of sync, according to Lin's read of the market via pv magazine.

The jump from 25.3 GWh in 2025 to a projected 35.1 GWh raises annual procurement volume across the continent, testing that pricing dynamic at scale.

A team from Sun Yat-sen University and the China University of Mining and Technology has built a recycling route for retired crystalline silicon PV modules that pulls high-purity silicon, silver, and copper out of a single waste stream, according to a paper in the Journal of Cleaner Production. The method runs in three linked stages: heavy-liquid separation of mixed materials, solar-cell etching, and solder-strip etching, pv magazine reports.

The opening stage floats and sinks the shredded module fractions in a zinc bromide solution, with the density tuned to split the streams apart. That step captured more than 98% of the solar cells and nearly all the solder strips before any chemical treatment.

Etching then cleaned up the separated fractions. The authors report silicon at 99.997% purity and copper strips at 99.99% purity, alongside silver chloride at 99.64% purity recovered at 80.07% efficiency.

A life cycle assessment put the carbon footprint of the route at 80.42% below conventional treatment.

The economics split sharply across the three steps. Heavy-liquid separation runs at a slight loss of -$0.04/kg, while solar-cell treatment returns $7.76/kg and solder-strip treatment $4.81/kg, meaning the metal-bearing back end carries the value.

Tesla is offering homeowners in Massachusetts and Connecticut a discount on a Powerwall home battery if they agree to let the unit support the grid, Canary Media reported. The company announced the virtual power plant (VPP) program this week.

The discount is conditional. Buyers who take the lower price commit to letting their backup battery dispatch to the grid when called.

Tesla is the US market leader in residential energy storage. The two-state offer channels that position into a pooled model, where household batteries can be aggregated and dispatched together during demand peaks.

A virtual power plant links distributed batteries into a single resource that grid operators can call on when supply tightens. In Massachusetts and Connecticut, delivering the incentive as an upfront hardware discount rather than ongoing payments lowers the entry cost for homeowners weighing residential storage.

For customers in the two states, the trade is a cheaper battery in exchange for shared control of it during grid stress. For the local grid, each enrolled Powerwall adds capacity that can be tapped without new generation.

Eavor Technologies' flagship geothermal project began sending electricity to Germany's grid late last year, Canary Media reports.

The project runs on a closed-loop system that circulates working fluid through sealed underground pipes instead of drawing heat from naturally permeable hot rock. That design lets developers pursue geothermal outside the volcanic zones where conventional wells depend on shallow high-temperature reservoirs.

The company had completed the first of four planned loops at the site when the electricity started flowing, with the other three still to be built.

The German connection marks a commercial-scale grid feed-in from the closed-loop approach, which had run at pilot scale before this. Conventional geothermal output has clustered in places where hot resources sit near the surface, conditions Germany's deep sedimentary basins do not offer, pushing developers there toward engineered and closed-loop methods.

Canary Media links the milestone to what it calls a rocky start, saying the first loop reached the grid after execution problems. The report did not include output figures, cost, or a completion date for the remaining three loops.

Eavor has not disclosed the operating loop's capacity factor or delivered electricity volumes, nor a timeline for loops two through four. Those details would show whether the closed-loop design can scale against conventional geothermal and firm low-carbon supply competing for German offtake.

IPVF and TU Delft have reached 31% power conversion efficiency on a 4 cm² two-terminal perovskite-silicon tandem solar cell, according to pv magazine.

The two-terminal monolithic cell pairs nanotextured silicon heterojunction bottom cells built at TU Delft with perovskite top cells that IPVF deposited using ambient air slot-die coating, a route both teams see as friendlier to high-volume manufacturing than vacuum-based methods.

The figure lifts the same team's earlier mark. It had reported 24% efficiency on 10 cm² monolithic tandem devices that used planar silicon heterojunction bottom cells from France's CNRS - École Polytechnique.

Gilles Goaer, chief technology officer at IPVF, tied the 31% result on the 4 cm² two-terminal cell to manufacturing steps that are "compatible with industrial scale-up".

IPVF is also working with French solar manufacturer Voltec Solar on perovskite-silicon tandem solar panels.

Canada's Bruce unit 3 has returned to commercial operation more than seven months ahead of schedule, World Nuclear News reported. The reactor entered its Major Component Replacement outage in March 2023 and had been slated to come back in January 2027.

The unit was reconnected to the grid in the early hours of 3 June, after which Bruce Power ran power ascension and completed the final testing and approvals for commercial operation.

During the work, Bruce Power and its partners set a Candu refurbishment record for calandria tube removal, finishing that step 11 days early. Eric Chassard, President and Chief Executive Officer of Bruce Power, oversaw a project the company expects to yield a refund of about CAD150 million, or about USD108 million, to Ontario's Independent Electricity System Operator on the basis of its performance.

The Major Component Replacement projects sit within Bruce Power's Life-Extension Program, which is refurbishing units 3 to 8 to keep the site running into the 2060s. The program supports some 22,000 jobs annually through direct and indirect activity.