California’s Antelope Valley enjoys plenty of sunshine and is seeing multilateral engagement between the solar industry and educational institutions.

China Sunergy Co. has announced that it will expand its manufacturing facility in the Jiangsu Province by one gigawatt (GW). The expansion will focus on the production of its Quasar cells.

Photovoltaic installation orders dry up in the Sydney area as solar companies shed staff and scale back their operations as the effects of the freeze of the feed-in tariff (FIT) scheme begins to bite and no electricity buy-back scheme replaces it.

Government plans for new nuclear power plants have been revealed in the UK, with eight sites named in its energy policy statements. The government has also released its Microgeneration Strategy, which focuses on non-financial barriers to microgeneration, including small-scale photovoltaic installations.

GE’s “Ecomagination: Powering Your Home” Challenge has resulted in $63 million of investment into home energy technology companies from GE and venture capital partners.

A lease option agreement has been signed between the County of San Bernadino and photovoltaic developer PVNavigator (PVN) to evaluate the potential for a large solar facility at the Barstow Sanitary Landfill site in central California. This is the second landfill agreement the company has made with the county.

U.S. and German photovoltaic and concentrated solar power (CSP) researchers are set to formally collaborate after a historic accord was signed today in Berlin, Germany. The signatories were from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) and the Helmholtz Gemeinschaft.

NRG Energy, Prologis and Bank of America Merrill Lynch have formed a consortium called Project Amp to install solar panels on 750 warehouse roofs.

A solar plane, Solar Impulse HB-SIA, has landed and is drawing major crowds at the Paris Air Show underway this week in the French capital. While certainly not the first solar aircraft, the Solar Impulse is the first airplane to be able to fly without fuel and capable of flying day and night.

A photovoltaic manufacturing site in Penang, Malaysia, is scheduled to be completed by the end of 2013, at a cost of €520 million. The facility will primarily serve the Asian solar market.