New Jersey and Pennsylvania are suffering from too much of a good thing. The two northeastern U.S. states have an oversupply of Solar Renewable Energy Certificates, also called SRECs. How they solve the problem will be instructive to utility boards, load-serving entities (LSEs), the solar industry; and governments, environmentalists, and electricity customers worldwide.

As was announced yesterday, the U.K. Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) has proposed yet more changes to the country’s photovoltaic feed-in tariffs (FITs). While the move has been described as a “huge step forward”, the industry says the impending tariff reductions will be “destructive”.

French electricity giant, Electricité de France (EdF) has announced its intention to acquire French solar producer, Photowatt, which filed for insolvency last November.

The traditionally semi-nomadic communities residing in southern Israel’s Negev desert have been the subject of disputes involving land, poverty and access for some time. A wave of initiatives to encourage villages to gain official recognition status, in order to profit from covering privately owned land with ground-mounted photovoltaic systems, is providing one method of aiding negotiations, despite the thorny social issues that come with them.

Germany’s Federal Environment Minister, Norbert Röttgen, has confirmed his attendance at the first “Energy Storage – Summit for the Storage of Renewable Energies” conference, scheduled to be held in Düsseldorf this March. During the event, he will address the issue of energy storage transformation.

Sanyo Solar (USA) LLC (SSU) has confirmed it will be closing its solar wafer and ingots facility down at the end of March. Around 140 employees will be affected.

SunConcept Group, which designs, installs and operates photovoltaic systems, has filed for insolvency with Germany’s Limburg District Court, after seven of its subsidiaries went bankrupt. A total of 100 employees have been affected.

An explanatory statement for the proposed law has now been presented. In it, the German Federal Ministry of Economics explains the planned steps to a new regulation of solar promotion. It remains unclear what the actual construction target of the Federal Government is, i.e. whether its 33.3 or 52 gigawatts (GW) of installed photovoltaic capacity.

Admitting that its photovoltaic business has been negatively affected by the weak market conditions in 2011, Roth & Rau has said it will close a number of its subsidiaries and “significantly” reduce its workforce by the end of the first half of 2012.

According to media reports, Bosch has delayed its plans to build a photovoltaic manufacturing facility in Penang, Malaysia, due to the turbulent solar market conditions.