The Sweetwater Union High School District and SunPower Corp. (Nasdaq: SPWR) celebrated the installation of 3.3 megawatts of high efficiency SunPower solar power systems at six district schools on Friday. 

San Diego Gas & Electric and Alarm.com will discuss opportunities emerging from their cooperative thermostat program in the opening keynote "Partnering for Success in Home Energy Management" at the fourth annual Smart Energy Summit in San Antonio, Feb. 25-27. 

According to a report, third-party-owned solar delivered more than $938 million to the California economy in 2012, marking a single year record. San Diego, the report also said, was the state’s top city for the year in total value of home solar contracts, third-party-owned or not. 

A plan to expand training, hire staff and promote the hiring of local residents for the building of clean energy projects in the Imperial Valley has led to an additional investment in the Imperial Electrical Training Center by the center's two biggest supporters. 

Politically, environmentalism has had a few good months in the United States. Hurricane Sandy put the words “climate change” back in the national vocabulary. Republican attempts to attack Democrats for waging a “war on coal” failed to win many votes in states like Virginia and Ohio on Election Day. In his second inaugural address, President Barack Obama made climate action a priority. A climate rally in Washington is being planned for later this month, and the president has committed to conducting a “national conversation” on the subject. 

The final day of events at the 2013 Distributech Conference & Exhibition capped three days of roundtable discussions, speaker panels and exhibits sharing the latest in advanced technology available to utilities. Effective adapatation to distributed generation of solar power wasn't left out of the discussion. 

As November’s general election creates numerous possibilities for policy change both in San Diego and across the country, a group of executives from companies and groups involved in the expansion of solar energy systems discussed the state of their economies at a Daily Transcript roundtable. 

In the aftermath of the summer bankruptcy of the government-backed California solar panel maker Solyndra, expectations among renewable energy wonks, who describe the company’s failure as an outlier among many successes, remain generally high. But some policy research analysts are more skeptical — not doubtful, but still skeptical. 

When entering San Diego's business community about 30 years ago, Clint Walker’s aim had nothing to do with being in the solar business. His success as the co-founder and president of Southwestern Solar Systems since his entrance to the business in 2009 came about in much the same fashion his other major endeavors have. 

When Cecilia Aguillon, director of marketing and government relations for Kyocera Solar Inc., immigrated to the United States from El Salvador as a teen, she grew into a young adult with a lofty goal in mind: to save the world. 

Some people look at buildings and see a combination of wood, steel and mortar with a number of things inside to make them more comfortable and workable — lighting, computers and maybe a few windows, even if they can't be opened.