The Green New Deal, a nonbinding resolution introduced by Senators Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ed Markey, has sparked a lot of discussion over the last several weeks. It is an ambitious plan to confront man-made climate change while also building an American economy that prioritizes renewable energy, innovation, and job creation. As such, it would have a tremendous impact on the solar energy industry (as well as other alternatives to fossil fuels) and the business community as a whole.

In our exploration of the “Green New Deal” and its impacts on the alternative energy industry, we examined how the environmental and economic components of the ambitious plan, proposed by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, would greatly enhance efforts to slow climate change and create new green jobs.

We’ve begun 2019 with the signs of climate change all around us - from a searing heatwave in Australia to the polar vortex recently unleashed across the Midwestern United States. As record-breaking events like these fail to convince some of our political figures that the threat of man-made climate change exists, many advocacy groups are pushing for sweeping governmental and regulatory action to confront it and mitigate future damages.

Solar-plus-storage, or the pairing of solar panels with batteries to store excess energy for future use, was a big topic in 2018. Many industry analysts predicted that the energy storage market in the United States would triple, and despite a few obstacles, it was a record-breaking year for new solar-plus-storage deployments. This trend is expected to continue in 2019 and beyond as energy storage becomes a vital component of consumer and utility solar installations.

As we enter the New Year, it’s important to look back over the struggles and successes of the previous year. And what a year it was for the solar industry! Despite a few major challenges, the U.S. solar sector stayed strong and made significant progress. Much of that forward motion is due to continually increasing public support for alternative energy technology and environmental stewardship.

The announcement of new 30% tariffs on imported solar panels in January, one of the early salvos in a trade war between the U.S. and China that has dominated headlines for the past year, put the solar industry on edge. Many solar professionals feared that our livelihoods, as well as the rapid momentum that solar power had gained over the past decade, would be jeopardized.