Illinois Renewable Energy Conference 2026: The Conversations I’m Watching The Illinois Renewable Energy Conference (ILREC) returns October 19–20 in Bloomington-Normal, and this year’s agenda reflects just how quickly the energy conversation in Illinois is changing. We’re no longer talking primarily about deploying more solar and wind. We’re talking about whether the grid can keep up…

Some projects forgive mistakes. Carports do not. One wrong assumption about soil, one structural detail overlooked, one steel price swing between bid and build, one buried obstruction nobody flagged or knew about, and any one of those can wipe out a project’s margin. Together they can sink a company. Carports are one of the fastest…

The 54,000-square-foot Victory Pickleball looks ordinary from the parking lot. Inside, fifteen indoor pickleball courts host leagues, lessons, and open play seven days a week. Hiding on the southern roof is a 250kW solar array, while on a pad behind the building, a 2.12 MWh lithium iron phosphate battery is finishing commissioning. Together, these two…

At an event celebrating the opening of its new Chicago headquarters, leading community solar developer Nexamp highlighted how Illinois is setting a national benchmark by rapidly scaling renewable energy while deeply embedding equity, labor standards, and inclusive workforce development into the core of its clean energy transition. On June 24, Nexamp, the nation’s largest community…

In the wake of winter storms Elliott and Fern, utilities in the Tennessee Valley have taken different approaches toward building resilience, offering examples to those still planning for the next storm. Billion-dollar weather disasters now strike the United States every 19 days, up from every 90 days in the 1980s. That shift explains why the…

Storage has moved from add-on to anchor. Here is how to build the muscle to develop and install commercial battery projects. For most of the last decade, C&I solar installers treated battery storage as a value-add. That era is over. In 2026, storage is becoming THE DEAL at a growing share of C&I sites, and…

AI automation, fixed-price engineering, and globally distributed talent are redefining how commercial and industrial solar projects move from concept to construction—and the results are stunning. When Illinois-based Greenlink Energy Solutions decided to expand into multi-megawatt commercial and industrial (C&I) solar and storage, the company faced the same bottlenecks plaguing much of the U.S. EPC market:…