Despite boardroom spats, technology deviation, and financial concerns, Solar Millennium said that Hannes Kuhn has resigned from company's supervisory board with immediate effect.
Former VP of sales and business development at SolarCity, John Lefebvre, has been appointed president of Suntech America, now responsible for boosting Suntech's market position throughout North and South America. The US is a key market for Suntech, and, as market leader in 2011, the company expects to benefit from the US market's doubling this year.
RENA has launched its ‘monoTEX,’ IPA-free alkaline texturing process for solar cells. has established that this process is key for their breakthrough mono-crystalline cell concept. RENA’s combination of pre-cleaning and monoTEX texturing is claimed to provide a homogeneous surface with a distribution of pyramid sizes that, together with an optimization of the complete process sequence, enables a cell efficiency that is well beyond the 20% mark. RENA claims to be ‘best in class’ with the monoTEX texturing and has already more than 200 million wafers production experience at different customer plants such as California-based TetraSun.
Overcapacity is continuing to take its toll on PV module prices, according to the latest ‘Solarbuzz Quarterly’ report. Factory gate prices are claimed to be down 33% year-on-year and will fall a further 18% in the fourth quarter of 2011. Solarbuzz warns that module inventory levels could reached almost 22GW by the end of next year if production is not cut drastically. The backdrop for the supply and demand imbalance is installation levels that are proving to be weaker than expected.
Damage limitation to JinkoSolar’s image and reputation kicked into gear during a hastily arranged telephone conference call to provide its side of the fluoride chemical waste leak at its cell manufacturing facility in Haining City, Zhejiang Province, China. The leak into a local small river sparked demonstrations and damage to offices and vehicles at the plant that had been picked-up by the international mainstream media.
Softening end-market demand and production overcapacity have led to a significant decline in new PV equipment bookings in the second quarter of 2011, according to SEMI’s latest version of its ‘Worldwide Photovoltaic Equipment Market Statistics Report.’ Equipment billings reached US$2.03 billion for the quarter ended on June 30, 2011, an increase of 17% quarter-over-quarter, after declining 19% in the first quarter. However, bookings, a leading indicator were down 18%, compared with the previous quarter to US$1.79 billion. SEMI said that the book-to-bill ratio dipped below parity to 0.88 for the first time in the past six quarters.
China Datang is planning to use solar modules from Tianwei New Energy for the first time on a 10MW ground-mounted project project in Delhi, Qinghai Province, China. The module supply agreement requires Tianwei to ship between September and October the full 10MW of modules directly to the project.
Several days of angry demonstrations by local residents after a fluoride leak from a JinkoSolar-owned cell manufacturing plant have led to the plant closing. According to reports, the plant had been warned of environmental noncompliance earlier this year, but after residents broke through gates, overturning cars and ransacking offices, local government officials have ordered the closure of the plant in Hongxiao, China.
Berlin-based White Owl Capital had acquired 5 PV power plants built by Gehrlicher Solar Italia, a subsidiary of Gehrlicher Solar for an undisclosed sum. Using First Solar CdTe thin film modules and SMA inverters, all the plants were grid connected before feed-in tariffs were reduced at the end of August, 2011. The projects, with a total power of 10.4MWp, are situated in the regions of Lombardy and Emilia-Romagna in northern Italy.
The first to tout new order bookings directly from the EU PVSEC event, held last week in Hamburg, Germany goes to Singulus Technologies. The company noted that it received an unspecified number of orders for its ‘VITRUM’ wet-chemical processing system for thin film solar modules.
