India’s Ministry of New and Renewable Energy (MNRE) has proposed plans to turn 60 Indian cities into so-called “solar cities”. The region of Tripura, in north east India, located next door to Bangladesh, has been selected as a pilot to this scheme with an investment of Rs.452.32 crore, according to a ministry official. The MNRE is expected to bear 90% of the cost and the remaining would be shouldered by the Tripura government.
With plans to achieve a 100MW pipeline in 2012, Martifer Solar USA has reported a success at its 460kW system in Breckenridge, Colorado. The company claims the arrays have been consistently performing at an average of 10% above expectations since their commissioning in January.
Canadian Solar, Suntech Power, Trina Solar and Yingli Green’s almost immediate response to the EU anti-dumping complaints has triggered JA Solar’s rebuttal.
In response to the solar industry's ever-increasing pressure to drive down system costs, companies Ampt, KACO New Energy, LTi REEnergy and REFUsol have announced the launch of the HDPV (High Definition PV) Alliance. The HDPV Alliance will leverage open technology standards to optimize the design and deployment of inverters, cabling, combiners and associated labour costs to deliver a lower total system cost and higher performance. Companies that join the Alliance are able to offer differentiated value and make it easy for their customers to identify and source products featuring the HDPV advantage.
Allied Building Products, distributor of roofing materials, is now offering Siemens microinverters to solar contractors in the US, with stocking locations in Hawaii and New Jersey.
Kyocera has released, what the company deems to be, conclusive evidence that its solar modules show only 8.3% degradation after 20 years. The Atomic Energy and Alternative Energies Commission (CEA) used a sample from Kyocera’s 945W roof installation in the small village of Lhuis, Lyon, France, to test under laboratory conditions. The results demonstrate that the modules were still performing at 91.7% of their original maximum power output.
Xcel Energy, a US electricity and natural gas company, has announced an end to its Solar Rewards scheme. Xcel Energy was seeking approximately 4.5MW of generation, from systems less than or equal to 500kW; it received approximately three times that amount in applications in about 30 minutes after the program opened at 8a.m. last week. Acceptance of applications ended after an hour.
Three months of deliberations has resulted in the Chinese Ministry of Commerce (MOFCOM) finding six US renewable energy initiatives guilty of flouting World Trade Organization laws. MOFCOM is dictating it will take necessary measures to force the US to cancel these initiatives in order to bring it inline with WTO statute.
Owning to July’s communiqué that Italy had reached its €6 billion limit, bringing into force the mooted Conto Energia V, Italian energy agency (GSE) has opened the first six-month register for PV systems over 12kW. The register will open at 9am August 20 and close at midnight on September 18 and capped at €140 million.
Non-governmental organization (NGO), the Centre for Science and Environment (CSE), is accusing US thin-film manufacturers of using a loop hole in the Indian government’s renewable energy scheme to “ruin the Indian domestic PV industry”. Jawaharlal Nehru National Solar Mission (JNNSM) initiative mandates a domestic content requirement, however, only for crystalline PV and not for thin-film.
