Victor Lee, executive director of TFG Radiant Group, will now serve as Ascent Solar Technologies’ president and CEO. TFG Radiant owns approximately 20% of the outstanding shares of Ascent and this past December agreed to purchase an additional 21% of the outstanding stock in a private transaction. Lee will remain as a board member for the company, but advised that he takes on the roles of president and CEO voluntarily and without any compensation.
PPG Industries advised that its flat glass business in Fresno will be expanding its production capability in order to better allow the manufacturing of the company’s Solarphire PV glass. The move aims to serve solar customers throughout California, the West Coast and even Asia with a faster shipping timeframe.
According to Polyera, the Newport Corporation’s PV cell lab has confirmed that Polyera’s polymer/fullerene OPV cell has achieved a 9.1% power conversion efficiency with an inverted bulk heterojunction architecture using ActivInk PV 2000 semiconductor material. The company said its active layer materials are able to be deposited using a wider range of film thickness without lower cell efficiency, which is said to improve yields and simplify manufacturing.
DuPont and Suntech Power Holdings announced that they had entered into a strategic agreement with an overall goal of augmenting the supply of PV materials and technologies in the global solar energy market. The companies agreement will specifically focus on technology advancements, supply chain optimization cost reduction initiatives and DuPont’s Tedlar polyvinyl fluoride film supply.
Danfoss Solar Inverters and MimtaSolar have entered an agreement, which will see MimtaSolar distribute Danfoss’s TLX and ULX inverter series throughout Turkey. The company will offer its single phase products in the 1.8kW to 5.4kW range and three phase products in the 6kW to 15kW range. The Danfoss inverter line is slated to be integrated into Mimta’s turnkey PV systems.
Sunlogics Power, a subsidiary of Salamon Group, was named the senior secured creditor of Arise Technologies. The company additionally noted that it is consulting on Arise’s day-to-day operations of its systems business.
The Ontario Superior Court of Justice gave Timminco, and its subsidiary Bécancour Silicon, an extension of the Companies’ Creditors Arrangement Act stay of proceedings. The stay proceeds will now be allowed to continue until April 30.
SolarCity has appointed Toby Corey, co-founder and former president and COO of USWeb, as its new chief revenue officer. In his role at SolarCity, Corey will aim to change the ways in which consumers, businesses and government organizations convert to cleaner energy, at a lower cost, through the means of various integrated solutions.
AQT Solar advised that using a low cost and production friendly sputter deposited copper-zinc-tin-sulfide (CZTS) thin-film solar cell, it had achieved high efficiencies. The company noted that the same manufacturing-ready processes and platforms used for its CIGS 2.0 solar cells was dually acceptable for CZTS and dubbed the term CIGS 3.0 for its future CZTS products.
ESA Renewables advised that it had not only completed its latest 500kW PV rooftop array in North Carolina, but has also sold the system, for an undisclosed amount, to Holocene. The 500kW array spreads over 55,867 square feet and uses 2,016 panels from Canadian Solar. Electricity from the array will be sold to Progress Energy Carolinas.
