The Los Angeles Times has reported that plans for a 970-acre solar PV farm near the Salton Sea in southeastern California have been shelved because of cost concerns. The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power made the move at the same time that City Council members indicated they were not going to back the project. The 55MW (AC) Niland project, announced in August, was to have been designed, engineered, and built by First Solar and equipped with the thin-film PV company's CdTe modules.
The Florida Public Service Commission has approved Tampa Electric's contract to purchase solar power supplied by the Florida Solar I project, a proposed 25MW solar electric generating station, for a 25-year period beginning in 2011. The system will be developed, built, and operated by Energy 5.0 on a 350-acre site in Polk County.
The race for higher photovoltaic module efficiencies has heated up and reached a new milestone, with the news that REC and the Energy Research Center of the Netherlands (ECN) have produced the first multicrystalline solar panels to hit 17.0% aperture-area conversion efficiency. The previous world record of 16.53% was announced by Suntech in late September, a result that had topped ECN and its partners' record of 16.4%, which was achieved earlier in the year.
In a bid to join the leading global producers of polysilicon, South Korean chemical manufacturer OCI plans to restart construction on a new poly plant inside its existing facility in Gunsan in January. The company (the former DC Chemical) will invest 1 trillion Won (approximately $858.5 million) in its Phase 3 (P3) factory, which will have an annual manufacturing capacity of 10,000 metric tons when commercial production begins in 2011, bringing its total annual poly capability to 27,000 metric tons.
Greek solar manufacturer HelioSphera will build a new photovoltaics module factory in Philadelphia’s historic Navy Yard mixed-use complex. Construction on the 160-MW production plant is scheduled to begin next year, with the factory coming online in 2011 and ramped to full capacity by 2012. Total cost of the project--which will benefit from a variety of state grants, loans, and tax breaks--will be approximately $500 million.
Hoku Materials and Jinko Solar have amended their polysilicon supply agreement. The companies said that, according to the terms of the amendment, both have agreed to reduce the term of the sales agreement by one year and to delay the first shipment date from Hoku's Pocatello, ID, plant from December 2009 to December 2010.
Sustainable Energy Technologies has begun deliveries of its solar power inverters to Tejados Industriales de Fotovoltaica (TIF), a leading Spanish EPC company, affiliated with Signet Solar, for a 1.8MW thin-film photovoltaic solar power plant located in the Blizkovice region of the Czech Republic. The Canadian inverter company says the installation marks the first time that its parallel system architecture power devices will be used in a megawatt-scale PV plant.
SunPower has completed one solar power project in California, and signed a deal for a series of others in Italy. The company finished a nonpenetrating, high-efficiency 1MW rooftop photovoltaic system on three buildings at Agilent Technologies’ headquarters in Santa Clara, CA, and also reached an agreement with Canadian energy company Etrion to build four solar power plants, totaling 4MW, in the Puglia region of southern Italy.
LDK Solar has signed an an agreement to sell a 15% ownership stake in its 15,000MT annualized capacity polysilicon plant in Xinyu City, China, to Jiangxi International Trust and Investment. The purchase price is approximately RMB1.5 billion (about US$219 million).
An 18-acre solar garden has been dedicated adjacent to Mars Chocolate's North America headquarters in Hackettstown, NJ. The 2.15MW (DC) power plant--which is comprised of more than 28,000 ground-mounted First Solar thin-film PV modules--is said to be the largest solar energy facility installed in New Jersey by a food manufacturing plant and the first project completed by Public Service Enterprise Group's PSEG Solar Source subsidiary.
