The Indian solar industry expressed shock recently when it emerged that multiple Chinese PV manufacturers had been reneging on supply contracts to India, but it seems this strategy may have been a comeuppance for historic behaviour on the part of some Indian developers.
Yesterday’s record-breaking bid opening in Saudi Arabia for 300MW of solar has grabbed headlines, including on PV Tech, but while the exact parameters of the RfP remain covert, the bid levels have sparked debate about whether such low prices can be possible without some kind of escalating tariff mechanism or other distortion.
With many of the top-20 module suppliers to the solar industry now having multi-GW shipment volumes, attention has turned firmly to assessing metrics that companies can use to benchmark the quality and reliability of shipped products against their competitors.
With limited cell capacities in the handful of countries exempt from the US Section 201 case, where could the US realistically source compliant modules from and who are the real c-Si winners and losers. Mark Osborne and John Parnell report.
Some of the industry is at loggerheads and many feel local manufacturing must be intrinsic to the 100GW by 2022 solar target, but the value of trade duties is under dispute.
Finlay Colville, head of market research at Solar Media, discusses how a 300MW solar farm, nearly four-times the current largest in the UK, is nearing planning, pushing the country's large-scale pipeline towards 4GW.
The results of our first (last) ever attempt at polling are in and they are very much predictable. But regardless of popular opinion, it's worth considering the views of those not speaking up. While the industry is largely against Section 201 trade measures, that alone is not the most likely reason the ITC might choose not to recommend hefty tariffs come November.
PV Tech reached its own little milestone of having reported and analysed the R&D spending habits of the same 12 key PV module manufacturers for 10 years. The results have just been published in sister technical journal Photovoltaics International as part of the annual leaders and laggards of R&D spending for 2016.
The significance of PV-Tech’s forthcoming conference in Kuala Lumpur – PV ModuleTech 2017 – has just moved to a new level, with the key company executives from all members of the Silicon Module Super League (SMSL) giving presentations on stage about the quality, reliability, and performance of their solar modules.
Once upon a time, it was relatively easy to verify a PV module manufacturer’s shipment claims and therefore any market share gains or shipment milestone claims as the majority of leading companies were public listed entities.
