The Global Solar Council (GSC) is progressing in leaps and bounds as the first unified international voice of the solar industry. This week, it announced its founding corporate members and the launch of the Global Council Leadership Forum.
This article reveals the most important PV manufacturers and suppliers to the solar industry in 2016. The new analysis and methodology explains exactly which companies are currently controlling, shaping and influencing all metrics related to upstream manufacturing trends and final end-market module shipments.
By any ‘normal’ metrics, PV thin-film equipment and module producer Hanergy Thin Film Power Group (Hanergy TF) remains in a dire financial position after reporting a non-cash loss of around US$1.58 billion in 2015 and its biggest customer and parent company, Hanergy Holdings and its affiliates failed to make due payments of around US$680 million.
A key theme of the Berlin Energy Transition Dialogue conference last week was how Germany’s Energiewende (‘energy transition’) has not only proven how to foster an explosion of renewable generation capacity through support schemes, but also how to integrate those renewables. Grid operators from Germany and Denmark discussed questions of feasibility, past, present and future.
When Jan Marc Luchies from Tempress Systems (Amtech Systems) took to the stage last week – on the second day of the inaugural PVCellTech conference in Kuala Lumpur on 17 March 2016 – equipment supplier Amtech Systems capitalized on this platform with a press release to highlight a sharp uptick in new order intake for its PV operations over the past two months, taking the company’s solar bookings to approximately US$50 million since October 2015.
The second day of our inaugural PV CellTech conference in Kuala Lumpur on 17 March 2016 turned out to be equally informative, engaging and thought-provoking as day one. Among the many takeaways from the two-day event in general, the final session addressed head-on one of the most hotly debated issues in the industry today – the technology roadmap!
Recent shipment guidance from two leading members of the ‘Silicon Module Super League’ (SMSL), Trina Solar and JinkoSolar highlighted that the US solar PV market in 2016 was expected to show considerable growth but raised concerns over the possibility of a module oversupply situation when compiling a list of suppliers with their own US ambitions.
In common with every other PV market in the world as it matures, attaining grid parity for the technology is the ultimate goal for Japan. As an electricity market in general, meeting electrical supply with demand will of course become ever-more important.
