High costs of capital and low tariffs are causing extremely tight margins for solar developers in India. PV Tech caught up with Gaetan Tiberghien, principal investment officer, South Asia for International Finance Corporation (IFC), to discuss financing in the region.
It’s the globe’s second largest continent, home to the some of the world’s fastest growing economies, and it has supplied precious resources to nations for hundreds of years - so why do today’s solar PV businesses find it so difficult to succeed in Africa? PV Tech spoke with Jon Sarpong, president of PV developer and consultancy Avior Global, about the challenges and opportunities for PV companies eyeing up the African market.
Indian solar PV manufacturing is beginning to make headway after a significant module capacity increase in the last year. PV Tech caught up with Ivan Saha, president and chief technical officer of India-based manufacturer Vikram Solar for an industry update.
Headquartered in Toronto, Canada, Morgan Solar is one of the industry's last remaining concentrated PV firms. It recently appointed Celestica's Mike Andrade as its new CEO, who discussed with PV Tech the place for such technologies, that are traditionally more expensive and harder to scale than conventional PV.
SolarEdge's Lior Handelsman explains some of the thinking and development processes behind HD Wave, which the publicly-listed Israeli company believes represents a significant leap forward for inverter technology. The product was launched at the beginning of the year, when Handelsman said in another interview for PV Tech that inverters can now "evolve at the speed of electronics, not mechanics".
Tata Power agreed to buy Welspun Renewable Energy earlier this month for INR92.49 billion (US$1.42 billion). Against the backdrop of fiercely competitive bidding, Mercom Capital Group chief executive and co-founder Raj Prabhu, explains the scene of potential mergers and acquisitions in the Indian solar market.
GTM Research's Nicole Litvak discusses with PV Tech the reasons why the commercial market has remained fairly stagnant and unconsolidated in sharp contrast to the country's booming residential sector.
The non-profit, clean energy education group, formerly known as the Solar Electric Power Association, recently changed its name to the Smart Electric Power Alliance. Along with the name change, the company has realigned its core objectives, seeking no longer to focus on “solar in a vacuum” but on the evolution of solar within a network of other technologies and incentives.
India is targeting an ambitious 40GW rooftop solar by 2022 even after a slow start in this sector. Anand Nagarajan, founder of Dexler Energy, discusses the potential for solar rooftop technology in India, consumer attitudes and the intricacies of an unsubsidised industrial and commercial sector.
Last month Israeli inverter manufacturer SolarEdge revealed it had sold its 10 millionth power optimiser. With half of those shipped in 2015, there appears to have been a discernible change in attitudes recently toward module-level power technologies. SolarEdge’s Lior Handelsman explains why.
