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.
The ‘Silicon Module Super League’ (SMSL) members in 2015, Trina Solar, Canadian Solar, JinkoSolar, JA Solar, Hanwha Q CELLS and Yingli Green may have the largest module shipments and manufacturing capacity significantly higher than any other c-Si manufacturer but still lag behind others when it comes to R&D spending.
‘Solar Ready Vets’ is the US Department of Energy’s answer to the urgent demand in solar for highly-trained workers; pairing skilled military veterans with civilian job training in an industry eager to recruit. PV Tech spoke with graduate Logan Rozanski.
Remote schools in West Africa can suffer from high levels of dropouts, a lack of enthusiasm and low rates of literacy and numeracy, but solar technology is now offering a chance to reinvigorate some of the lowest performing schools. PV Tech visited a school that is benefiting from such solar and software installations in the Greater Accra region of Ghana.
On Friday in New York, the historic UN global climate agreement was officially signed by a host of world leaders, signifying the unified global effort to tackle one of the world’s most insurmountable environmental and economic issues.
Despite claims by the company and automatic acceptance by the mainstream media, SunEdison’s position as the ‘world's largest renewable energy developer’ almost came to fruition in 2015.
Midway across southern Ghana, near the historic port fishing town of Winneba, lies East and West Africa’s largest solar PV plant. Ghana suffers a severe energy deficit with only around 70% of the population having access to electricity, so it was welcome news that the project was connected to the grid at the end of last week. PV Tech visited the new project, built by China-based power firm BXC Ghana, just ahead of the Solar and Off-grid Renewables West Africa 2016 conference in Accra, Ghana.
GCL Systems Integration (hereafter ‘GCL’) has now been officially inducted into PV Tech’s exclusive Silicon Module Super League (SMSL) for 2016, with our team having previously alluded to aggressive capacity additions by the company in 2015.
Despite being technically bankrupt, Yingli Green as a NYSE listed company has been in stealth mode over its future viability since reporting third quarter 2015 results at the beginning of December last year.
In February, 2016 SolarCity, the largest residential solar PV installer in the US said in its fourth quarter 2015 earnings call that its ambitious 1GW Buffalo Riverbend manufacturing facility had been impacted by longer than expected equipment lead times, pushing some equipment installs into the second-half of 2016.
