News

The Tucson Airport Authority (TAA) and Tucson Electric Power (TEP) will be coming together for a second time since 2007 for the installation of a solar energy project. TAA’s board of directors approved a 20-year land lease with TEP, where TEP will pay a fixed rental rate of US$46,716.50 per year to lease 50 acres of land south of the Tucson International Airport.

Columbus, Indiana is set to welcome a new kid in town found in the form of NuSun. The company is a solar panel manufacturer that prides itself in the building and assembling of U.S. made nanocoated crystalline-silicon PV panels. NuSun will be putting US$8.9 million towards the purchase and set-up of their new Indiana facility, which is slated to begin production in mid-2011.

IB Vogt and Sonthalia have renewed their partnership wherein IB Vogt will embark on a concept study and provide engineering services for a PV factory in Falta Solar Hub area of India. The PV factory is expected to be completed between 2011 and 2012 and is part of the Solar Mission that the Indian government approved for the generation of 20MW of solar power in India by 2022. The size of the contract has not been disclosed by either party.

The 37th IEEE Photovoltaic Specialist Conference (PVSC) will be celebrating its 50th anniversary in 2011 and has opened its call for papers to be presented at the June 19th through June 24th conference in Seattle, Washington. Authors who wish to submit their papers should provide a technical abstract by the February 21, 2011 deadline. Details on the abstract submission process can be found here.

At its recently held ‘Supplier Conference,’ Yingli Green awarded Amtech Systems with its “Special Contribution Award” for excellence in optimizing the efficiency and productivity of Yingli’s cell manufacturing operations in Baoding, Hebei province, China. According to Amtech, this was the highest honour given to Yingli’s business partners during its First Supplier Conference.

Chinese state company Lu'an Group has secured a wafer and polysilicon supply deal with LDK Solar as it ramps its first 60MW solar cell turnkey factory supplied by centrotherm photovoltaics. Shanxi Lu'an Photovoltaic Technology Co, a subsidiary of Lu’an Group is also planning to expand capacity to 360MW in the future.

Global electricity supplier Tenesol, owned by Total and EDF, has completed the first 'positive-energy' production facility in France. The project, which generates up to three and a half times more energy than it consumes, is located near Avignon, and is fully owned by Isoltop.

SunPower and Kern Community College District have opened a 1.1MW solar power system at Bakersfield College. The system, which will supply one-third of the college’s electricity, took five months to build and features a 3.1-acre parking lot canopy structure with nearly 3,700 PV panels.

Having completed its planned cell manufacturing capacity expansion to 800MW, Neo Solar Power (NSP) expects capacity to be expanded to over 1.2GW in 2011. The capacity expansion is 200MW more than previously guided at the beginning of the year. Strong demand despite the capacity increase from 240MW in 2009 highlights the company’s confidence in the market growing next year.

SolarEdge Technologies has chosen One Network to market and install its PowerBoxes, PV monitoring portal and three-phase solar inverters. One Network has installed 7MW of PV and tracking equipment in France in 2010 and hopes its agreement with SolarEdge will see it break the 10MW barrier next year.