Dealing with the acute lack of capital spending across the PV supply chain, major equipment supplier Meyer Burger is consolidating its production and technology operations after several years of leading an acquisition trail. The company said it would focus operations at four main production locations and two solar technology centres worldwide.
In response to the solar industry's ever-increasing pressure to drive down system costs, companies Ampt, KACO New Energy, LTi REEnergy and REFUsol have announced the launch of the HDPV (High Definition PV) Alliance. The HDPV Alliance will leverage open technology standards to optimize the design and deployment of inverters, cabling, combiners and associated labour costs to deliver a lower total system cost and higher performance. Companies that join the Alliance are able to offer differentiated value and make it easy for their customers to identify and source products featuring the HDPV advantage.
Allied Building Products, distributor of roofing materials, is now offering Siemens microinverters to solar contractors in the US, with stocking locations in Hawaii and New Jersey.
Kyocera has released, what the company deems to be, conclusive evidence that its solar modules show only 8.3% degradation after 20 years. The Atomic Energy and Alternative Energies Commission (CEA) used a sample from Kyocera’s 945W roof installation in the small village of Lhuis, Lyon, France, to test under laboratory conditions. The results demonstrate that the modules were still performing at 91.7% of their original maximum power output.
Sungevity revealed that over the past three months it has welcomed David Dunlap, COO, Steve Atherton, CTO, Walter Conroy, general counsel and Liz Ludwig, VP of corporate business development to its executive management team. Dunlap’s newly created COO position manages the company’s customer-facing operation functions with Dunlap coming to Sungevity after serving as executive VP of operations and client services at Inside Track, an educational services company.
E.ON Climate & Renewables is heading to bigger pastures. The company advised that it is expanding its US solar operations and moving its global solar headquarters to San Francisco, California’s Financial District. EC&R expects for its relocation to be completed in October.
Clean Power Finance and Soligent announced a new partnership, which will see Clean Power Finance’s products offered to Soligent’s network of solar contractors. The companies look to the agreement as being able to help Soligent offer its solar contractors, what they consider to be, the best payment terms in the industry while cutting the cost and time of sales and financing paperwork.
California’s Independent System Operator (ISO) confirmed that in recent weeks the state has reached and surpassed a major milestone – twice. Over 1,000MW of solar power were generated across the state setting new US records. ISO noted that the state’s recent heat wave helped propel California’s solar production.
According to a monthly report from Italian grid operator Terna SpA, solar power provided 8.4% of total Italian electricity demand in August. It also revealed that electricity generated from PV during that month grew by 49.2%, from 1,501 GWh in August 2011 to 2,240 GWh in August 2012.
A new initiative is being launched by micro-inverter pioneer, Enphase Energy to boost the use of its technology in commercial PV projects at SPI 2012. The new program includes cash rewards for installers undertaking commercial-scale PV projects.
