The US Department of Energy's National Renewable Energy Laboratory has officially certified an aperture efficiency of 17.1% for a solar cell fabricated using Nanosolar's non-vacuum, flexible foil technology. The tests were carried out on September 1 under standard test conditions of 1000W/m2 at 25°C.
Despite global oversupply and plummeting demand for PV modules and components, the UK solar market is still experiencing large install figures and has had an explosive year with 900% growth. Over 300MW has already been installed and forecasts suggest that 550MW could be deployed by the end of the current FiT period.
Martifer Solar has signed a contract to install a 22MW PV project in Portugal. The system, which will be the largest in Portugal when completed next year, is being commissioned by an unnamed client of BNP Paribas Clean Energy Partners.
Dow Chemical said it will make the commercial introduction of its Powerhouse solar roofing shingle to U.S. markets this month. The company plans a rolling launch into markets from California to the East Coast that will continue through 2012, starting with the debut program in Colorado in October.
Although better known as one of the world's largest suppliers of oil, Saudi Arabia continues to join the solar age with the inauguration of one of its first larger-scale photovoltaic power plants on October 1. The facility, a 500KW system comprised of Solar Frontier CI(G)S thin-film modules, is located on Farasan Island and was installed by the Saudi Electricity Co. and Solar Frontier's parent company, Showa Shell Sekiyu (which is partially owned by the Saudi Arabian Oil Co.).
SkyPower has secured a CAD$67 million revolving credit facility from Deutsche Bank, to be used to support the ongoing development of SkyPower's portfolio of utility-scale solar projects in Ontario, Canada. The facility is a letter credit facility innovatively structured to leverage the benefits of Ontario's green energy program and feed-in tariff.
Q-Cells North America has chosen Satcon Technology to supply an additional 40MW of its Prism Platform solutions for its Starwood solar project in Sault St Marie, Ontario. Q-Cells will use a combination of eight 1.25MW Equinox Prism Platforms and 24 1.25MW Solstice Prism Platform solutions at the site.
Bringing two decades of extensive experience in renewable energy, software and semiconductors to the company, solar industry veteran Cary Vandenberg has joined eIQ Energy’s executive team. As vice president of sales he will be responsible for strengthening its sales management, business development and international business in order to expand its product offerings and customer installations.
Optimising its PV5400 Series encapsulant for use with the Bürkle Ypsator multi-opening, three-stage laminator platform, DuPont Photovoltaic Encapsulants is claiming a breakthrough in productivity and a reduction in manufacturing costs for glass/glass thin-film solar module manufacturing.
A power outage on October 4 at REC’s polysilicon production facilities in Moses Lake, Washington, caused a complete shut down of operations. REC said there had been no safety issues, but it would be two to three weeks before full production could be resumed at pre-outage levels, resulting in a 500MT reduction to REC’s previously guided annual output at the facility of 19,000MT.
