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.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel has dealt a blow to Germany’s flagging downstream sector by questioning its credibility as a commercially viable energy source and calling for a further cut to its feed-in tariff.
Fronius International and Obvius Holdings have formed a strategic partnership for the development of a monitoring solution that provides “plug-and-play integration.” Fronius’ IG Plus and CL inverters are now supported by Obvius’ AcquiSuite, AcquiSuite EMB and AcquiLite EMB.
As of October 1, Solarwatt had extended the product warranty for all of its solar modules to 10 years. The company stated that for the 10-year period it would guarantee all of its delivered modules to be free of material and processing defects that would affect their operation.
The Meyer Burger takeover of Roth & Rau is on its way to becoming more of a reality as the management board team has undergone a reshuffle, and former Roth & Rau chairman Dr. Dietmar Roth has left his former role for a seat on the Meyer Burger board of directors.
Enecsys advised that it has partnered with Ember for the company’s wireless ZigBee communications, which will be incorporated into Enecsys microinverters so that households and business can better monitor and improve their systems’ performance. The ZigBee system-on-chip (SoC) and ZigBee PRO software have been added to Enecsys’ SMI microinverter series and should allow for real-time and historical data to be populated for its users.
BrightSource Energy has supplied its solar thermal technology for use at Chevron Technology Ventures’ enhanced oil recovery (EOR) project in Coalinga, California. The 29MW thermal “Solar-to-Steam” facility uses 3,822 heliostats, each consisting of two 10x7-foot mirrors mounted to a six-foot steel pole, which are focused on a boiler on top of a 327-foot tall solar tower.
