Plextronics has scored US$15 million during its financing round from Solvay, its largest minority shareholder, which will go towards stepping up the company’s technology development and delivery of its products to customers located worldwide. Plextronics is focused on developing polymer-based materials and technologies for key applications of printed electronics such as organic light emitting diodes (OLED) and organic PV cells (OPV).
Sustainable Energy Technology and Würth Solar will be working on a 90kW demonstration project, which will be installed at the Lycée Technique Louis Couffignal in Strasbourg, France. Using Sustainable Energy’s Paralex system design and Würth Solar’s CIS modules, the project is part of a cooperation agreement the two companies hold that aims to provide commercial and institution customers with “parallel” solutions for rooftops in France.
Q-Cells closed the sale of its Finsterwalde II and III PV power plants to Blue Forrest Solar Holding, a joint venture formed between DIF Infrastructure (DIF) and the NIBC European Infrastructure Fund (NIBC). The two plants have a combined installed capacity of 40MWp, which when added with the Finsterwalde I PV power plant Q-Cells sold in 2010, leads the entire site to have an 82MWp installed capacity.
Over the next few months Parabel is planning to install PV rooftop systems with a combined capacity of around 6MW in the German states of Brandenburg and Saxony.
Not wanting to be left in the shade in this record-breaking year for solar cells, First Solar has reported that its test cadmium-telluride (CdTe) cells have reached 17.3% conversion efficiencies. The figure – confirmed by NREL – trumps the previous record of 16.7%, which was achieved back in 2001.
Cadbury Cocoa Partnership is looking to bring photovoltaics to West Africa by installing solar lanterns and panels in Ghana. The scheme will see lanterns given to cocoa farmers and panels installed in rural schools across the country.
eIQ Energy has appointed Jerry Cutini as its new president and chief executive officer. Former board member Cutini will be charged with leading the company into a new stage of growth and preparing it for MW-scale deployment.
Ten years to the day that Q-Cells manufactured its first solar cell, the company has revealed that it is independently launching production of its Q.Peak high-performance module at its Solar Valley Thalheim headquarters. The new production line was commissioned on July 25 holding a 130MWp production capacity and will produce the Q.Peak modules from monocrystalline solar cells made in Germany.
In an effort to help India meet its Solar Mission goal of 1000MW of grid-connected solar power projects by 2013, Thermax Limited and Amonix signed a new deal to bring CPV technology to India. Under the partnership, Amonix will provide its solar power generation systems while Thermax will act as the engineering, procurement and construction partner for the customer’s turnkey solutions.
In January, SunRun published a report explaining how local governments inadvertently drive up the cost of installing solar projects on a home. Between local solar permitting and inspection processes, a home installation was costing, on average, an additional US$2,500. Six months after its initial report, SunRun has revealed a new study published by Aecom, which confirms how a simpler solar permitting process can potentially generate more than US$5 billion in new growth for the state of California.
