Starting work on what is being called one of the largest solar thermal power plants in the world, Solar Millennium, via its subsidiary, Flagsol, has begun development on the 50MW Andasol 3 plant in southern Spain for completion in 2011. Situated on the Plateau of Guadix in the province of Granada, Andasol 3 is the third of the Andasol projects in the southern Spain region using parabolic trough technology.
VLSI Research, Inc. has revealed its Top 10 PV manufacturing equipment supply companies (see table below) for last year, with Applied Materials’ near-$800 million in revenues ranking them at the top of the pile. Coming in second is Oerlikon Solar, followed by GT Solar International, Gebr. Schmid and centrotherm photovoltaics AG. All three had revenues in excess of $500 million.
aleo solar AG has been approached to supply modules and inverters for a 250kW power plant in Oristano on the west coast of Sardinia. The Arborea I project, one of the largest rooftop installations on the island, will be equipped with 1,138 aleo S_18 type modules with a total output of 250 kilowatts.
Axio Power has agreed to buy the solar assets of BQ Energy, a New York-based developer of utility-scale renewable energy projects located on industrial, military, and brownfield sites. The acquisition includes BQ Energy’s solar assets in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Hawaii, and California.
Motech Industries’ Kunshan, China-based subsidiary Motech (Suzhou) Renewable Energy has, according to a report in Digitimes, announced that it is running at full utilisation and that demand is exceeding supply in the company’s facility. As a result, the company plans to increase prices by between 1 and 2%.
Organic solar cell technology will be under scrutiny October 15-16, when the OPV Summit event convenes in Boston. The two-day conference will be attended by industry players including NREL, Konarka Technologies and Sandia National Laboratories among others, as the challenge continues to increase the conversion efficiency and improve stability and lifetime.
Southern California Edison (SCE), one of the nation's largest electric utilities, has announced that it has issued a competitive Request for Offers (RFO) for new power contracts with independent generators and marketer
BrightView Systems, an Israel-based production process optimization start-up, will team with the Thin-Film Photovoltaics Laboratory at the Neuchatel Institute of Microengineering (IMT) to target the optimization and effective control of optical and electrical cell properties for next generation thin-film technologies.
Mecasolar has announced it will be opening a new production plant in San Francisco, which will start producing one- and two-axis solar trackers and fixed structures in the first quarter of 2010. This initiative reflects the interest of Mecasolar and the OPDE Group.
Over the past four years, the European market for solar thermal systems (STS) is enjoying interest from policy makers, market participants and end users. In addition to the potential for growth in this market, "the key driver for the market in Europe is government support for STS in the form of financial subsidies, tax credits, and regulatory reforms," remarked Hammam Ahmed, Frost & Sullivan research analyst.
