Financial & Legal

Roth & Rau is focusing on rationalising operations to improve its cost-effectiveness and structurally reorganise. The review will see the exit of Martin Detje, former head of turnkey operations, as well as the reduction of equipment production costs via the standardisation opportunities enabled in the production of the new SiNA platform.

Under a new agreement with creditors, Conergy's debt will be reduced by €188 million.

The European Commission has awarded Sovello AG €15.5 million of regional investment aid to help build its latest String Ribbon solar-module production facility in Bitterfeld-Wolfen, Germany. When completed, the entire project will have received investment totalling €147 million and created 320 jobs in the region.

In an attempt to nearly double capital expenditure by as much as US$1.1 billion over the next two years, First Solar hopes to achieve sales of between US$3.7 billion and US$3.9 billion in 2011.

A new report by the Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA) and GTM Research entitled, U.S. Solar Energy Trade Assessment 2010, found that the U.S. not only has a strong solar industry, but is a leader in the net exportation of solar energy products. In 2009, US$723 million worth of net exports came from the U.S. alone.

Several reports have been released in the past few weeks detailing the projected growth of the PV market in the future years and in the latest issue of Solarbuzz Quarterly, analysts have honed in on a more specific prediction for 2010. According to the new report by Solarbuzz, the market size for 2010 is expected to reach 16.3GW, an adjustment from the previously forecasted 15.2GW that analysts thought 2010 would bring.

The 37th IEEE Photovoltaic Specialist Conference (PVSC) will be celebrating its 50th anniversary in 2011 and has opened its call for papers to be presented at the June 19th through June 24th conference in Seattle, Washington. Authors who wish to submit their papers should provide a technical abstract by the February 21, 2011 deadline. Details on the abstract submission process can be found here.

Australian company Silex Systems is looking to expand its solar power PV efforts and has embarked upon a fully underwritten institutional placement of new ordinary shares in order to raise AUD$89.1 million. The money collected will be put towards different prospects, but will mainly focus on Silex’s subsidiary, Solar Systems Pty, and the solar PV technology they develop.

For the first time in its history, the U.S. Government has launched a government-coordinated plan for the support of renewable energy and energy efficiency exports. The Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency Export Initiative has 23 commitments from 8 different federal agencies, which plan to focus on new programs, actions or deliverables to tackle major export barriers in the U.S. renewable energy and energy efficiency (RE&EE) companies.