SPONSORED: Falling system prices have been a key driver of PV's recent growth and competitiveness, but upfront costs are only one part of the equation for long-term profitability within the solar power industry. Maximising any given system’s cumulative power output over its lifetime is critical to lowering the levelised cost of electricity (LCOE) and maximising investment returns.
A basket of publicly-listed solar cell and module manufacturers on the Taiwan Stock Exchange (TSE) have continued to build sales momentum through September as demand increased for products from China, Europe and the US.
Global solar PV manufacturing capacity expansion announcements in the first half of 2017 showed a significant increase over the second half of 2016. New plans almost reached the record heights set in the first half of 2016.
TUV Rheinland India, a subsidiary of the TUV Rheinland Group has opened a new €2.5 million state-of-the-art laboratory at Electronic City in Bangalore, India to provide all testing services under one roof and dramatically reduce turnaround time and accelerate time-to-market for customers.
Eyelit Inc., a manufacturing software provider for visibility, control, and coordination of manufacturing operations has launched version 5.3 of its Manufacturing Execution System (MES) software suite.
The Indian solar industry expressed shock recently when it emerged that multiple Chinese PV manufacturers had been reneging on supply contracts to India, but it seems this strategy may have been a comeuppance for historic behaviour on the part of some Indian developers.
US-based PV installer RGS Energy has struck an exclusive deal with Dow Chemical to exclusively sell its third generation (3.0) solar shingles under the ‘POWERHOUSE’ brand said to use conventional crystalline silicon solar cells rather than the original CIGS (Copper, Indium, Gallium, Selenide) thin-film substrates.
Independent solar power producer Scatec Solar ASA has teamed with Norway’s multinational oil and gas company, Statoil ASA to support the funding of a 162MW solar power plant project in Brazil.
Taiwan-based merchant solar cell and module producer Neo Solar Power (NSP) is set to build a 40MW PV power plant on former agricultural land that is suffering from severe land subsidence in ChangHua County, Taiwan.
With many of the top-20 module suppliers to the solar industry now having multi-GW shipment volumes, attention has turned firmly to assessing metrics that companies can use to benchmark the quality and reliability of shipped products against their competitors.
