This year saw Ghana not only install the largest solar project in East and West Africa, but also a major 30MW module manufacturing facility near its capital, Accra, in what is a major milestone for the upstream solar sector across Africa. PV Tech visited the plant to understand some of developer 3SIL's thinking behind location and business.
Module manufacturer Seraphim Solar is looking for fresh locations for future manufacturing plants and praises Mexico as both and end-market and a potential production centre.
Major Photovoltaics Energy Provider (PVEP) SunPower has achieved has set a new PV module conversion efficiency record of 24.1%, using laboratory made IBC-based solar cells that has been verified by the US Department of Energy's National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL).
Leading thin-film module manufacuturer First Solar revealed its new-to-the-market and highly-anticipated Series 5 thin-film PV module at Intersolar last week.
The future for Tesla-SolarCity could lie in aggregating rooftop PV with stationary energy storage, EVs and other distributed energy resources, the head of energy storage market analysis at Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF) has said.
The prospect of the ‘commoditisation’ of lithium-ion batteries is not likely to be as clear-cut as has been seen in the PV industry, one manufacturer has said.
Leading PV manufacturing equipment supplier Meyer Burger has received an order valued at around CHF 21 million (US$22 million) from a China-based integrated PV manufacturer.
SolarEdge's Lior Handelsman explains some of the thinking and development processes behind HD Wave, which the publicly-listed Israeli company believes represents a significant leap forward for inverter technology. The product was launched at the beginning of the year, when Handelsman said in another interview for PV Tech that inverters can now "evolve at the speed of electronics, not mechanics".
