BayWa r.e., Enel Green Power and Solarcentury are among the 20 participants in a new European Union-funded project that aims to increase the performance and reliability of solar PV components and systems.
Italian headquartered FuturaSun has officially opened its second PV module assembly plant with a capacity of 500MW in collaboration with manufacturing partner, State Power Investment Corporation Limited (SPIC) in Taizhou, China.
State-owned companies in India could be tasked with establishing polysilicon manufacturing facilities to help make domestic solar manufacturing more competitive, reports have claimed.
The cost-effectiveness of solar panels as well as new technology that allows households to sell surplus power to the grid will both be explored under two separate initiatives announced by the Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA).
China-based PV power plant developer and PV manufacturer CECEP Solar Energy Co is planning a major move into the rapidly developing merchant high-efficiency PERC large-area solar cell market with the construction of a 20GW hub in the Gaoyou Economic Development Zone, Gaoyou City, Jiangsu province.
Major materials science company, Royal DSM has sold its Resins & Functional Materials (RFM) businesses including the coatings activities of DSM Advanced Solar, known for its anti-reflective (AR) resin coatings for solar glass and on-field PV power plant upgrading, to rival Covestro AG for a cash sum of around €1.4 billion.
A new company, EnCORE PV has been established to build own and operate a 1GW heterojunction (HJ) plant in the region of Kaliningrad, located along the Baltic coast between Poland and Lithuania.
PV Tech’s analysis of ‘Solar Module Super League’ (SMSL) member JA Solar’s capacity expansion announcements in the first nine months of 2020 have revealed the company has already announced a total of over 104GW of combined plans, including ingot/wafer, solar cell and module assembly.
Leading ‘Solar Module Super League’ (SMSL) member JinkoSolar has made a major revision to its PV module assembly capacity expansion plans for 2020, intending to nearly double its nameplate assembly capacity to a new goal of 30GW by the end of 2020.
The rapid transition in the upstream manufacturing solar sector to significantly larger p-type and n-type monocrystalline wafers, cells and modules may be hailed as a new era for the industry in higher module performance and a leap in reducing PV power plants LCOE (Levelized Cost of Electricity) in a rapidly changing downstream market that becomes subsidy free, bidding orientated and targeting grid parity and beyond. But issues such as reliability lurk just below the surface.