South Korea’s government is planning for nearly 3GW of solar PV alongside smaller capacities of wind and batteries on reclaimed land in Saemangeum, an area of land created by a huge Seawall project completed in 2010.
An extra AU$100 million (US$70.76 million) of funding could be put into a rebate scheme for households buying energy storage systems in South Australia, after a peer-to-peer lending group stepped in.
US-headquartered high-efficiency PV module producer SunPower Corp is expecting to sell further assets and increase its loans in 2019 to avert bankruptcy due to looming liquidity issues as the company expects to remain loss making next year, while current net losses in the first nine months of 2018 have reached US$745.3 million.
Martin Libra, Head of LATAM at Prothea, an independent advisory boutique providing advisory and asset management services in the renewable energy sector, explains the chances opening up in the Chilean wind and solar market, which can now be considered a pioneer in the grid parity trend that is currently developing in Southern Europe.
Indian buildings are silent energy guzzlers, but the game-changing potential for making zero energy buildings (NZEBs) has not been explored extensively, according to think tank Center for Study of Science, Technology and Policy (CSTEP).
Major polysilicon producer Wacker Chemie has reported a significant decline in the fortunes of its polysilicon business segment in the third quarter of 2018.
Polysilicon producer REC Silicon has been forced to sell solar grade (FBR) polysilicon below cash cost, due to weak demand and ASP declines, driven by demand curtailment in China and continued polysilicon capacity expansions.
PV manufacturing capacity expansion announcements in the second quarter of 2018, were slightly higher than the previous quarter, although activity slumped specifically in June, after China’s decision to suddenly cap utility-scale and distributed generation (DG) projects (531 New Deal). But large-scale multi-gigawatt production plans in the first half of the year may have hidden an inevitable slowdown, despite the impact on downstream demand from the 531 New Deal.
Australia is to trial using solar and wind power to produce hydrogen via electrolysis, with the hydrogen then being used for long-term energy storage in the Sydney gas network.
