Starting January 1, 2011, Advanced Energy Industries will have two new business units: Thin Films and Renewables. The Thin Film division will be led by Yuval Wasserman who will also act as president and COO for the business unit. The Thin Film business division will be headquartered in Fort Collins, Colorado and will house the company’s power conversion and thermal instrumentation products for capital equipment markets such as the semiconductor, solar panel and flat panel display industries.
ContourGlobal and Guascor Solar have signed a contract to develop 30MW of PV projects in Italy. The first of these projects, a 6MW plant in Sabaudia, is already operational, with a building work on a second 8.5MW development in Sicily scheduled to start in early 2011. The plants will be built by Guascor and owned and operated by ContourGlobal.
In June 2010, Statkraft decided that it would begin to solely focus its business on hydropower, wind power, gas power and district heating and in keeping with its decision, it has sold its Casale solar park to two Italian investors: Eurowood and Blue Stream Resources. All shares of the 3.3MWp solar park, which was owned by Statkraft’s RA1 company, have been signed and closed and are now equally owned between the two Italian companies.
The U.S. Department of the Interior has given its seal of approval to SolarReserve’s Nevada-based Crescent Dunes solar thermal plant. Construction work on the 110MW plant is scheduled to begin in mid-2011, with total costs for the project expected to be around US$475 million.
Abengoa Solar will build two 50MW solar thermal plants in Extremadura, Spain with the help of the Japanese trading company, Itochu. Construction work on the Logrosán plants has already begun and they will be operational at some stage in 2012.
SunEdison and Arizona Public Service (APS) will join forces to build a utility-scale PV solar power plant close to the Prescott Regional Airport in Arizona. The 10MW facility is scheduled for grid connection in autumn 2011 and will generate in excess of 25 million kWh of electricity in its first year.
In SolarTech’s continued effort to hasten the implementation of renewable solar energy projects on state and local levels, the company has made the industry’s first engineering procurement and construction (EPC) contract template for solar financing, which is anticipated to go hand in hand with the power purchase agreement (PPA) that was released in 2009.
NEOptions, the Bulgarian Development Collaborative and SDN spent three years working together to produce what they claim as the largest solar PV project in Bulgaria and one of the largest in the EU: a 45MW solar PV project made up of one 20MW installation and another 25MW solar PV installation in the towns of Samovodene and Zlataritsa, Bulgaria. Construction has started on the solar PV project, with 5MW already completed.
SunPower has closed its €195.2 million solar bond issuance for its 44MW Montalto di Castro park in Italy. The proceeds will be used to fund further development of the facility, which is scheduled to be sold before the end of the year.
