Solar PV capital expenditure (capex) covering the midstream segments of the industry (c-Si ingot-to-module and thin-film) is now well into its second major upturn in spending, going into 2018, at a time when the industry is just about to move to a new phase in annual deployment levels of greater than 100GW.
Utility-scale power company Intersect Power has been awarded a power purchase agreement from Austin Energy for a 150MW PV project in Texas that is expected to reach commercial operation in 2020.
Efficiency gains and productivity improvements are set to dominate the PV manufacturing landscape again in 2018, with strong investments continuing to flow into existing and new cell architectures, with gigawatt-level status now becoming the norm for the manufacturing segment, writes Finlay Colville.
California oil and gas producer Aera Energy and GlassPoint Solar are set to built California’s largest solar energy project — which will be used to power operations and reduce carbon emissions at the Belridge oilfield west of Bakersfield, California.
Renewable energy power purchase agreements (PPA) driven by solar are set to take a significant chunk of the market in Southeast Asia over the next few years, according to panellists at the Solar and Off-Grid Renewables Southeast Asia (SORSEA) conference in Bangkok.
Solar PV and other renewables will increasingly benefit from artificial intelligence (AI) and could completely overhaul the design, development and deployment of the technologies, a new report has claimed.
Outsourcing in the various stages running up to module assembly versus having one’s entire supply chain in house was a major theme at PV ModuleTech 2017. PV Tech caught up with Nick Strevel, director, global technical sales, at vertically-integrated thin-film PV manufacturer First Solar, to discuss the benefits of having all in house production and the drivers for high expenditure in R&D.
PV module manufacturers hoping to get new technologies taken up by the market quickly and at scale need to generate as much information as possible from testing houses and certification bodies for the finance community to consider their product, according to a representative of one of the world’s largest solar developers.
When manufacturing capacities moved from megawatt to gigawatt ten years ago, the concept of having a fully-integrated and automated production site was widely accepted to be the most economical, Finlay Colville examines whether this is truly the case.
