The European solar industry has followed the lead taken by its counterparts in the US by developing best practice guidelines for the burgeoning O&M business. Stefan Degener, senior director of O&M at First Solar, who led a group to develop the guidelines, speaks to Ben Willis about their significance and aims.
Several rounds of auctions for large-scale projects and a favourable policy environment for distributed systems have helped create the right conditions for PV to flourish in Brazil. Rodrigo Sauaia and Juliana Vasconcelos explore the biggest areas of opportunity for foreign firms looking to access this promising new market.
The maturing of the solar operations and maintenance business has shone a spotlight on the need for some universally accepted standards and practices across the industry. Vassilis Papaeconomou explains why such a step forward will be vital to ensuring the full value of solar assets is realised.
The combination of rapidly evolving technologies and the trend towards decentralisation is demanding increasingly sophisticated commercial models. Simon Göß looks at some of the emerging solutions and considers the place of blockchain technology in tomorrow’s energy system.
Cutthroat pricing in India’s booming solar market is causing headaches for developers. Tom Kenning reports on some of the looming pinch points for solar finance in a country where the cost of capital remains persistently high.
‘Silicon Module Super League’ (SMSL) member Jinko Solar has reported the second consecutive quarter of solar module shipments that were higher than leading SMSL rival, Trina Solar.
Passivated emitter rear contact (PERC) production is forecast to exceed 15GW in 2017, accounting for more than 20% of all p-type solar cells produced in the year. PERC has become the first major application for lasers in the mainstream c-Si cell sector in the solar industry, with all other applications either legacy/dormant or as part of process flows that may reside permanently in the research lab or at best make it into production, several years from now.
GCL-Poly Energy Holding has placed a bid of US$150 million for the polysilicon assets of bankrupt renewable energy firm SunEdison via the US bankruptcy court dealing with the Chapter 11 proceedings.
The solar yieldco business model was “flawed from the beginning” according to Santosh Raikar, managing director of renewable energy investments at State Street Bank.
Canadian Solar has made a third major revision to its planned manufacturing capacity expansion plans for 2016, while reiterating previously guided PV module shipments and revenue for the year.
