Americas

Kyocera Solar’s new MyGen US-made solar kits are now available for residential and light-commercial solar energy installations being developed by new and veteran solar professionals alike. The domestically produced pre-engineered kits include modules, inverters, racking, monitoring, grounding, manual, drawings and all the marginal components needed to complete a solar installation.

In reporting first quarter financial results, metals specialist Timminco, noted that it had rebranded its solar grade silicon operations as ‘Timminco Solar’ and was executing a strategic marketing effort to communicate to PV manufacturers its ‘value proposition’ for the product. Timminco management said that the firm had shipped 135MT of solar grade silicon from inventory in the first four months of the year with 63MT alone shipped in April, 2011.

Canadian Solar has become an official sponsor of the New York Yankees, enhancing the baseball team’s environmental commitments while increasing the photovoltaic product manufacturer’s presence in the US.

NJR Clean Energy Ventures (NJRCEV), a subsidiary of New Jersey Resources (NJR) will be installing a 14.1MW ground-mounted solar PV system at McGraw-Hill’s East Windsor, New Jersey campus, which will produce 18 million kWh of energy per year. Set to be built on a 50-acre parcel next to McGraw-Hill’s two office buildings, the system will be built in two phases. Half of the system’s capacity is expected to become operational by December, with the remaining half running by March 2012.

The US Air Force Academy (USAFA) in Colorado “switched-on” its new 6MW solar PV power system built by Colorado Springs Utilities and SunPower. Funded in part by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, the plant uses SunPower solar panels and the company’s T0 Tracker system.

SunPower and Dow Jones & Co. have completed a 4.1MW solar power plant on the 200-acre Dow Jones campus in South Brunswick, New Jersey. At its peak production, the solar plant will supply half the power Dow Jones needs to support its largest campus.

During Mage Solar’s unveiling of its Powertec Plus modules at Intersolar Europe 2011, the company announced that it had started production of the module line at its Dublin, Georgia plant at the beginning of June. Testing and certification for the 190W monocrystalline and 230W polycrystalline modules was successfully completed, allowing the modules to begin production in Dublin earlier this month.

SPI Solar and LDK Solar, its majority shareholder, have signed an agreement to become the primary engineering, procurement and construction (EPC) and operations and maintenance (O&M) service provider for KDC Solar’s project pipeline in New Jersey and New York. The three-year contract will see the two firms collaborate on a number of projects, which could be as little as 150MW or as much as 300MW.

According to the Solar Electric Power Association’s (SEPA) most recent report, US-based power utilities are ramping up the use of solar photovoltaics. The 2010 Utility Solar Rankings report identifies the top 10 US utilities that added the most new solar power to their systems last year as well as the top 10 utilities that added the most solar on a watts-per-customer-served basis.

The board of the Overseas Private Investment Corp. has approved $123 million in financing for the construction of two 20MW solar power plants in Peru, said to be the first large-scale solar power project in the Latin American country. Along with the involvement of Peru's ProInversion investment promotion agency, the ground-mount-based projects will be developed by T-Solar and use silicon thin-film panels made by the Spanish company with Applied Materials' SunFab technology.