Asia & Oceania

India’s finance minister, Shri Chidambaram, announced 2GW worth of new large-scale solar projects as part of his interim budget speech earlier this week.

The Small-scale Renewable Energy Scheme (SRES), Australia’s rooftop PV incentive, has negligible impact on household power bills, according to analysis published ahead of a review of the country’s renewable energy target (RET).

Leading polysilicon and wafer manufacturer GCL-Poly is to become a majority shareholder in consumer electronics firm Same Time.

A renewable energy research facility will be built in the disaster-hit Japanese region of Fukushima, after the area’s local government and Fraunhofer ISE research institute signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU).

The Indian government is seeking a US$500 million loan from the World Bank to initiate construction of a planned 4GW solar project in Rajasthan.

A large-scale storage system made by reusing electric vehicle batteries has been developed and deployed at a 10MW solar farm in south western Japan by Sumitomo Corporation.

SolarWorld chairman Frank Asbeck, the chief agitator in a string of trade cases against the Chinese PV industry, has been accused of “reckless” behaviour that could put thousands of US solar jobs at risk.

Industry advocacy body, the Australian Solar Council, has launched a ‘save solar’ campaign.

The programme has been repeatedly successful and director general Arun Kumar has said it will now run every month.

Independent power producer Etrion, headquartered in Geneva, has announced details of two forthcoming PV projects in Japan and confirmed that both will receive the feed-in tariff (FiT).