Central & East Asia

On a three day visit to China, Pakistan president Manmoon Hussain and minister for Punjab, Shahbaz Sharif met with financial and development companies and banks in Beijing, and signed MoUs for continued investment in solar projects in Pakistan.

Companies responsible for 748 Japanese solar power projects that have gained approval to receive the feed-in tariff (FiT) but have not yet been built have been handed a temporary reprieve.

Chinese tier one manufacturer ReneSola will open a manufacturing base in Japan, in partnership with electronics trading company Vitec.

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.

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.

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