This week's Movers & Shakers segment sees big waves in Europe with a new president for SolarPower Europe and Lightsource hiring a new strategy officer in its move to evolve from a pure solar company to a global energy leader. There's resignations in some of Asia's biggest module manufacturers including Trina Solar and Yingli Green, and the Coalition for Community Solar Access celebrates its first anniversary and talks to PV Tech on how to keep the community solar boom going.
France has awarded contracts to 79 projects in the first 500MW tender of its 3GW large-scale programme, as well as announcing tender programmes for 450MW of self-consumption renewable energy systems and 210MW of 'solar innovations' including solar roads.
US-Based wafer producer 1366 Technologies and ‘Silicon Module Super League’ (SMSL) member Hanwha Q CELLS have jointly achieved cell conversion efficiencies of 19.9%, up from 19.6% announced in December, 2016.
News in Brief: The governments of India and Portugal sign an MoU on renewable energy development, solar arrays are installed at MSU and State College, PA, African gold mine IAMGOLD corp signs a PPA for a new solar facility, and a Hawaiian food bank is making big savings with its new solar system.
Europe added 6.7GW of solar last year with demand decreasing by more than 21% from the prior year, according to the latest data from SolarPower Europe.
Big energy utilities such as Eon and innogy are “changing the appearance” of the European solar market as they wade into the sector, a panel of industry leaders has concluded.
South Korean PV specialist DNE Solar has signed a framework agreement with German inverter manufacturer KACO New Energy for the delivery of 300MW of string inverters.
France has sought to increase its ambitions for solar PV in the country after the technology “overshot expectations”, a government representative has said.
