SolFocus has promoted chief operating officer Bob Legendre to president and COO, reporting to CEO Mark Crowley. In his new, expanded position, Legendre will oversee a broad range of activities including manufacturing, supply chain, engineering and deployment. As the COO, Legendre led SolFocus’s engineering organization and finalized SolFocus’s product realization and product certification for deployment in EMEA, Australia and North America.
Trina Solar has signed a licensing, sales and marketing agreement with module-integrated installation hardware manufacturer Zep Solar. Trina hopes to begin selling its Zep compatible modules along with Zep’s System II hardware in North America, Europe and Australia from Q3 onwards.
Germany and Italy are forecasted to drive solar demand to new highs in 2011, with rumours of installations up to 22GW on the cards for this year. The German and Italian markets, scheduled to peak in 2011 and 2012, respectively, face a potential problem in terms of where to sell their modules if these two countries cannot accommodate 10GW of installations per year. The emerging markets can solve part of this challenge and will deliver new opportunities to the solar industry. Some Asian, European and Middle Eastern regions will require up to of 6GW of solar-generated electricity, while the Americas, Africa and Australia are each projected to install approximately 1GW in 2014. This paper takes a look at the development of these emerging markets and provides a projection of likely installation figures up to 2015.
Trina Solar squeezed a little more module shipments out of the factory gate in 2010 than previously guided. Shipments were approximately 351MW for the fourth quarter of 2010, compared to previous guidance of approximately 300MW, resulting in total 2010 module shipments reaching approximately 1.06GW in 2010.
Australia’s Capital Territory (ACT) feed-in tariff has been expanded to include medium to large-scale solar projects in order to cater for larger commercial and industrial farms as well as community groups. According to the Australian Solar Energy Society, the gross feed-in tariff, which pays a premium for all solar energy generated, is now available for solar panel installations 30kW to 200kW.
The next generation of industrial silicon solar cells aims at efficiencies of 20% and above. To achieve this goal using ever-thinner silicon wafers, a highly effective surface passivation of the cell, front and rear, is required. In the past, finding a suitable dielectric layer providing a high-quality rear passivation has been a major challenge. Aluminium oxide (Al2O3) grown by atomic layer deposition (ALD) has only recently turned out to be a nearly perfect candidate for such a dielectric. However, conventional ALD is limited to deposition rates well below 2nm/min, which is incompatible with industrial solar cell production. This paper assesses the passivation quality provided by three different industrially relevant techniques for the deposition of Al2O3 layers, namely high-rate spatial ALD, plasma-enhanced chemical vapour deposition (PECVD) and reactive sputtering.
Acuity Technology Management completed an independent evaluation on EnviroMission’s Australian Solar Tower technology, valuing it at AUDS$60,000,000. The valuation includes the intellectual property, development rights and overall commerciality of the technology.
Technic has appointed Wilson Xia as its Asia-Pacific technical director of photovoltaics. Xia’s new role will see him working on the research and development, applications engineering and distribution of the company’s TechniSol photovoltaic processing technologies.
The German module manufacturer, Sovello, has now received official accreditation to supply its modules in the U.K., Australia and Ireland as well as in Florida and California in the U.S. The certificates from the Australian Clear Energy Council (CEC), the Sustainable Energy Authority of Ireland (SEAI), the British BRE Global, the Florida Solar Energy Center (FSEC), and Go Solar California were issued in Q4 2010.
CSIRO and Dyesol have completed the first stage of their joint project developing higher performance dyes for dye solar cells (DSC). The first six months of the programme has seen Dyesol build a research-scale assembly and testing facility at CSIRO’s Newcastle-based centre, in south-east Australia.
