In this week's Movers & Shakers, PV Tech reports some recent industry mergers and acquisitions, dramatic UK solar job losses and an equally dramatic opportunity for job growth in the US with Tesla's new Gigafactory in Nevada.
Green bonds have the potential to unlock vast new sums of capital for the deployment of solar and other low-carbon infrastructure. Katie House looks at how a relatively new concept is rapidly evolving into a potentially major source of clean energy finance.
Tim Buckley, director of energy finance studies, Australasia, Institute of Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA), explains how significant this loan is for India and what else will be driving the targeted US$100 billion solar investment by 2022.
PV Cycle, a not-for-profit compliance and waste management programme solar PV technology in Europe, has achieved a record recycling rate of 96% for silicon-based PV modules.
How silicon feedstock is packed into casting crucibles can have a big impact on the size and cost-efficiency of the resultant solar ingots. Til Bartel looks at some of the latest thinking around this essential stage in the PV manufacturing supply chain.
PV waste | Europe is leading the way in efforts to regulate the disposal and recycling of old or discarded PV modules. Sara Ver-Bruggen investigates the extent to which the industry is complying with the rules and whether PV markets in other parts of the world are likely to follow Europe’s lead.
Growing awareness of the advantages of using controlled quantities of impurities in solar silicon is closing the price gap between lower and higher purity feedstock, writes Til Bartel.
A shift from free-abrasive/steel wire sawing to fixed-abrasive diamond wire sawing is expected to take place in the PV cell manufacturing industry, with 2018 being the anticipated pivotal point for market dominance. This shift is due to several key advantages of diamond wire sawing, such as higher throughput, less wire per wafer, no slurry and the possibility of kerf recycling. However, in order for diamond wire sawing to realize its promise as the next-generation workhorse for the slicing of silicon PV wafers, inherent fundamental challenges must be properly identified and successfully addressed by the PV industry. As a first step to increasing the current collective understanding of the critical needs/challenges of diamond wire sawing, the c-Si programme of the U.S. PVMC held a workshop on July 8th, 2014 in San Francisco, California. One of the key products of this workshop was an extensive list of short- and long-term challenges. This article expands on some of the most important challenges identified at the workshop through the collective discussions and dialogue among a variety of PV industry experts and stakeholders.
