The Indian solar industry expressed shock recently when it emerged that multiple Chinese PV manufacturers had been reneging on supply contracts to India, but it seems this strategy may have been a comeuppance for historic behaviour on the part of some Indian developers.
Some of the industry is at loggerheads and many feel local manufacturing must be intrinsic to the 100GW by 2022 solar target, but the value of trade duties is under dispute.
Italian renewable energy company Falck Renewables has officially entered the US solar sector, with the company announcing that it has acquired a 92MW PV project in North Carolina from Canadian Solar.
PV Tech reached its own little milestone of having reported and analysed the R&D spending habits of the same 12 key PV module manufacturers for 10 years. The results have just been published in sister technical journal Photovoltaics International as part of the annual leaders and laggards of R&D spending for 2016.
The significance of PV-Tech’s forthcoming conference in Kuala Lumpur – PV ModuleTech 2017 – has just moved to a new level, with the key company executives from all members of the Silicon Module Super League (SMSL) giving presentations on stage about the quality, reliability, and performance of their solar modules.
Recurrent Energy, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Canadian Solar, has signed a 15-year Power Purchase Agreement (PPA) for a 100MW solar project in California with community choice utility Peninsula Clean Energy (PCE).
Thai energy and waste management firm Padaeng Industry (PDI) has acquired a portfolio of six operational solar PV farms in Thailand with a combined capacity of 30MW from Armstrong Asset Management and Dragon Capital for a total of THB1.3 billion (US$39 million).
Canadian Solar has launched an innovative ‘cool’ PV module design, dubbed ‘Ku’ modules. The new PV module series is based on Low Internal Current (LIC) module technology to provide better module energy yield and reliability.