Africa remains one of the most difficult markets to penetrate, riddled by bankability issues and a distinct lack of the right kind of strategic partnerships. To expedite and support solar investment on the continent, SolarPower Europe and the Africa-EU Renewable Energy Cooperation Programme (RECP) have teamed up to facilitate business cooperation between African and European stakeholders.
A significant decline in the cost of PV modules and project construction, as well as a shift from small-scale projects to cheaper capex utility-scale projects, is a main driver for an clean energy investment slowdown in 2016, says Bloomberg News Energy Finance (BNEF).
Array Technologies (ATI), one of the world's largest solar tracker manufacturers, has officially surpassed 5.6GW of trackers shipped globally. The company is also celebrating 11,000MW years of tracker operation.
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.
The latest report from the Climate Bonds Initiative (CBI), an investor-focused non-profit organisation, found that of the US$694 billion of climate bonds outstanding in 2016, energy accounted for 19% at US$130 billion, exemplifying a push in investment for renewable energy projects.
The future for Tesla-SolarCity could lie in aggregating rooftop PV with stationary energy storage, EVs and other distributed energy resources, the head of energy storage market analysis at Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF) has said.
Morgan Stanley has predicted a boom in solar-plus-storage in Australia, calling PV a direct substitute for grid power and warning investors that the incumbent energy industry has been slow to react to trends.
