Major materials science company, Royal DSM has sold its Resins & Functional Materials (RFM) businesses including the coatings activities of DSM Advanced Solar, known for its anti-reflective (AR) resin coatings for solar glass and on-field PV power plant upgrading, to rival Covestro AG for a cash sum of around €1.4 billion.
A new company, EnCORE PV has been established to build own and operate a 1GW heterojunction (HJ) plant in the region of Kaliningrad, located along the Baltic coast between Poland and Lithuania.
PV Tech’s analysis of ‘Solar Module Super League’ (SMSL) member JA Solar’s capacity expansion announcements in the first nine months of 2020 have revealed the company has already announced a total of over 104GW of combined plans, including ingot/wafer, solar cell and module assembly.
Leading ‘Solar Module Super League’ (SMSL) member JinkoSolar has made a major revision to its PV module assembly capacity expansion plans for 2020, intending to nearly double its nameplate assembly capacity to a new goal of 30GW by the end of 2020.
Soltec has launched its next-generation ‘SF8’ single-axis tracker system to meet the needs of utility-scale PV power plants adopting the new wave of large-area solar panels.
The rapid transition in the upstream manufacturing solar sector to significantly larger p-type and n-type monocrystalline wafers, cells and modules may be hailed as a new era for the industry in higher module performance and a leap in reducing PV power plants LCOE (Levelized Cost of Electricity) in a rapidly changing downstream market that becomes subsidy free, bidding orientated and targeting grid parity and beyond. But issues such as reliability lurk just below the surface.
Major integrated PV module manufacturer, Suntech has started ramping up a 1GW integrated cell and module assembly plant in Indonesia, predominantly to serve the US market that takes its nameplate module assembly capacity above 10GW.
Coming out of stealth-mode, US-based integrated PV panel manufacturing start-up, Violet Power intends to disrupt the PV industry with in-house production of high-efficiency IBC (Interdigitated Back Contact) solar cells. The company will use cell-to-module ‘flex circuit’ and thermal plastic encapsulant technology in a glass/glass configuration that will have a solar panel warranty of 50 years, more than three times the average in the industry, today.
