The past few weeks has seen some of the most dramatic knee-jerk, naïve and misinformed PV market reporting seen in recent times, with the headlines often resembling nothing more than tabloid sensationalism.
‘Silicon Module Super League’ (SMSL) member Trina Solar and building materials and PV systems developer China Singyes Solar Technologies Holdings have jointly secured a bid to build a 250MW ‘Top Runner’ PV power plant project in Tongchuan, Shaanxi province, China.
Oslo-headquartered clean energy firm Scatec Solar has signed agreements to build two solar PV projects with capacity of 33MW and 50MW in the Cherkassy region of Ukraine.
Sunseap International, a subsidiary of Singapore-based Sunseap Group, has started construction of its 186MW, US$150 million solar farm in Vietnam – claimed to be the largest PV project in the ASEAN region.
According to Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF), the global average selling price (ASP) of solar modules is expected to decline by 35% in 2018, compared to previous forecasts of a 20% to 27% decline, due to the Chinese government curtailing solar growth through new policies initiated last Friday.
China-based solar PV project developer and operator ReneSola is one of the first companies to publically echo the impact expected from the Chinese government’s decision to significantly curtail solar deployment, highlighting the solar module ASP decline of modules as a key benefit to downstream developers.
HeliosLite has developed a disruptive PV tracker based on a patent pending 1.5 axis kinetic capturing more energy than 1 axis horizontal trackers without sacrificing cost effectiveness. This disruptive PV tracking solution boasts higher energy output than 1 axis horizontal trackers and is said to bring cost-effective tracking to decentralized PV plants.
No sooner than all of the huge exhibition stands at SNEC 2018 were dismantled last Thursday, China’s regulatory organisations overseeing the solar industry, instigated new policies Friday that could have a similar effect on the utility-scale and distributed generation (DG) markets in the country.
Major horizontal single-axis solar tracker firm Soltec is opening the first of its kind ‘Bifacial Tracking Evaluation Center’ (BiTEC) in Livermore, California to further scientifically evaluate the performance of bifacial PV modules and the tracking performance with single-axis trackers.
