News

A major ground-mounted PV auction in France is set to boost the country’s solar capacity by 10%, with 107 developers successfully bidding on 858MW of capacity spread evenly across the country.

Solar has emerged as the overall cheapest technology in Argentina’s latest clean energy tender, aimed at smaller-scale installations.

The cancellation of an 80-megawatt project with no financial penalty raises questions about a monopoly utility competing against private developers.

Supported by an innovative portfolio contract with its power purchasers, Ormat Technologies has now started commercial operations of its innovative hybrid solar-geothermal power plant at Tungsten Mountain, Nevada.

New textile-based solar cells developed by Fraunhofer researchers, semitrailers could soon be producing the electricity needed to power cooling systems or other onboard equipment. In short, textile-based solar cells could soon be adding a whole new dimension to photovoltaics, complementing the use of conventional silicon-based solar cells.

Researchers at Siberian Federal University, together with colleagues from the Royal Institute of Technology (Stockholm, Sweden), discovered new properties of material based on palladium, which can increase the performance of solar cells.

The €29.7 million financing package was awarded by Banco Sabadell. Renovalia’s 79.2 MW solar park will be Spain’s first PV facility to sell all of its output on the spot market.

U.K. solar developer Lightsource BP plans to host a community information event in the town of Mannum, South Australia, to outline a proposal to fund, build and operate a 100 MW solar project.

French floating PV specialist Ciel&Terre is teaming up with SCG, an Asian petrochemical company, to develop floating solar plants at hydroelectric dams in Thailand.

Scientists at the U.K.’s Faraday Institution have been able to observe degradation mechanisms at the lithium metal anode in a solid state battery, and made several discoveries which could improve the performance and design of future solid-state lithium-ion batteries.

The Shapoorji Pallonji Group’s solar EPC business will hit the capital markets with an initial public offering on Aug. 6.

ReNu Energy signed an agreement last week for the sale of its Australian solar assets to CleanPeak Energy, a commercial rooftop solar startup.

The global power and renewable energy market is expected to remain largely unaffected by the Trump administration’s new wave of tariffs on Chinese goods. Although shipments of Chinese modules into the U.S. market are falling, Chinese manufacturers sent more panels to overseas markets in the first half of this year than they did in the same period of 2018. Analysts from Fitch, meanwhile, claim the U.S. solar market will continue to expand, despite higher project costs.

The winning developer will be able to use solar modules and cells of any origin for the plant, which will be built in Auraiya district, in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh. Bidding closes on Sept. 5.

PV technology has made significant progress in a short amount of time, leaving solar enthusiasts chuffed. Opponents, on the other hand, brand it as unworkable boondoggle, surviving on the crutches of subsidies and only salving the conscience of the green-minded companies cosseted by political forces. The naysayers do have partial truth in their argument - governments the world over have been supporting the growth of this child with the moniker “solar” with public finances. So, this is the partial truth and the enthusiasts have just enough firepower to say that all energy is, after all, subsidised one way or another – in terms of uncompensated costs of air pollution, congestion and global warming and the consequential irreversible damage these fossil fuels have done to the planet. Perhaps more important and statistically relevant is a report published by the IMF in 2015, which had pegged subsidies to fossil fuels at US$5.3 trillion.