North America

US residential solar installer Vivint has secured a US$325 million revolving warehouse facility to refinance existing debt.

Six months after settling claims in the Chapter 11 bankruptcy case of its U.S. distribution subsidiary, the Chinese PV maker says it has signed more than 500 MW of U.S. module supply contracts.

The Israeli inverter manufacturer saw its net profit decline 4% year-on-year to $33.1 million in the second quarter, despite shipping 1.3 GW and seeing a 43% increase in turnover. Gross margins were affected by the increase in U.S. tariffs on China made products.

Dominion Energy Virginia is seeking bids for up to 500 megawatts of solar generation in both 2021 and 2022 to continue moving the Commonwealth toward a clean energy future.

First Solar reported a bumper quarter during Q2 by most metrics. The company’s net sales of $585 million were nearly double the previous year, on shipments 1.4 GW of product – the most in its history. Additionally, First Solar booked more than 2.1 GW of orders in July alone, a very positive start to Q3.

Energy provider New Jersey Resources (NJR) is selling US$150 million of green bonds to finance six commercial solar plants with a combined capacity of 50MW.

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.

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.

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.

Ongoing US-China trade tensions will not ruin solar fortunes on either side as players adapt by redrawing the lines of global supply flows, Fitch Solutions has predicted.

Soventix has been singled out by the Nicaraguan government as the potential developer of a major solar project, the latest in a series of PV moves by the Central American state.

A German player has become the owner of a distributed solar pipeline in El Salvador, laying the groundwork for construction to launch later this year.

Power Energy Corporation, a subsidiary of Power Corporation of Canada, has bought developer and asset manager Nautilus Solar Energy from management shareholders and minority shareholder Virgo Investment Group for an undisclosed sum.

Leading microinverter supplier, Enphase Energy shipped over 1.2 million units in the second quarter of 2019, with its latest IQ 7 model accounting for around 98% of shipment total.