Solar Manufacturing News

The Chinese solar manufacturer today admitted it is in talks with its lenders and strategic investors about a break up of the company after its 2018 annual accounts revealed an apparently unserviceable debt pile. Any strategic investor is likely to constitute a Chinese state-backed bail-out.

Recently, PV-Tech took the opportunity to catch up with Erik Bentschap Knook, Chief commercial officer at Eternalsun Spire and a key partner at the forthcoming PV ModuleTech 2019 in Penang.

The rollercoaster witnessed in recent years by Taiwan’s solar manufacturers is written all over the words of Jenny Hsu, global sales manager of Motech Industries.

Taiwan’s government risks failing to make good on solar growth pledges unless it acts to clear structural hurdles such as land shortages, industry operators have warned at Energy Taiwan 2019.

Shareholders in the heavily-indebted solar project EPC and building-integrated PV manufacturer will vote on the last day of the month on the proposed takeover of the business by a Chinese state-backed entity. No news has emerged of a winding-up order due to be heard yesterday.

The Hong Kong-based solar manufacturer appears to have posted impressive revenue gains this year, based on preliminary, unaudited operating results for the first three quarters of 2019. But as the troubled company continues to pin its hopes on a much-anticipated turnaround in Chinese solar demand, its long-term outlook remains uncertain, mere weeks before the scheduled de-listing of its shares in Taiwan.

Major polysilicon producer Wacker Chemie has warned its overall group profitability for 2019 would be around 30% lower than the prior year, due to continued weak demand from the solar industry in China and continued polysilicon prices declines to industry record lows.

Taiwan will try and use its leverage as a global electronic and manufacturing hotspot to engineer a multi-gigawatt clean energy boom, government figures have said as they kickstarted this year’s edition of Energy Taiwan.

In the run up to our Greenwashing vs. verifiable sustainability webinar, the CEO of pv magazine’s UP initiative partner SMA Solar Technology, Jürgen Reinert, talks about what the inverter manufacturer is doing to prove its sustainability credentials.

There is movement in the heterojunction space, but will it be enough to surpass PERC’s momentum? New production lines show promise, but they might also be the last roll of the dice for Swiss production equipment supplier Meyer Burger.

The PV project developer and BIPV manufacturer has seen a glowing set of first-half figures published last year become a nightmare of lost income, debt defaults and frozen bank deposits. All eyes now turn to the business’ high court date on Wednesday.

LONGi Green Energy Technology Co, the largest monocrystalline wafer producer, has approved future PV module and solar cell manufacturing plans of 10GW and 5GW, respectively.

REC Group has officially started volume production of heterojunction solar cells and modules at its manufacturing complex in Singapore that will provide 600MW of annual capacity, when fully ramped.

‘Solar Module Super League’ (SMSL) member, JA Solar has licensed a number of patents from Shin-Etsu Chemical on doping Ga in silicon crystals and using the Ga-doped p-type crystalline silicon wafers for making solar cells to mitigate the impact of Light Induced Degradation (LID).

Chinese solar panel maker Risen Energy has signed off on an order to provide 150MW of high-efficiency PV modules to a power station in Malaysia. This stands as the biggest module order Risen Energy has ever carried out to date both in Malaysia and from an overseas floating power station.