Solar Manufacturing News

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.

The Chinese company has announced it has acquired intellectual property rights pertaining to various applications of gallium-doped silicon wafers in solar cell applications from Japanese company Shin-Etsu Chemical.

The offer was apparently submitted by Saudi energy giant ACWA Power, which refused to confirm the bid when asked by pv magazine. The second lowest bid – $0.0175/kWh – was reportedly submitted by a consortium formed by Emirati developer Masdar, French utility EDF and Chinese PV panel maker JinkoSolar.

After emerging as the recipient of most of the Brazilian government’s public allocation of generation capacity, the Canadian-Chinese manufacturer has secured a large share of projects in auctions held by power companies Copel and, probably, Cemig.

Solar and storage developer 7X Energy has spent more than US$100 million to stockpile 2GWac of Power Electronics inverters in order to take advantage of the full investment tax credit (ITC) before it starts to taper next year.

Norwegian polysilicon manufacturer REC Silicon announced last Thursday it is considering selling its silane gas facility in Butte, in the US state of Montana.

The office of the U.S. Trade Representative has removed the exemption of bifacial products from Section 201 tariffs, effective October 28.

The Total Solar International PV unit of the French oil giant has started construction of a large scale plant in Osato, in the prefecture of Miyagi, Japan. With its third solar project in Japan, Total will reach 100 MW of installed generation capacity in less than two years.