Solar Manufacturing News

Fraunhofer ISE has worked with German technology companies to improve the metallization process in silicon solar cells. The result could drive down module costs quite a bit.

While the rest of China’s solar manufacturers take on ever more debt to expand their production lines as fast as possible, Comtec said it is ready to sell off fabs for the right money and will instead focus on project sales and lithium battery and EV business opportunities.

With the Turkish government having given Kalyon Enerji another three years to build the 500 MW facility it won a tender to construct with former partner Hanwha Q Cells, Ankara has now committed a $333 million “super incentive” to the fab.

The Ningbo-based manufacturer shipped more than a quarter of the panels it exported in the first six months of the year to the eastern European nation. All the big manufacturers posted rising shipment volumes as emerging markets made up for slow growth in their homeland.

The District Court of Dessau-Roßlau yesterday confirmed self-administered insolvency proceedings have been conducted at the German thin-film CIGS module manufacturer and a provisional administrator has been appointed.

German energy agency Dena has found China’s smelter fleet could shift 432.5 GWh of daily demand to more amenable hours to tally with renewables generation. To make it happen though, the regulator needs to lay down rules for providing incentives.

A solar PV technology claiming to have achieved 50% higher output than conventional systems in tests has bagged EU research money to speed up its move to large-scale production.

Having stated an intent to hit 65 GW of annual mono wafer production capacity by the end of 2021, the Chinese solar manufacturing giant has now said that landmark will be achieved next year.

With the 200 hydrogen bikes offered to journalists and world leaders at the G7 summit in Biarritz proving popular, manufacturer Pragma Industries has received an order for 1,000 of them from Chilean president Sebastian Pinera. The company’s founder, Pierre Forté, wants the bike to have a societal impact in developing countries.

A consortium of European research institutes has received €10.6 million in EU funding to establish pilot production of a high efficiency module concept developed by Swiss startup Insolight. The module combines high efficiency multijunction cells with a solar concentrator lens and has previously demonstrated 29% efficiency.

Two of Germany’s leading research institutes and a CIGS module maker have announced plans to work on the development of perovskite-CIGS tandem cells with a target of producing thin film modules with better than 30% efficiency.

Specialist automation and PV module assembly solutions provider, Mondragon Assembly has struck a deal with Korean equipment supplier, STiN for its ‘continuous stringing’ intellectual property (IP).

Inline solar cell measurement equipment specialist Aurora Solar Technologies (AST) has won its largest single order to date from a major China-based manufacturer of high-efficiency PERC solar cells.

The Hong Kong manufacturer is holding out hope a boom that is expected to start imminently will help it turnaround losses that forced it to issue a profit warning last week. Getting its new production line in Qujing up to speed will help, provided the demand materializes.

The tender produced lower bids than previous rounds but again allocated less generation capacity than planned. The Japanese government initially accepted bids for a combined 589.9 MW but ended up assigning only 195.8 MW of capacity. The final average price for procured solar power was $0.1222/kWh.