News

Solar power is already taking over the land, so naturally, now it's coming for the sea. The big ol' boat in the photo above is the Silent 55 ship from Silent Yachts, a luxury solar panel boat company based in Austria. It uses silent electric propulsion to achieve unlimited range without noise, fumes, or any maintenance at all.

Most of the generation capacity – around 63 MW – was deployed in the emirate over the last 14 months.

The French oil giant and China’s Envision Group are forming a joint venture offering PV systems combined with energy management solutions. Total Eren is also involved in a 100 MW solar project in Uzbekistan.

The future benefits of technology such as smart meters and the associated aggregation of small scale generation are not being adequately rewarded, support for solar and wind is being cut off and parliament is fixated solely on one issue

The obligation will be applied annually from 2022. The clean electricity required will have to be bought through power purchase contracts of at least 10 years’ duration.

Credibility comes not just from offering products that generate clean electricity, but also from the way in which those products are manufactured, says SMA Solar Technology CEO Jürgen Reinert. Here, transparency and sustainability are key. That’s why one of the world’s largest PV inverter producers has partnered with pv magazine’s UP sustainability initiative. In the following Q&A, Reinert lays out what SMA is doing to step UP its green game.

Tennet needs more than €4.75 billion to invest in cross-border grid infrastructure between Germany and the Netherlands, as rising volumes of solar and wind are complicating network operations, said Dutch Finance Minister Wopke Hoekstra in a recent letter to the Dutch parliament, adding that the government may need to privatize the state-owned transmission system operator or sell off a stake in it.

The Australian Energy Market Operator constrained the output of several large-scale solar plants by 50% on Friday, in response to voltage fluctuations in a 220 kV network spanning the states of Victoria and New South Wales.

With India’s power minister hinting that a new renewable energy tariff policy could be in the works, the federal agency responsible for solar has started boasting about the volume of clean power it has in the pipeline.

A consortium led by gas network owner Enwave Australia is developing Australia’s first industrial renewable energy microgrid at a new 120-hectare business park in Nambeelup, Western Australia.

Goldman Sachs Renewable Power, a subsidiary of the investment banking giant, has reached an equity pool of $4 billion, which will serve to expand on the hundreds of megawatts in portfolios the company has acquired in the last 12 months alone.

TEESS, a 50/50 joint venture established by Total and Envision Group, has launched its commercial activity to develop on-site distributed generation solar projects for B2B customers in China.

Germany must embrace renewables and energy storage at an unprecedented scale if it hopes to offset the void left behind by coal and nuclear phase-outs, a new study has said.

Record-low tariffs seen in government auctions this month in Malaysia will not dent the country’s solar growth, according to analysts at Fitch Solutions.

Greece has opted to slightly trim the capacity on offer at the year’s last solar-only tender, setting ceiling prices that reflect the gradual technology cost decreases seen in the country.