Solar

In 2016 France turned a one-kilometer stretch of roadway into the world’s first solar road. And three years later, the trial project has turned out to be an absolute disaster, French newspaper Le Monde reports.

Solar could be rolled out on buildings across all of China’s major urban centres at competitive prices without the need for subsidies, according to a new study published on Nature Energy.

Global retail brand Gap moved one step closer to its goal of fully renewably-powered operations by 2030 after signing a power purchase agreement (PPA) with Enel Green Power North America. It has purchased 90MW of energy from the renewables giant's North Dakota wind project for a period of 12 years.

Electricity produced from commercial and industrial solar energy systems is now cheaper in Chinese cities than that supplied by the national grid.

The city council of Satellite Beach, Fla., has unanimously passed a resolution committing the city to transition to 100% clean, renewable energy for the entire community by 2050 and for municipal operations by 2032.

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.

New textile-based solar cells developed by Fraunhofer researchers, semitrailers could soon be producing the electricity needed to power cooling systems or other onboard equipment. In short, textile-based solar cells could soon be adding a whole new dimension to photovoltaics, complementing the use of conventional silicon-based solar cells.

Researchers at Siberian Federal University, together with colleagues from the Royal Institute of Technology (Stockholm, Sweden), discovered new properties of material based on palladium, which can increase the performance of solar cells.

The €29.7 million financing package was awarded by Banco Sabadell. Renovalia’s 79.2 MW solar park will be Spain’s first PV facility to sell all of its output on the spot market.

U.K. solar developer Lightsource BP plans to host a community information event in the town of Mannum, South Australia, to outline a proposal to fund, build and operate a 100 MW solar project.

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.

The winning developer will be able to use solar modules and cells of any origin for the plant, which will be built in Auraiya district, in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh. Bidding closes on Sept. 5.

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.

The state enterprise Solar Energy Corporation of India (SECI) issued at the beginning of the month a tender for 1,200MW of renewable power that can be used to alleviate peak demand issued on the grid, in effect mandating the use of energy storage systems (ESS).

‘Solar Module Super League’ (SMSL) member JA Solar has supplied its bifacial double-glass PERC modules to a 2.5MW rooftop project at a Goodyear tire manufacturing facility in Shah Alam, Malaysia, the country's largest such project.