Asia

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.

Australian renewables investor Lyon Group has penned an agreement with China Huadian Corporation which will see the duo co-develop and invest in power-plus-battery energy storage systems across Australia, China and other Asian markets.

‘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).

The Dubai Electricity & Water Authority (DEWA) has allegedly attracted the second lowest global solar bid for a 900MW tranche of the 5GW Mohammed Rashid Al-Maktoum (MBR) solar park in Dubai.

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.

Expert warnings that India will be falling short of its renewable deployment targets have sparked a strong-worded rebuke from the government, which has slammed them as “ill-founded”

PV project developer and EPC firm, ReneSola is continuing with plans to offload operating plants to recoup cash and invest in new projects.

American John B. Goodenough, Brit Stanley Whittingham and Akira Yoshino, from Japan, have received the Nobel Prize for Chemistry for developing the lithium-ion battery. A statement from the Royal Academy of Sciences of Sweden said the invention “laid the foundations of a society without wires and fossil fuels, and [they] are of great benefit to humanity”.

A report by Indian ratings agency CRISIL points to a rising rate of tender failures, an inconsistent policy approach from central and state governments and restrictive solar energy tariff caps and says India could have just 104 GW of renewables capacity by 2022.

The rising solar appetites of global investors so far in 2019 have put the industry on course to reach full-year financing volumes unseen since 2017, according to Mercom.

US assistant secretary of state for energy Francis Fannon says Indian solar developers should put quality, service and diplomacy above one-time expenditure.

Although the Wiki-solar website ranking only gives a snapshot of PV project engineering, procurement and construction contracts outside China, it is nevertheless a useful indicator of the changing shape of the global solar market.

The decreasing costs of solar and wind energy could generate $71 billion in stranded coal assets in Japan by 2025, according to a new report from the Carbon Tracker Initiative, a financial think tank, and the University of Tokyo. Offshore wind power will be cheaper than coal in Japan by 2022, new solar cheaper by 2023, and onshore wind less expensive by 2025.

China is the world’s largest producer of solar panel technology – tech that is now being exported and that is transforming energy sectors in countries such as Argentina, where the largest solar park in Latin America has recently been inaugurated.