South america

Shenzhen-based BYD intends to significantly increase the production of solar panels in Brazil in 2020, in response to demand from the local market, said the director of marketing and sustainability of BYD in Brazil, Adalberto Maluf.

The Brazilian president said the potential introduction of a grid fee for net metered solar systems will be eliminated thanks to an urgent ad-hoc decree expected to be approved soon by parliament. The proposed ‘solar tax’ would have affected all new PV installations with a generation capacity of no larger than 5 MW under Brazil’s net metering regime.

Canada’s Solar Provider Group (SPG) is the latest foreign developer to enter the Brazilian PV market, with a plan to invest US$250 million over the next five years.

Solar Provider Group has arranged a team to enter the Brazilian solar market with the goal to complete investments worth $250 million over the next 5 years

GameChanger Solar has received an order of more than 200MW of tracking systems from South America.

Acciona has commissioned a 54.2MW / 62MWp PV plant in the Atacama desert, bringing its total renewables operating capacity in Chile to 536MW.

The 117 MW Solar farm located in Sertão Solar Barreiras Complex is the fourth project by Atlas Renewable Energy which has been commissioned and functioning

A major US renewable group and a local utility have teamed up to deploy a significant green energy pipeline in Colombia, providing another boost to the country’s nascent solar scene.

Ecuador has identified the handful of top global clean energy developers who will compete to deploy the country’s first ever large-scale solar project.

A few Chilean major banks have united to support a bifacial PV system in Northern Chile's Atacama Desert, currently being constructed in the area listed among the planet’s driest inhabited places.

The latest study published by the International Renewable Energy Agency says the average solar electricity cost of $0.085/kWh produced by projects commissioned last year is set to fall to $0.048 next year, and $0.02-0.08 by 2030.

EPC points out operational launch of PV assets located in Chile and in India as Q1-Q3 2019 revenues almost double compared to last year, however net profit decreased by more than a half.

The latest figures released by BloombergNEF show new solar and onshore wind power plants have reached parity with average wholesale prices in California, China and parts of Europe. The technologies are winning the race to be the cheapest sources of new generation for two-thirds of the world’s population.

The World Climate Summit in Santiago de Chile, set to be held in just a few weeks, has just been cancelled. Against a background of social protests in the country, concerns have recently grown as to whether logistics and security could be guaranteed for the event. Nevertheless, social problems and environmental protection must not be played off against each other: Both are closely linked to the economic paradigms of recent decades.

Analysts at Fitch Solutions have published a report singling out Spain and Brazil as ‘outperformers’ in the global solar market and labelled Vietnam the “market to watch”. The analysts expect surging growth from the Southeast Asian nation to continue in the coming decade.