Solar Commercial Plants News

The cancellation of an 80-megawatt project with no financial penalty raises questions about a monopoly utility competing against private developers.

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.

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 Shapoorji Pallonji Group’s solar EPC business will hit the capital markets with an initial public offering on Aug. 6.

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.

Soventix has been singled out by the Nicaraguan government as the potential developer of a major solar project, the latest in a series of PV moves by the Central American state.

A German player has become the owner of a distributed solar pipeline in El Salvador, laying the groundwork for construction to launch later this year.

Global asset management firm Capital Dynamics has purchased an 180MWac / 231MWdc solar project that includes a 90MWac / 360MWh energy storage facility in Boulder City, Nevada for an undisclosed sum.

Amazon revealed plans for a 45MW / 100,000MWh solar farm in Virginia and a 23.2MW / 68,000MWh wind farm in Cork, Ireland on Thursday.

With grid capacity a limiting factor, the Middle Eastern country has moved to foster private-to-private solar projects to meet industrial power demand.

In collaboration with Raptor Maps, FLIR has created a five-part series with four videos and a webinar on the use of thermal drones for solar inspection.

The final segment in pv magazine’s look at unsung solar markets heads to Ukraine, where a generous feed in tariff and developments in the corporate PPA segment looks likely to push installations past the 1 GW mark for 2019.