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.

With solar energy about to reach the iconic terawatt (TW) milestone of globally installed PV capacity, waste handling and end-of-life (EoL) scenarios become a pressing matter.

PV InfoLink analyzed the key markets of China’s big module manufacturers, as well as product trends, based on export statistics. According to trade figures, the nation’s module exports totaled 34.2 GW in the first half of 2019, up by more than 90% from the corresponding period of 2018. In a nutshell, overseas demand has been strong in 2019.

After several years of stagnation, Spain has started to see a revival in its PV market, writes IHS Markit’s Maria Chea. The country’s newfound growth has been due to a combination of tender and private PPA projects, along with decreasing component costs.

The Australian utility-scale PV and wind industries have just gone through a record two years of construction and commissioning. More specifically, writes Rystad Energy’s David Dixon, utility-scale PV has transformed from a megawatt-scale market to one measured in gigawatts. The resultant boom in utility-scale PV in the country has attracted developers, EPCs and OEMs, from at home and across the globe.

Grid operator Polskie Sieci Elektroenergetyczne has published figures demonstrating the country had 1,007.2 MW of solar at the end of September, with 600 MW of new PV coming online in the first nine months of the year. The Polish government expects total capacity to reach 1.3 GW this year.

Corporations in the auto industry, battery manufacturing and mining have joined forces to establish reliable due diligence reporting on raw minerals. Volvo will be among the first to move on the issue by putting its cobalt supply chain under scrutiny early next year.

A project on Isabela Island in Ecuador’s Galapagos archipelago has given its 3,500 inhabitants energy generated by local resources, including plant oil produced on the continent. Preferable to a logistically challenging and hyper expensive extension of the mainland grid, if the $13 million island system were installed today, it would be cheaper than when it was contracted four years ago.

A 20 MW solar park is planned near a Stockholm highway to generate power for a tenants association. The project is expected to generate cheaper power than grid electricity and will also trade clean energy certificates on the Swedish-Norwegian market.

The solar manufacturer’s ever-accelerating production capacity expansion plans currently foresee 10 GW of mono wafers being pumped out at the Sichuan facility every year from the second quarter of 2020 – and only a fool would bet against that timetable being bettered by the time April rolls around.

The discussion about wind damage in PV structures is getting louder and more heated, especially with rapid single-axis tracker growth in many markets. Whether it’s social media comments on failure photos, or one side of the profession taking shots at another in the press, the dialogue is at risk of becoming cynical. Simon Hughes, partner at technical and commercial energy consultancy Everoze, shines a light on four things that need to happen next, as well as the need for more dialogue between stakeholders.

WEnergy was celebrating the commissioning of its solar-diesel-storage off-grid network on the island of Palawan. Four more networks could come online within two years, said the developer, as part of a planned 15 microgrids in the nation.

The Finnish solar manufacturer must raise €3.5 million from a convertible bond issued on Monday and which closes on December 18. Generate the cash and production is expected to start at the Solitek facility in Vilnius early next year. Fail, and (almost) all bets are off.

The European Solar Manufacturing Council says a decision by policymakers to disregard the carbon footprint of imported solar products ‘makes absolutely no sense’. Talk of ‘jobs which require a rather low qualification’, meanwhile, is unlikely to heal the widening rift with solar project developers and panel installers.

Scientists at Princeton have found solar and wind energy offer the added environmental benefit of reducing water usage, by comparison with hydroelectric dams. Their findings, say the researchers, could have a positive impact on groundwater sustainability in drought-prone regions such as California, where they conducted a case study.

Amid high hopes for the European Commission presidency that is about to start, attendees at a recent event in Berlin tempered optimism by renewing calls for an industrial policy for the bloc.

Market intelligence company Navigant Research has developed a country forecast of the global market. Incentives and pricing will be the main driver of installations, though the market will continue to be concentrated in certain key regions for now.

A new application for ABB’s ‘Ability’ digital platform enables industrial customers to avoid peak charges without using of battery storage. The Swiss corporation has developed two apps for its energy management software with the help of an artificial intelligence specialist.

Scientists at the United States’ Argonne National Laboratory worked with a class of electrolyte materials they say could greatly improve the performance of lithium-sulfur batteries. The group has devised a selection rule which it says will help researchers select the most suitable electrolyte materials for different battery systems.

Firming up the payment system for solar energy exported back into the grid from PV-powered pumps will offer owners a new revenue stream, eat into a $1 billion annual diesel fuel bill and reduce strain on the grid by up to 1.5 GW daily during the agricultural season.

The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development is lending €250 million for a project which has expanded from producing an initial 100,000 EV batteries per year to an hoped-for 1 million by 2022, creating 1,000 new jobs along the way.

The third-quarter results for the inverter maker are in and look promising. All performance indicators are up for the steadily growing company.

In an update to its International Technology Roadmap for Photovoltaics, German engineering association the VDMA notes standardization of wafer size is a topic of great interest to the country’s PV equipment manufacturers, and modifications to lines will be needed to process wafer pieces larger that 161mm.

Chinese thin film manufacturer Hanergy told pv magazine in August the manufacturing division of Solibro had ceased to be one of its subsidiaries in December 2015 but a company presentation issued six months later would appear to indicate otherwise. Hanergy has been approached for comment.

Opinion is divided over the urgency of addressing the issue. While some developers feel the 25-year lifetime of modules offers plenty of time to prepare an action plan, other industry voices claim Indian-made products don’t last half that long and one recent report pointed out waste is already piling up thanks to defects and faulty installation.

TES issued a press release announcing the new facilities that is light on detail but claimed the plants would position it as ‘a leader’ in battery recycling. The company also announced an intent to move into the reuse of spent electric vehicle batteries in commercial and residential applications.

The Asian Development Bank has signed off a grant for the South Pacific island nation to move on its plans to be 100% renewable by 2025.

Scientists at the University of Maryland have developed an organic polymer electrode which they claim demonstrates stable function for a sodium-ion battery over 50,000 cycles and also offers encouraging performance in magnesium-ion and aluminum-ion storage devices.

In this interview, pv magazine sits down with Greg Tremelling, VP of business development at Oztek Corp, to talk about his company’s semi-custom solutions and where he sees the energy storage industry going.

The microgrid utility has raised enough capital from Shell New Energies to deploy systems across sub-Saharan Africa.