Soliant Energy has received UL Listing from the Underwriters Laboratories Inc. for its SE-500X solar cells. The company also says its SE-500X line is the first product certified to be under the SU 8703 UL draft standard, a new comprehensive code defined specifically to test safety parameters of concentrated photovoltaic (CPV) products.

Alanod-Solar has unveiled its new lacquering facility in Ennepetal, Germany. The new facility represents a total investment of USD$25 million and increases the company’s annual capacity by nearly ten million additional square feet per year.

Hisco has said it has signed a distribution agreement with Hosiden to support the North American solar market.

Germany’s upper house of parliament has agreed to a compromise proposal to reduce the cuts for solar power incentives. The law can now enter into force.

Germany’s Bundesrat upper house of parliament has agreed to a compromise proposal to reduce the cuts for solar power incentives. The reductions will be implemented over a three month period.

Construction on the largest school solar project in California, the U.S. is about to get underway. Rosendin Electric has announced that the USD$50 million, 9.4 megawatt (MW) installation, which spans ten schools, will be completed by the first quarter of next year.

pvxchange has announced it has brokered more photovoltaics (PV) modules and inverters in the first half of this year than during the course of the whole previous year. At the same time, another 1,000 participants have registered on the online trading platform since the beginning of this year.

Suniva, Inc., a U.S. manufacturer of monocrystalline silicon solar cells and modules, has announced it has expanded its manufacturing capacity to 170 megawatts (MW) from 96 MW by adding a third cell line at its metro-Atlanta plant.

The Sacramento Municipal Utility District (SMUD) has signed multiple 20-year power purchase agreements (PPAs) with Recurrent Energy for 60 megawatts (MW) of solar power to be developed in the southern portion of Sacramento County, the U.S. These are the first agreements to come out of the utility’s feed-in tariff program (FIT) introduced in January of this year.

Changes in incentive schemes and new regulations could see the total capacity of photovoltaics (PV) installations “fall considerably” in 2011, meaning new markets would have to pick up the shortfall. The news comes as IMS Research says that 14.6 gigawatts (GW) of new PV capacity will be added worldwide this year.