Highlights

Through the transaction, Cubico acquired 47 operating assets with a capacity of 274 MW – including 167 MW of PV in Spain as well as 7 MW of solar plants in Italy –and a portfolio of solar projects under development of about 1.4 GW.

A huge renewable energy complex is planned to include 5 GW of PV capacity. Furthermore, the State Power Investment Corporation has announced a plan to set up a 5 GW heterojunction solar cell factory in Fujian province.

Dutch researchers have shown that bifacial floating PV arrays do not benefit significantly from sunlight reflected from the water, and claim that the water only reduces panel temperatures by a small amount. Bird droppings may also affect system performance, but floating PV could achieve a lower LCoE than ground-mounted arrays if such issues are addressed, they say.

Overall, the Polish energy regulator has allocated 1.7 GW of renewable energy capacity in a procurement exercise that was open to projects exceeding 1 MW in size. The auction concluded with a lowest price of $0.051/kWh, slightly up from the auction of the same kind held last year.

The third annual scorecard published by the consultant has tested 22 batteries with different chemistries for cycling stability and temperature-dependent behaviour and identified significant product trends.

The Chinese leader has revealed some details of his nation’s commitment to go carbon neutral by 2060. That solar and wind power promise could even prove to be a conservative estimate, according to the nation’s solar industry.

Terna’s first auction for reserve storage capacity was largely oversubscribed, with over 1,327 MW of submitted projects. Overall, 23 projects were assigned to 17 operators.

The Kazakh authorities allocated 55 MW of PV capacity in two different procurement exercises. Two projects, totaling 40 MW, were secured by Russian module manufacturer Hevel Solar.

Throughout this year, a fast-moving story has played out in PV module technology, with the introduction of larger wafers and subsequently larger module formats seeing the industry break into two camps, backing either 182 mm or 210 mm wafers. It remains to be seen whether one or the other will become a new industry standard, and both sizes will likely be plentiful on the market for the next few years at least. pv magazine takes a look at how we got to this point.

Through the procurement exercise, the Spanish government wants to allocate 1 GW of PV, 1 GW of wind and another gigawatt of renewable energy capacity with storage.