Highlights

With competition on the module market as cutthroat as ever, manufacturers are increasingly looking to emphasize the quality and reliability of their products and services as a differentiator. pv magazine investigates what’s behind some of these claims, and the move from manufacturers to more sophisticated quality assurance methods.

Although the National Energy Administration (NEA) held a seminar to talk about the development of the 13th five-year plan last November, a positive signal for domestic demand, the Chinese government still has not released new official targets for solar, as of February 2019.

Power provider Stadtwerke Waldkirch has built a 264 kW PV system in Germany with Sunman’s glass-free modules, as a titanium rooftop at the project site made it impossible to use conventional modules.

Despite a number of unfavorable policy announcements, the global PV market still added 101 GW in 2018. It looks likely that this momentum will continue this year, with as much as 110 GW of new capacity expected.

Germany set a new record in March as more than half of its power was generated from wind, PV and other renewables. In the first quarter, renewables accounted for 45.4% of net electricity generation, according to Energy Charts from Fraunhofer ISE.

The Japanese CIS solar module maker has been acquired — along with its parent company, Showa Shell Sekiyu — through a share exchange by Japanese oil refiner Idemitsu. The transaction was announced in mid-October, while the preliminary agreement was signed in July.

The Tunisian government awarded contracts for six 10 MW solar projects in the country’s second solar tender. The tender process was launched last August.

Approximately 420 MW of solar power was newly installed in February. The strong growth for the first two months of the year was mainly due to the FIT cuts for commercial PV projects.

A recent Australian National University study shows that newly developed geographic information system algorithms can identify prospective sites for off-river pumped hydro projects throughout the world. The researchers, who identified around 530,000 potential sites, said pumped-hydro installations could enable large-scale energy time-shifting, as well as a range of ancillary services such as frequency regulation, which could help to integrate high levels of PV and wind into electricity systems.