Installations

IKEA starts selling home PV systems; First Solar reports solid year-to-year growth in Q1; Solar Impulse returns to the skies. Good news is not boring in the solar world.

TerniEnergia announced that it has completed the first of its two “giant” PV projects in South Africa.

Progress on three solar schemes and projects in India, which have a potential combined capacity of 1050 MW, including 500 MW of rooftop PV being tendered by SECI, a piece of land being assigned for a 200 MW project in Rajasthan, and SkyPower agreeing EPC and O&M contracts with Sterling and Wilson for 350 MW of PV projects.

Residential solar lending platform Mosaic will receive the funding for a new USD200 million facility from DZ BANK and NY Green Bank. The facility will help the company achieve its ambitious future targets for providing solar financing to homeowners.

Community solar project in Halfmoon, New York will allow more than 100 local residents to participate in solar energy generation, even if they can’t have their own private PV systems.

Mississippi Power and Silicon Ranch Corporation broke ground on the largest solar farm in the state of Mississippi.

An extensive study of solar farms in the UK has found that the existence of the solar panels can improve biodiversity and wildlife abundance, especially when combined with measured land management.

Hanwha Q Cells has published its 2015 annual report today, in which the advantages of bringing together its German and Malaysian Q Cells and Chinese SolarOne manufacturing were demonstrated. Booking a profit of $44 million, on sales of $1.8 billion, the harmonization of its ingot through module operations, and more-recent capacity expansions see the company well situated in 2016.

Residential solar lease-to-own company Fenix International has now signed over 60,000 leases for its off-grid ReadyPay Power solar systems in Uganda.

Australian investment in large-scale renewable energy projects fell sharply in the first quarter of 2016, more than six months after the Coalition government promised “certainty” after forcing the Labor opposition to agree to slash the renewable energy target (RET) to 33,000GWh.