Residential PV

With her first official announcement, Spain’s incoming Minister of Ecological Transition, Teresa Ribera has made it clear that the previous government’s reviled tax on distributed generation array, the so-called ‘sun tax’ will be eliminated. At the same time, she has confirmed her support for more ambitious EU renewable energy targets.

Representations by big beasts of global PV win only a partial concession from the authorities in Beijing, with officials agreeing to honor FIT payments for any ground mount projects connected during the next three weeks.

With a growing global residential PV market, software solutions to optimize rooftop systems have spawned. Last year the PV market grew by 29% with no sign of decelartion in sight. Optimizing installations and making them as convenient as possible has thus become a hotter market recently.

The updated version of the “PV Grid Parity Monitor” (GPM) provides an analysis for the commercial DG segment in representative cities of five countries: Germany, Chile, Spain, Italy and Mexico. Germany, Chile and Italy are the countries where good proximity to grid-parity and regulations favoring self-consumption are best combined.

With new amendments to the Electricity Market Act, the Baltic country will now have its first technology-neutral auctions for renewable energy projects ranging in size from 50 kW to 1 MW, its feed-in premium scheme limited to generators up to 50 kW (which may favor solar), and more chances to create direct lines with single final customers.

Despite recent developments in China, the European solar association believes global newly installed PV capacity this year will reach 102 GW, only 5 GW lower than its previous guidance.

The failure of the tender depended on a series of factors, the most important of which was the clarification of policy around fiscal exemptions for solar self-consumption in the case of third-party investment.

The French energy giant has consolidated its new clean energy focus through the acquisition. The Langa group is expected to have operational PV assets of 165 MW in France by the end of the year.

Residential solar installations have almost trebled in Ho Chi Minh City in the past nine months, in line with the Vietnamese government’s recently announced aim for solar arrays to be installed on 26% of the country’s homes by 2030.

Renewable energy has made great strides in electricity generation but the integration of renewables in the heating, cooling and transport sectors is still in its infancy. With those sectors making up around two thirds of global energy demand, there is still enormous potential to harness PV and other technologies.