Utility Scale PV

The Italia Solare Forum event held in Rome last week has shown, once again, that permitting for both large scale and distributed generation projects remains the main barrier to remove to make Italy get the benefits of its huge solar potential. Despite recent progress, new provisions, and a slight increase in new PV capacity, the Italian market may be, again, unable to surpass 1 GW this year.

Floating PV is a growing niche in the solar sector, but its offshore segment has proven more difficult to activate, largely because of the difficulty of open-water energy generation. Nevertheless, one company in Singapore, G8 Subsea, aims to leave the safety of harbors and reservoirs.

The development entity driving the first stage of a planned 60 MW solar plant has announced a doubling in the amount of borrowing secured for a project which was supposed to be operational in 2018.

The new provisions define clearly what hybrid power plants are and what kind of grid tariffs they should pay. The regulation may be particularly favorable for hybrid wind-solar plants, especially in North-Eastern Brazil, where the grid is not strong enough to support further renewable energy development.

The Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairs and Climate Policy is now reviewing 54,109 renewable energy projects totaling 5.17 GW in the first round of the SDE+ program for 2021. Solar accounts for around 80% of the total submitted capacity.

A surge of Italian PV project activity is soon expected if the local authorities get out of the way. With the market, financial and policy settings in place, the market is set to see a return to bustling PV project activity, with regulatory reforms clearing the way forward, reports Sergio Matalucci in Milan.

With a new system for floating photovoltaic power plants, engineers from Germany want to make the application cheaper, higher-yielding, and safer. The result is somewhat reminiscent of a pufferfish, which also gave the system its name.

Through the two procurement exercises, Bahrain’s Sustainable Energy Authority (SEA) wants to deploy solar plants at the Ministry of Labour & Social Development and the Ministry of Education.

According to U.S.-based Grizzly Research LLC, many of the company’s European solar projects appear not to exist. Renesola has said it will review the report and address the key inaccuracies with detailed explanations on its upcoming earnings conference call.

Amazon has announced 5.6 GW of solar throughout the world. The first U.S. projects are planned for Arizona and Georgia.