Manufacturing

REC Group has begun production of its residential N-Peak Black series, reaching up to 325 watts. Concurrently, Trina Solar has released four new modules within its Tallmax, Duomax, Duomax Twin and Honey series — some of which reach up to 415 watts.

The exhibition halls of the Solar Solutions Int. trade fair near Amsterdam are full and visitors seem optimistic. And for good reason, as 2 GW of PV capacity could be built in the Netherlands this year — a solid 40% jump on last year’s installations.

Motech Industries revealed this week that its annual net loss widened by 124.19% year on year to NT$6.795 billion ($220.5 million), marking its biggest yearly net loss ever.

Canadian Solar recorded net income of $237.1 million in 2018, from $99.6 million a year earlier, on annual PV module shipments of 6.62 GW.

Meyer Burger has struck a strategic partnership with Oxford PV to expedite the mass production of perovskite on silicon heterojunction (HJT) tandem cells.

Just three months after revealing that it had achieved a 28% conversion efficiency with its perovskite-silicon tandem solar cells, Oxford PV has closed the initial portion of a Series D funding round aimed at bringing its core technologies to market.

With the legal squabble between Hanwha Q Cells and three rival solar manufacturers now encompassing three countries, equipment supplier Meyer Burger saw fit to refer to the dispute in its latest announcement of an Asian contract win.

Shunfeng International Clean Energy expects its annual losses to have widened to around $255 million last year, up from $125 million in the preceding 12-month period.

Indian company Amtronics CC has paid Quantum Materials Corp an initial $500,000 as part of an agreement securing the right to manufacture quantum dots and thin-film quantum dot solar cells based on QMC technology for commercial supply in India. Construction has already started on a manufacturing facility in the state of Assam.

Things are hotting up in the tracker world as the desire to squeeze down the price per Watt of solar power intensifies. And the rise of the trackers is attracting some well-known businesses to buy their way into the field.