Markets

After several year of stalled and failed projects, Zimbabwe’s government is now seeking to implement existing projects, and to get rid of licensed projects that have never been realized. The first attempt will be pushing forward the 100 MW Gwanda solar project, which had been awarded to Intratek in 2015. The government is further planning to grant incentives to rooftop PV under net metering.

A report published by New Zealand’s state-owned transmission grid operator Transpower finds the widespread uptake of distributed battery storage could play an important role in supporting the power system as rooftop PV and electric vehicles are increasingly adopted.

Through a new procuremente exercise, the Oman Power and Water Procurement company (OPWP) is now seeking developers for the Manah Solar I IPP and Manah Solar II IPP projects with a capacity of 500 MW and 600 MW, respectively. Both plants will be located at Manah which is around 150 km southwest of Muscat.

Scatec Solar moved into the Malaysian Solar market in late-2016. The company sealed financing for 197 MW of capacity with the help of the country’s green bonds, the year after. Malaysia is continuing on its solar trajectory and will hold the third iteration of its tenders for the allocation of an addition 500 MW in generation capacity.

According to new statistics released by African Energy Live Data, solar represents more than half of total new power generation capacity for the first three months of this year.

According to the new auction schedule approved by the Italian Ministry of Economic Development, three more renewables procurement exercises will be held each year in 2020 and 2021. Through the seven bidding rounds, the Italian authorities seek to allocate approximately 4.8 GW of new power generation capacity.

Norwegian headquartered polysilicon manufacturer REC Silicon has announced that it will lay off another 100 workers at its Moses Lake facility in the western United States, as the factory heads into long term shutdown.

Through this procurement exercise, the Tunisian government hopes to build six solar plants with a capacity of 10 MW each and ten 1 MW small solar parks.

While it is often stated only 5% of lithium-ion batteries are recycled, a review of research into the second life and recycling of lithium-ion batteries suggests that is a gross understatement. A new study found almost 100,000 tons of waste batteries were recycled last year – about half of what reached end-of-life.

After the bombshell news this week, the Italian inverter manufacturer’s CEO spoke to pv magazine about the future of ABB’s R&D hubs, manufacturing sites, hundreds of employees and of course Fimer’s outlook.