Markets

Representing 35% of global module capacity, IHS forecasts a 5.7 GW total effective capacity of Chinese tier-1 module suppliers in the first quarter of 2015.

The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology in China has released new regulations aimed at boosting equity in manufacturing expansions and encouraging consolidation amongst manufacturers in the country’s PV, battery and polysilicon industries.

In the three years that Grupotec has been operating in the U.K., it has erected 32 PV parks with a total capacity of 220 MW, making it the No. 2 leading EPC company in the country last year.

Spain’s Santander and Germany’s Bayerische Landesbank arranged funding for the projects, which will be owned by SunEdison’s yieldco subsidiary TerraForm Power.

The PV manufacturer has announced plans to end its production operations in Germany in March and relocate them to more affordable locations. IHS analyst Stefan de Haan sees the main reasons for the move in the floundering European PV markets and the lack of scale effects.

When Saudi developer ACWA won Dubai’s 200 MW reverse auction for a PV power plant with a bid of only US$5.84c/kWh over 25 years, the low price stunned the PV industry. The founder of Bloomberg New Energy Finance, Michael Liebreich, believes that it will also send a strong signal to the MENA region of just how cheap renewable energy can be delivered. Liebreich describes it as “the starting gun for something pretty substantial.” He spoke to pv magazine at the World Future Energy Summit this week in Abu Dhabi.

The global PV market reached between 40 GW and 42 GW in 2014, demonstrating moderate growth on 37 GW in 2013. This is according to figures released today by the PV Market Alliance.

On the same day that former U.S. Vice President Al Gore expressed optimism that an agreement on greenhouse gas emissions would be reached in Paris later this year, Jake Werksman, the European Union’s lead negotiator in these negotiations, shared Gore’s optimism that Paris would prove successful after the failure of the last round of negotiations in Copenhagen to reach a consensus.

In his annual State of the Union speech delivered to Congress and the nation Tuesday evening, President Barack Obama highlighted the rapid expansion of solar power in the United States since he moved into the White House.

A new study titled Managing Flexibility in European Electricity Grids by Frost and Sullivan finds that grid flexibility is crucial to integrate renewable energy sources in Europe. Technical, geographical, managerial and above all political obstacles remain though.