Markets

Observatório Fotovoltaico is mapping PV projects across Portugal, with information on installation size, year of commissioning, exploration type, and developer. The free tool already includes around 1,000 projects, corresponding to 60% of the country’s total installed capacity.

Despite a slow start to the year, BloombergNEF expects Portugal to install another 1,363 MW of solar by the end of 2023. The likelihood of that scenario seems to come down to how quickly projects from the record-breaking 2019-20 solar auctions go online, if they do so at all.

In the second interview of a series held at Intersolar 2023, pv magazine spoke with Karen Tang, Director – Editorial Lead Europe at Singapore-based market research company OPIS, about current price trends in the industry. She said solar panels may soon be bought at an average of $0.185/W but she also revealed that offers under $0.15/W are now becoming more frequent. Furthermore, Tang said prices may continue to drop in the future, with the bottom line being difficult to determine. Much will depend on the actual manufacturing capacity we will see coming online, which may not match the huge number of recent announcements released by module producers.

Alight says it has obtained a 12-year power purchase agreement (PPA) for a 64 MW solar plant in Sweden. It says it will turn to non-recourse project financing, despite the conventional practice of financing PPA-backed solar assets with equity in the country.

At Intersolar in Munich, pv magazine spoke with Jenny Chase, solar analyst at BloombergNEF, about falling solar module prices, oversupply, bottlenecks in the European markets, and labor issues. According to Chase, lower panel prices won’t instantly create demand, and manufacturers should prepare to deal with very low margins. She also said we can expect to see more consolidation in the industry, and bankruptcies for uncompetitive producers may be unavoidable.

The German police arrested a Chinese citizen at Munich Airport last week, prior to the start of the Intersolar Europe trade fair. Investigators are targeting the detained individual for allegedly evading anti-subsidy and anti-dumping duties imposed on PV products in the European Union prior to September 2018, a lawyer told pv magazine.

The National Energy Administration (NEA) says China installed 61.21 GW of solar in the first five months of this year, bringing the nation to nearly 453 GW of cumulative installed PV capacity by the end of May.

Greece’s energy regulator has announced three separate auctions for standalone energy storage systems connected to electricity transmission networks. The application process for the first auction, which involves 400 MW of energy storage, will be open until July 10.

Chris Sparkes, lead technician at UK solar installer Solar Fast tells pv magazine simply throwing money at the PV industry will not suffice.

The European Union’s new renewable energy directive says that around 100 GW of wind power and PV should be built on the continent every year.