Policy

Renewables may be making encouraging advances in the south Asian nation but the natural gas infrastructure deal announced today by the Saudi power company at a stroke eclipses the 375 MW of solar capacity in Bangladesh and its 609 MW development pipeline.

Q Cells will introduce its Q.Home hybrid inverter and battery system to the Australian market at the All-Energy event in Melbourne tomorrow. It is also introducing its new larger wafer module, which hits 355 Wp on a 60-cell format.

In this op-ed for pv magazine, Roy Torbert and José Juan Terrasa-Soler, of the Rocky Mountain Institute and Resilient Power Puerto Rico, respectively, analyze the cost of Puerto Rico’s energy recovery and the role that microgrids play in reconstruction and resiliency.

The Chaoyang facility is the largest of the first batch of central-subsidy-free solar projects approved in the world’s biggest solar marketplace. China Power has awarded three construction contracts to entities owned by its SPIC parent company.

The average price in the October round of Germany’s solar capacity procurement program fell back below the five-cent mark, helped by expansion of the quota for solar on Bavarian agricultural land. Nineteen of the 27 projects allocated by the Federal Network Agency were such schemes.

That would take the country to 8.28 GW of generation capacity by the end of the next decade with the government stating up to 6 GW of small scale capacity could be required on top. By that stage, however, coal would still amount to 43% of generation capacity and gas and diesel a combined 8.1%, under the new Integrated Resource Plan.

The affordable public financing packages on offer for solar rooftops are attracting developers who have clients happy to lease out roofspace without any capital outlay in order to secure cheaper power.

In January, the U.K. Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy opened consultation on its solar-plus-storage proposals. To date, systems with a capacity bigger than 50 MW are classed Nationally Significant Infrastructure Projects.

Although the International Energy Agency’s latest renewables report forecasts impressive solar growth there is still a nagging feeling it has produced conservative estimates and the emphasis on sharing costs with grid operators is predictable.

Two high-profile bankruptcies this year could serve as a warning for the potential pitfalls of pay-as-you-go and small scale, off-grid solar. However, Marcus Wiemann and David Lecoque of the Alliance for Rural Electrification say such business models can lead to long-term success and have a key role to play in providing power to the 1 billion people throughout the world who still live without electricity.