Policy

Commercial and industrial PV installer Starsight Energy says business is on the up thanks to rising wholesale energy costs in the country.

With the Polish government planning to commission five gas power plants over the next five years, London-based thinktank Carbon Tracker has estimated just how costly the move will be, compared to deploying solar plants and energy storage instead.

The $87 million Kesses solar project, in Kenya’s Rift Valley town of Eldoret, is set for completion by Spanish developer Alten this year.

With the Italian government temporarily limiting the returns available from solar plants on the wholesale energy market, Swiss investor SUSI Partners says the underlying strength of the country’s PV industry remains.

The European Commission wants to introduce legislation to back semiconductor research and to address the immediate problem of supply chain bottlenecks by drumming up more than €43 billion, with member states and the private sector expected to contribute.

Mario Draghi’s administration has replaced market-driven electricity prices for the rest of the year and replaced them with tariffs based on historical averages. With solar plant operators among those affected, the European trade body for PV is not amused.

Utility Nova Scotia Power wanted to impose a monthly charge on net-metered solar system owners which the Canadian Renewable Energy Association said could have doubled the payback period for household and commercial arrays.

Commercial and industrial clients across the continent are turning to solar amid fears ever more cash-strapped conventional electricity companies will be unable to invest in their creaking grids, an online event has heard.

One of the first items in the in-tray of the country’s new Socialist Party government must be to unblock Portugal’s seemingly huge appetite for PPA-backed merchant solar sites and to deliver the PV projects which were tendered by the authorities, to global acclaim, in 2019 and 2020.

The raised ambition of an already huge renewables-powered hydrogen project in the Southern African nations vividly demonstrates the hydrogen and clean energy potential of a continent which accounted for just 0.5% of the world’s new solar capacity last year, according to trade body AFSIA’s annual report.