Healthy growth
Industry investment: Total corporate funding in the solar sector increased 175% to $26.5 billion in 2014, reports Raj Prabhu, CEO and cofounder of Mercom Capital Group. Last year saw strong public market financing, debt financing, and initial public offering activity. Venture capital funding doubled after a two year slump. Large-scale PV project acquisition activity continued to soar.
Lessons learned from PV+Test
Module test:?For the second time Hanwha Solar submitted to the challenging PV+Test 2.0 test program created by the German safety standards authority TÜV Rheinland and Solarpraxis this time with a module from the same series that was already tested last year. After adjustments to its production process the module fared even better this time than it did before.
2014 ends on a low
NYSE Bloomberg Solar Energy Index: Investors eye Asian market growth amid new capacity announcements.
Monitor this
Monitoring systems: Monitoring and control have become essential to ensure not only the smooth operation of solar plants but also the mitigation of financial risk to investors.
A maturing market and the rise of O&M
PV is all grown up. In its 2014 clean energy investment analysis released last month, Bloomberg New Energy Finance found that global investment in solar reached almost $150 billion for the year, its largest-ever slice of the clean energy pie. BNEF noted that some large solar investments, such as Japans $1.1 billion 250 MW Setouchi […]
Multi-MW solars past, present and future
Multi-megawatt solar: Paula Mints, founder and chief analyst of SPV Market Research, examines the development of large-scale solar PV.
A secondary market
Italy: Tommaso Angela, an analyst with Prothea, a Milan-based investment firm specialized in renewable energy, gives an overview of the Italian solar market as well as the trends and players in the Italian renewable energy financial market.
Optimizing tracker trouble shooting
PV tracker O&M: The laundry list of what can go wrong with trackers is a long one. Tracker designers and operations & maintenance experts are bringing innovations to the industry to help reduce costs.
An opportunity and a challenge
O&M: It sounds so simple: Keep the modules clean and cut the grass. However, O&M offerings are becoming more and more sophisticated, as prices for software, technology and soft costs are coming down.
Performance under difficult conditions
Mounting systems Japan: Germany-based provider Schletter established operations in Japan in April 2012 to supply the booming ground-mount market. In supplying around 500 MW of mounting structures to Japan, it has learned valuable lessons about varying topographies and wide-ranging climactic conditions. Dominik Grützner, the representative director of Schletter Japan K.K, shares five key lessons from his time in Japan.
