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.
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.
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.
2014 ends on a low
NYSE Bloomberg Solar Energy Index: Investors eye Asian market growth amid new capacity announcements.
Global FIT overview
Feed-in tariffs: A number of changes have taken place to feed-in-tariff schemes on both sides of the Atlantic.
Further price reductions
Module prices: A weak Q4 has once again led to a drop in module prices in Europe. Trina Solar and Yingli currently dominate the market.
Frontier mentality
Japan: coming through the module glut unscathed is no mean feat for a thin film manufacturer, but Solar Frontier has long turned expectation on its head. 2014 saw the firm travel along its own path in how it develops projects, moves its CIGS technology forward, releases differentiated products, and looks to the international market.
Fiddling while Rome burns
European R&D: Criticized for toiling away in labs while the PV industry lies gravely injured, Europes R&D sector hopes a series of pan-continental projects can help wrest control of solars global future. pv magazine visited the INES research center in France to see how the community is regrouping and collaborating as it prepares to survive Europes solar winter.
Energizing O & M in the United States
Operations & maintenance: The U.S. PV industry has shown it knows how to build distributed solar and massive power plants alike but the need to operate and maintain them is creating new challenges and opportunities.
Dynamic market or missed opportunity?
WFES 2015: the MENA region has long attracted the attention of the global solar industry as a collection of national markets with enormous potential. The question of whether the market will live up to its hype or remain an enormous missed opportunity is still unclear, but it does appear that now is the time for this debate to be met head on.
