Magazine Archive 06-2017

European markets: Self-consumption is a key model for European solar in 2017. C&I rooftops and the rise of the residential prosumer are driving the expected recovery, alongside large-scale tenders in Germany, France, Poland, and Turkey.

European module market: Hot-selling solar components in Europe in 2017 come in the form of high-efficiency products. Competition between providers of 300 W+ is particularly fierce, finds Corrine Lin of pv magazine’s Insight and Investigations team.

pv magazine: Macron is now France’s new President. Is this good news for solar? Xavier Daval: What Macron said during his campaign, and what is on his website, seems a continuation of what Energy Minister Ségolène Royal did. However, the true direction doesn’t seem clear at all. Macron said he aims to double solar and […]

Quality testing: Since 2014 PV Evolution Labs, a subsidiary of DNV GL, has been publishing its PV Module Reliability Scorecard. In 2017, some of the key findings are that the Bill of Materials matters more than ever, and that the location of the production facility can be crucial. Jenya Meydbray, PV Evolution Labs founder, provides his take on making quality count.

Spanish PV policy: The complexity of Spain’s long awaited renewables auction, the only one like it in the world, and the lack of clarity when it comes to remuneration is drawing fire from the country’s cleantech sector.

Recycling: As PV module deployment continues to grow, so does the issue of end of life. Germany’s Loser Chemie has long worked on the recycling of thin film PV modules and has recently made major strides in applying chemical separation technology to the crystalline silicon (c-Si) space. The question is not how, but when large-scale recycling of PV modules will be reality, says Loser Chemie’s Wolfram Palitzsch.

Ex-Yu roundup: The history of the former Yugoslav countries is mired in political upheaval and war, and irreversibly shaped by the country’s dissolution in the 1990s. While Slovenia and Croatia have gone their own way in leading the charge towards solar deployment, a lack of funding and policy transparency coupled with bureaucratic inertia is limiting PV rollout.

Valuing storage services: A lack of adequate valuation for the services that energy storage provides has been identified as a key barrier to the wider deployment of batteries. But the path ahead is not always easy or direct.

Global markets: The 2017 BNEF Future of Energy Summit featured fact-free presentations from the Trump administration, but the real story is the ongoing price declines and accelerated deployment of clean energy and transportation.