Asia

Panasonic has unveiled a new product in Japan with a PV-based charging function that uses a heat pump and hot water storage unit to save energy by maintaining bathwater temperatures at constant levels.

India’s cumulative rooftop solar installations surpassed 7GW in December. The state of Gujarat leads the country with the most installed rooftop solar capacity to date.

The procurement exercise was open to PV projects exceeding 250kW in size and had a ceiling price of ¥10.25/kWh ($0.089).

Longi Solar has released the data of an inhomogeneous snow-load test. Its results show that its 72-cell solar modules held 1,800 pascals more force than a competing large format product using 210 mm cells.

Manufacturers Longi and Zhonghuan Semiconductor have both raised the price of their 182mm wafers while holding the cost of their other products as rival Shuangliang Eco-energy signed deals for more wafer production equipment.

Ratings agency ICRA has estimated Indian green hydrogen will cost that much if produced at sites featuring clean energy generation capacity and electrolyzers. That is between 50 US cents and a dollar per kilogram cheaper than in locations where the two systems are not co-located, with the saving possible due to a reduction in open-access, intra-state grid charges.

The London-based analyst has published a series of clean tech predictions for the year which also highlighted the rising proportion of sub-5MW solar projects in the global market, and cheaper clean energy financing costs even as panel prices continue to rise.

The nation imported solar cells worth more than $633 million from April to the end of last year, a figure higher than the value imported during the whole of the 2020-21 fiscal year.

Japan’s PV sector remains the third largest in the world in terms of installed capacity, at some 78.5GW, making it one of the leading global PV marketplaces in the last decade. But as the world races to install more solar, it is one of the few markets in recent years that has charted a decline in new installs. An approach involving numerous government agencies is looking to restart the market, and not purely based on feed-in-tariffs (FITs), says Izumi Kaizuka, the director and principal analyst at RTS Corp.

In other news, Belgian company Tree Energy Solutions (TES) is accelerating plans to develop the German port of Wilhelmshaven into a “world-scale” hub for importing green gas, and German engineering company MAN Energy Solutions will invest up to €500 million in its hydrogen-focused subsidiary H-TEC Systems.