China

Trina Solar is spearheading an effort to standardize 210mm silicon wafers and modules, aiming to improve production efficiency, supply chain optimization and innovation.

The nation is set to have added 40 GW of solar in 2020 and that figure will rise again this year, to 45-50 GW, according to one of the year’s first industry predictions.

Researchers have assessed how much solar may be deployed on the rooftops and coal storage sheds in coal power plants in China and they have found potential for around 4 GW.

Longi and Tongwei have both seen changes in ownership in recent days. Meanwhile, Maxwell Technology has unveiled a plan to build a heterojunction cell factory Jiangsu Province and the Henan Group has entered PV glass and module production.

Furthermore, Chinese manufacturers JA Solar and Akcome both want to add 6 GW of manufacturing capacity to their respective panel production operations. Trina and Tongwei will jointly deploy another 15 GW of ingot capacity.

An international research team has proposed to use nighttime radiative cooling to harvest water from PV panels and reuse it for module cleaning during the daytime. According to their findings, the proposed system has, also, a beneficial effect on the modules’ operating temperature.

A huge renewable energy complex is planned to include 5 GW of PV capacity. Furthermore, the State Power Investment Corporation has announced a plan to set up a 5 GW heterojunction solar cell factory in Fujian province.

The Chinese leader has revealed some details of his nation’s commitment to go carbon neutral by 2060. That solar and wind power promise could even prove to be a conservative estimate, according to the nation’s solar industry.

Meanwhile, the China Photovoltaic Industry Association (CPIA) has confirmed that newly installed PV capacity for this year should be around 40 GW.

The 275,000 metric tons of annual polysilicon production facilities pushed out of the industry by the expansion of big Chinese producers is more than double the capacity lost in the last great poly market shake-out, between 2010 and 2013.