China

Independent energy analyst, Corinne Lin discusses the fallout of China’s recent solar PV policy decision, including decreasing utilization rates and serious oversupply; and a focus on equipment upgrades, particularly for PERC, SE, half cut and bifiacial technologies. The industry will bounce back in 2019, she concludes.

REC Silicon ASA has announced that it will today lay off around 100 employees from its workforce based in Washington, the U.S., and reduce production, as a “direct result” of the trade dispute between the U.S. and China.

Yingli Green Energy Holding Company Limited has been delisted from the New York Stock Exchange, and expects to begin trading on the OTC Pink on July 2, where there are no disclosure requirements.

The manufacturing facility is aiming to produce enough glass to satisfy production of approximately 3.7 GW of solar PV modules per year. The company is also planning to build a 2 GW module factory in Zhangjiagang.

This year, The Smarter E made its debut this June 20 to 22 in Munich, Germany, bringing together existing exhibitions, Intersolar Europe and ees Europe, with two new events, Power2Drive Europe and EM-Power. This change reflects both the strong shift towards storage, and the rapidly changing face of the overall energy industry. pv magazine hit the floors, attended the conferences and held two roundtables to discover the latest trends. Read on to discover our eight key takeaways (and one new buzzword).

Inverter manufacturers tapped into the major theme of digitization in their product presentations at this year’s Smarter E event in Munich – of which Intersolar Europe is a part of. The solutions deploy smart software solutions for maximizing self-consumption, O&M provision and enable hybrid architectures across all three market segments.

Both solar companies are closely linked with the Chinese state-owned company, CNBM and they now want to work together to develop the next generation of CIGS manufacturing facilities.

As forecast in its 2017 financial report, JinkoSolar shipped around 2 GW of modules in the first quarter of this year. Meanwhile, it did not adjust its forecast for 2018 shipments, in the range of 11.5 GW to 12 GW, despite the Chinese government’s cuts to installations.

Many expansion plans are still firmly afoot in the Chinese solar PV manufacturing industry, if the information pv magazine gathered from some of the country’s leading manufacturers at last week’s Smarter E event, is anything to go by. Indeed, Tongwei , Longi, Sunport and BYD are all progressing at full speed with their capacity ramp ups.

Perovskites, a tempting low-cost alternative to crystalline silicon based solar cells, could be moving closer to commercial production thanks to a new way of applying the critical electron transport layer (ETL) pioneered by an international team of researchers.