Japan

The Chinese-Canadian manufacturer reported a 1% decrease in sales in the third quarter, with net profit falling 19%, to US$55.2 million. Quarterly shipments were up significantly year on year, from 1.59 GW in July-to-September last year to 2,387 MW this time around. The company expects to ship up to 8.5 GW of panels and achieve turnover of up to US$3.16 billion this year.

The company says its network is the largest fleet of batteries under virtual power plant management worldwide.

Market intelligence company Navigant Research has developed a country forecast of the global market. Incentives and pricing will be the main driver of installations, though the market will continue to be concentrated in certain key regions for now.

Korean conglomerate LG reports increasing demand for its high-efficiency PV products in key markets while Kyocera said its solar business is improving profitability. Panasonic posted a slight increase in sales for its PV segment, including solar manufacturing.

Analyst WoodMac has spelled out the urgent need to decarbonize the global hydrogen production industry. While the fuel can offer a sustainable grid balancing act for intermittent renewables, in its current fossil-fuel driven form it is pumping out more than 800 megatons of carbon into the atmosphere every year.

Scientists at the Tokyo Institute of Technology have developed a carbon nanotube which forms a strong junction with a lead-halide perovskite, improving performance and stability.

Automotive Electronics Power Private Ltd. (AEPPL), an India-based lithium-ion battery manufacturing venture between three Japanese companies, aims to produce 30 million cells per year by 2025.

The Chinese company has announced it has acquired intellectual property rights pertaining to various applications of gallium-doped silicon wafers in solar cell applications from Japanese company Shin-Etsu Chemical.

American John B. Goodenough, Brit Stanley Whittingham and Akira Yoshino, from Japan, will receive the Nobel Prize for Chemistry for developing the lithium-ion battery. A statement from the Royal Academy of Sciences of Sweden said the invention “laid the foundations of a society without wires and fossil fuels, and [they] are of great benefit to humanity”.

The Total Solar International PV unit of the French oil giant has started construction of a large scale plant in Osato, in the prefecture of Miyagi, Japan. With its third solar project in Japan, Total will reach 100 MW of installed generation capacity in less than two years.