Mexico

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 latest study published by the International Renewable Energy Agency says the average solar electricity cost of $0.085/kWh produced by projects commissioned last year is set to fall to $0.048 next year, and $0.02-0.08 by 2030.

An accelerated transition to renewables could go either way, regarding the United States’ unique geopolitical strength. According to Indra Overland – head of the Center for Energy Research at the Norwegian Institute for International Affairs – the U.S. could surrender a major advantage if it abandons fossil fuel. The nation could, however, remain dominant in the global energy sector if it continues to lead on innovation and clean energy tech-related intellectual property.

The project the company is developing in Juárez will sell energy to the Mexican department store chain El Puerto de Liverpool through a 15-year PPA for the second contract of the type IEnova has secured with the group.

Energy minister Norma Rocío Nahle García yesterday announced the tender round believed to have been cancelled in January had merely been held up by the inability of power lines to cope with new generation capacity. The minister added, expanded nuclear capacity is under consideration.

The Mexican electric power industry is maintaining its dynamism, despite a collective perception of inactivity stemming from a lack of information from the federal government. And renewables are barely mentioned in the National Development Plan for 2019–2024 drawn up by Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador.

In the early years of the 21st century, distributed generation systems in Latin America were mainly installed off-grid in remote rural areas, writes Maria Chea, solar analyst at IHS Markit. As the El Niño phenomenon and high oil prices continued to exacerbate high electricity prices and power shortages, governments began to turn their attention to distributed generation, including PV systems, to assuage strains on their national grid networks.

The Business & Human Rights Resource Centre has published a report looking at the human rights due diligence performance of the renewables industry and examined individual generation methods. The report finds that, while the solar sector is not top of the sad list, its vest also isn’t completely unstained.

In the first part of pv magazine‘s series on solar’s hidden champion markets, we take a look at Mexico. The country currently has 4 GW of total installed PV capacity, and overtook Chile as Latin America’s largest solar market by the end of 2018. But the cancellation of auctions and other negative signals from government could put a damper on things moving forward.

The Chinese lithium-ion battery producer has taken significant stakes in two U.K. entities associated with a mine which could hold up to 8.8 million tons of the raw material in clay deposits.