Middle East

Utility Kahramaa has revealed the winning consortium initially offered $0.01745/kWh with the price then reduced based on financial market indices.

A list compiled by a British price comparison website draws upon data from German company Statista which shows clean energy – including hydro – made up 12.74% of the nation’s power mix at the end of September.

The resulting project will sell power to Qatar General Electricity and Water Corp under a 25-year power supply deal. French oil and gas giant Total and Japanese conglomerate Marubeni will hold a combined 40% stake in the power plant, which will be built near Doha, the Qatari capital.

The nation deployed around 923 MW of new solar last year. Around 350 MW came in the form of unlicensed projects given an extension to their grid-connection deadlines.

Some 15 countries are likely to be able to lay claim to the status of being members of solar’s “gigawatt club” in 2019, according to conservative projections from BloombergNEF. Nonetheless, PV suppliers, developers and service providers are always on the lookout for new pockets of growth. To kick off 2020, pv magazine’s global team of correspondents and editors have highlighted 10 “fast-growing” solar markets to evaluate where the opportunities, and potential risks, lie.

Solar deployment continued to pick up in the Middle East and North Africa in 2019, the Middle East Solar Industry Association has said in its annual report.

Abu Dhabi-based renewable energy group Masdar is sailing into the Southeast Asian solar market with Indonesia’s first floating solar project. The petro-state owned developer says the facility will be the largest in the region.

As it moves towards grid connection this month, the solar project in the south of Oman demonstrates the value proposition of n-type PV cell technology, Chinese solar manufacturer Jolywood has argued at the World Future Energy Summit. The project is said to be the largest n-type bifacial array in the world.

The winners of the 2019 pv magazine awards have been recognized in a ceremony alongside the World Future Energy Summit. The victors spoke of the importance of innovation being recognized within the industry.

Researchers from Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah University of Science and Technology have created flexible solar cells made of crystalline silicon. They claim to have stretched a crystalline silicon cell’s surface by around 95% while maintaining conversion efficiency of around 19%.