Australia and India helped make up for Chinese solar retreat last year
The world had more than half a terawatt of PV generation capacity at the end of last year as emerging solar markets picked up the slack caused by Beijing’s subsidy about-turn to the tune of a 20% rise in installations outside China.
Washington state’s 100% renewables bill passes both Houses
Washington is looking to become the fourth state to make the move to 100% renewable electricity, with only a senate review and the hand of Governor Inslee left in the path of SB 5116.
DuPont unit and Fraunhofer ISE to work on c-Si module testing
The PV solutions division of DuPont Electronics and Imaging has revealed plans to work with the Fraunhofer ISE on optimizing testing protocols for crystalline silicon solar modules.
California’s solar power record setting season is here
The state grid operator reported breaking 11 GW of instantaneous power from large scale solar on Saturday at 1.50pm. Just 20 minutes earlier, the CAISO grid was exporting a record 1.5 GW of electricity, and last Wednesday it hit 93% clean electricity for a moment.
Hawaii utilities seek more renewables, storage and now grid services too
Hawaiian Electric Companies has laid out plans to source the equivalent of 135 MW of solar and 1,378 MWh of energy storage – as well as load shifting and frequency response from distributed energy resources through aggregators.
Storage set to come of age in the next five years
The transition for utility scale storage from offering short duration, high value grid services to the world of long duration energy peaking could spell the end of fossil fuel backup generation within five years.
“Demand for polysilicon is not going away”
According to the general manager of French PV production equipment provider Apollon Solar, Jed Kraiem, multicrystalline cells are expected to have a share of only 40% in 2019 global demand, with mono PERC cell structures now clearly being in advantage thanks to higher efficiencies and increasingly lowering costs. He claims, however, that technological advances in the solar industry historically are implemented first in the mono segment and then transferred to the multicrystalline business.
U.S. trade authorities to investigate Jinko, LONGi, REC cells
The ITC will look at cells made by LONGi, JinkoSolar and REC Group, based on claims by Hanwha Q Cells that the companies have infringed on its PERC technology.
EnergySage report suggests Panasonic, LG gains in US rooftop solar
EnergySage’s quarterly intel report also showed Enphase winning back U.S. market share from SolarEdge, falling costs and bigger rooftop PV systems.
Energy storage races to investment-grade status
SUSI Partners has bought a 50% stake in Macquarie Capital’s 63 MW / 340 MWh distributed energy storage portfolio in Southern California. Included as part of this purchase is the world’s largest virtual power plant.
