Vietnam

With pressure mounting on the world’s governments to turn their back on the fossil fuel, China and peers in South East Asia, Europe and South Asia could help deliver a coal-free future at the COP26 climate summit planned in Glasgow in November.

A booming overseas market has offset falls in demand in China caused by rising solar module prices, according to Flat Glass. In common with its PV glassmaking rivals, the company is pressing ahead with production expansion, betting reduced prices for its products will feed even greater demand.

Developed by a Vietnamese-Korean research group, the complex PV device was built with a bottom bifacial crystalline silicon perovskite-filtered heterojunction sub-cell that is able to absorb all solar spectra in the short-wavelength range.

An energy transition investment report published this week has also revealed the former world record low price for solar power announced by the Al Dhafra project in Abu Dhabi last year, has fallen even lower since.

Indonesia will catch the eye too over the next nine years, according to analyst WoodMac, as its market grows from 300 MW to 8.5 GW.

A group of international scientists has compared the hypothetical performance of three novel shapes of solar modules – pyramidal, hexagonal and conical – and has found the latter has the strongest potential in terms of thermal behavior. According to their findings, a cooling technique based on forced airflow is key to making these solar module shapes into a feasible solution.

Electricity bill payers in nations as diverse as Germany, Greece, India and China should be aware new solar projects can now generate electricity cheaper for them than legacy coal and gas-fired plants.

If the three record-busting low solar price tariffs recorded in the Middle East in the past 18 months are to be believed, renewables-powered hydrogen in prime sites in the region could already compete with gas-plus-CCS production, according to IRENA. Has the Gulf discovered the new petrol?

Private sector fossil fuel spending on exploration is drying up just as modest rises in clean energy investments are being observed. With stock market investors increasingly embracing renewables, the IEA has observed positive signals in its latest energy investment report, but warned we are still doing far too little to keep global heating at bay.

Covid-19 disruption has been cited as the chief culprit as imports from China, Thailand and Vietnam slumped from April to January, but safeguarding duty also appears to have had an impact, with unaffected imports from nations such as Myanmar, Chad and Russia on the rise and Malaysian trade keeping steady.