photovoltaic

The US microinverter maker reported its second consecutive quarter of profit and is sold out into the second half of the year, as it continues to battle tariffs and component shortages.

The Chinese string inverter giant was the world’s biggest supplier for the fourth year in a row, in spite of having lost 4% in global market shares, according to analyst Wood Mackenzie. Asia-Pacific was again the largest inverter market last year, accounting for 64% of global shipments. Sungrow and SMA were, respectively, the second and third largest providers.

The feed-in tariff granted reduces each quarter in line with how much solar capacity was installed in the previous three-month period and the drop will be felt more keenly in sun-rich Corsica and the nation’s overseas territories than on the mainland.

The power line, under development by Italian transmission company Terna and Tunisian gas and electricity group STEG since 2003, was originally conceived to export power generated in Tunisia to Italy but is now based on an electricity exchange in the opposite direction.

In the latest of a series of interviews about the geopolitics of renewable energy, Indra Overland, head of the Center for Energy Research at the Norwegian Institute for International Affairs, explains how storage could change the global energy landscape by eliminating entrenched strategic dependencies. The impact of storage, he says, will be stronger in regions dependent on fossil fuels.

The strong growth registered in the first quarter of the year – when 1.27 GW of new PV was deployed – will prompt a 1.4% reduction in the FIT price for the three-month period up to July.

Although it is still unclear how the victorious Socialist Party will build a majority in parliament, listed Spanish energy companies such as Solaria and Audax saw the price of their shares rise significantly after the vote.

The energy program will initially relate to combined cycle gas power plants with a capacity of 2.76 GW. No mention was made in electric utility CFE’s official statement of the possibility of increasing capacity by harnessing renewables.

The new manufacturing facility will be located in Leshan, in China’s Sichuan province and will produce monocrystalline wafers. It will raise the group’s wafer capacity to around 11.5 GW. Meanwhile, large supply deals are said to have come from markets including Vietnam, Mexico and Spain.

A new project is in line with the target of the Island Council of Tenerife to cover all electricity demand with renewable energy. The development of electromobility and storage is key to the ambition.