Sungrow

The 12th Renewable Energy India (REI) Expo opened its doors today; the booming music and bright sunshine mirroring India’s ambitious goals to become the biggest RE market in the world. In the opening conference, the government’s commitment to renewables was underlined, while BNEF said the country will have one of the highest penetrations of solar and wind, globally, by 2050. Companies are also starting to look to India for manufacturing opportunities, although the landscape is still filled with uncertainty.

Hydropower company, Dai Hai Power is working on a 100 MW solar PV plant near Buon Me Thuot City, Vietnam. Sungrow will supply the necessary inverters.

The Chinese solar PV inverter manufacturer officially opened its first non-domestic fab today: a 3 GW central and string inverter factory in Bengaluru, Karnataka. It is targeting a 50% market share in India in 2019, and mulling setting up an R&D center in the country. pv magazine attended the inauguration.

Inverter manufacturers tapped into the major theme of digitization in their product presentations at this year’s Smarter E event in Munich – of which Intersolar Europe is a part of. The solutions deploy smart software solutions for maximizing self-consumption, O&M provision and enable hybrid architectures across all three market segments.

Representations by big beasts of global PV win only a partial concession from the authorities in Beijing, with officials agreeing to honor FIT payments for any ground mount projects connected during the next three weeks.

Sungrow, the world’s second largest inverter supplier, according to GTM research, has announced plans to establish production facilities in India. The Chinese inverter company is aiming to strengthen its global delivery capability by setting up central and string inverter facilities in the state of Karnataka. The fab would be its first outside of China.

According to the latest GTM Research statistics, global inverter shipments increased 23% in 2017, and revenues 11%, thus representing another record year. A market first, three-phase string inverter shipments overtook those of central inverters.

The past year has been an exciting period for proponents of floating solar. A range of new projects and pilots have been announced across the globe over the past 12 to 14 months, with IHS Markit’s Solar Deal Tracker now listing floating PV installations in 24 countries throughout the world, all in varying stages of development.

The Chinese power electronics company will ship its turnkey energy systems comprising storage inverters, NCM lithium batteries and an energy management system to a 30 MWh storage project being built in Hokkaido, Japan.

Inverter overview: As 2017 drew to a close following a record-breaking year for solar, pv magazine sat down to discuss the global inverter landscape with Cormac Gilligan, senior solar analyst at IHS Markit. With China dominant, India’s soaring solar market still very much up for grabs and technical innovation a perennial route to market leadership, these are the six trends that we believe will shape the solar inverter landscape this year.