Wiki-Solar

With utility scale solar installations accelerating, Philip Wolfe, founder of PV data consultancy Wiki-Solar, drills into the data to highlight some interesting variations in relative progress around the world.

Wiki-Solar’s latest league table of utility-scale solar project developers shows that only six renewable specialists occupy the top 20 spots.

The 1.36 GW of solar capacity installed by Shanghai Electric across just three projects in 2021 and the first quarter of 2022 helped it enter an annual ranking of the global solar industry’s biggest engineering, procurement, and construction contractors.

In his second article, Philip Wolfe founder of Wiki-Solar lists the world’s largest individual solar PV power plants. The biggest solar parks and other clusters of plants will be listed in subsequent blogs.

Solar energy pioneer and founder of Wiki-Solar, Philip Wolfe updates his series of blogs on the world’s largest solar power stations, first published in pv magazine in 2019. At that time, there were no single solar power plants over 1 GWAC. The record now is 2.2 GWAC.

A global ranking of large scale solar project capacities indicates prominent roles for a resurgent Spain, behind the usual top three of China, the U.S. and India, with Australia and the Netherlands also on the rise. There were disappointing returns, though, for the U.K., Italy and Canada.

The Italian energy company has developed four big solar plants in the last 21 months to add 794 MW of generation capacity to its 3.67 GW solar portfolio and is emblematic of companies from the wider energy sector focusing on the renewable technology.

Although the Wiki-Solar website ranking only provides a snapshot of PV project engineering, procurement and construction contracts outside of China, it is nevertheless a useful indicator of the changing global solar market landscape. Of the top 11 companies, three are based in India, three in the United States, another three in Spain and two in the United States.

Although the Wiki-Solar website ranking only provides a snapshot of PV project engineering, procurement and construction contracts outside of China, it is nevertheless a useful indicator of the changing global solar market landscape. Of the top 11 companies, four are based in India, three in Germany, and two in the United States. But last year’s largest contractor, U.S.-based First Solar, might lose its leading position this year, as it has largely discontinued its EPC activities.

Intersolar Europe is always a key date in the solar calendar but this year’s show had it all, including three panel-smuggling arrests. Elsewhere, wafers were getting bigger, efficiency records were tumbling and new technologies were emerging. There was also more news on the solar car ports fad and Hanwha’s ongoing legal tussle.