Flexible CIGS thin-film firm, Ascent Solar surpassed US$1 million in annual revenue for the second time since it started operations in 2005.
Suntech has become the latest solar company to sign up as a retail electricity provider in Japan.
India’s Ministry of New and Renewable Energy (MNRE) is to install 17,500 solar photovoltaic water pumps across the country.
China-based PV project developer and manufacturer, China Singyes Solar Technologies Holdings, said it had started developing the first phase of a 1.1GW PV power plant project at the Hongshagang Industrial Park in Minqin County, Gansu Province, China.
Chinese PV manufacturer Chaori Solar has become China’s first firm to default on a domestic bond after missing an interest repayment.
The UK Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) has said it will not review the country’s Renewable Obligation Certificate (ROC) bandings again before the scheme’s expiration in 2017.
Module manufacturer SOLON will shut its Berlin headquarters and relocate to the UAE, it has announced.
The pipeline of approved PV projects in the Philippines reached over 1GW in January, according to the country’s Department of Energy (DoE).
Duke Energy’s subsidiary, Duke Energy Renewables, has acquired two 20MW PV projects in California from renewable energy developer Infigen Energy.
Struggling solar EPC firm S.A.G. Solarstrom has received a bridging loan to help it through its ongoing efforts to avoid bankruptcy.
RGS Energy (Louisville, Colorado, U.S.) and Mosaic (Oakland, California, U.S.) have partnered to offer a loan product for residential solar photovoltaic (PV) systems, which can be invested in through Mosaic's crowdsourcing platform. This is an expansion of Mosaic's crowdsourcing concept to groups of residential PV systems.
Joint venture Greenwood Biosar has built a 2.4 MW solar photovoltaic (PV) plant in Panama for Enel Green Power's (Rome) Panama subsidiary. This is the first utility-scale PV plant in the nation. The PV plant is located 14 kilometers from the town of Chitré in Herrera Province, and is connected to the EGESA grid network.
NPD Solarbuzz Inc. (Santa Clara, California, U.S.) predicts that with the renewed balance of supply and demand in the global solar photovoltaic (PV) market, year-end demand will be set again by available supply levels in 2014. The company says that the demand-constrained environment in the last few years has been the catalyst of the industry's over-capacity problem which sank capacity utilization rates and resulted in capital expenditure declining to an eight-year low in 2013.
France's Ministry of Ecology, Energy and Sustainable Development has released preliminary figures for solar photovoltaic (PV) plants commissioned in the fourth quarter and full year 2013, finding that the nation's PV market fell 45% to only 613 MW over the year. This is substantially lower than a previous estimate of 743 MW for 2013 published by French grid operator RTE (Paris), and may reflect different criteria. Despite this overall downward trend, in the fourth quarter of 2013 161 MW of PV plants were connected to the grid, a capacity 69% higher than the fourth quarter of 2012.
Germany installed 193 MW of solar photovoltaics (PV) in January 2014, according to figures released by the nation's Federal Network Agency. This is a 16% increase over December 2013 but below any other month in the last four years. January 2014 installations bring the nation to 35.9 GW of installed PV. Due to the low rate of installations, feed-in tariff degressions have been at the minimum level of 1.0% since the beginning of 2014.
The global solar photovoltaic (PV) market grew 24% to 37 GW in 2013, according to preliminary figures released by the European Photovoltaic Industry Association (EPIA, Brussels). This brings the world to nearly 137 GW of installed PV at the end of the year. EPIA estimates that China installed the most PV at 11.3 GW, followed by 6.9 GW in Japan and 4.8 GW in the United States.
The U.S. state of New York has selected 29 large-scale solar photovoltaic (PV) projects totaling 33.6 MW for support under the NY-Sun Initiative, as well as eight initiatives for reduction of PV system “soft” costs. Awards for these projects total USD 28.6 million.
SolarWorld AG (Bonn) has released selected results for 2013, reporting a 25% year-over-year fall in revenues to EUR 456 million (USD 630 million) and a -42% operating margin. This is an improvement over the operating loss that SolarWorld experienced in 2012, which exceeded revenues.
Powerway Renewable Energy Co. Ltd.'s (Foshan, China) South African subsidiary has partnered with InnoVent Rental and Asset Management Solutions (Johannesburg) to launch a solar lease finance program in South Africa, which the companies plan to expand to the rest of the continent.
Schneider Electric SA (Rueil-Malmaison, France) had entered into cumulative contracts to service more than 1 GW of solar photovoltaic (PV) plants at the end of 2013, as the first company to do so. The company operates and services PV plants in five continents. The company's operations and maintenance (O&M) service offerings range from remote technical control and spare parts management to corrective and preventative maintenance of balance of systems.