When manufacturing capacities moved from megawatt to gigawatt ten years ago, the concept of having a fully-integrated and automated production site was widely accepted to be the most economical, Finlay Colville examines whether this is truly the case.
What a start to the PV Taiwan 2017 week! There have been some rather tame mergers and acquisitions in the solar PV industry over the years - not to mention the shuffling of zombie factories within China – but the news today that Neo Solar Power, Gintech Energy Corp., and Solartech Energy are planning to merge is worthy of far more scrutiny.
Things can change very quickly in the solar industry, and no more so than when new trade-related cases are introduced or existing ones are amended in scope. Often companies – and in particular module suppliers relying on export revenues – suddenly find themselves with a golden opportunity that was previously not in their strategies, or have barriers unlocked that remove competitors based in other countries.
With many of the top-20 module suppliers to the solar industry now having multi-GW shipment volumes, attention has turned firmly to assessing metrics that companies can use to benchmark the quality and reliability of shipped products against their competitors.
Finlay Colville, head of market research at Solar Media, discusses how a 300MW solar farm, nearly four-times the current largest in the UK, is nearing planning, pushing the country's large-scale pipeline towards 4GW.
The significance of PV-Tech’s forthcoming conference in Kuala Lumpur – PV ModuleTech 2017 – has just moved to a new level, with the key company executives from all members of the Silicon Module Super League (SMSL) giving presentations on stage about the quality, reliability, and performance of their solar modules.
PV Tech’s new two-day event PV ModuleTech 2017 – in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, on 7-8 November 2017 – is set to outline the key issues in new high-efficiency PV modules that will dominate utility-scale solar farms deployment globally over the period 2018-2020.
A key factor in the strong growth of the PV industry in 2017 is the Silicon Module Super League (or SMSL), comprised of the seven companies that will each ship in excess of 4GW of modules this year, well above all other module suppliers to the industry.
The solar industry is set to reach annual demand at the 100GW level much earlier than has been forecast by both third-party observers and the leading component suppliers. During 2018, the solar industry is shaping up to ship more than 100GW of solar modules during the calendar year, while 2017 alone will see the number exceed 90GW comfortably.
Solar Media's head of market research Finlay Colville delves back into the UK's vast network of planning portals to uncover the incredible scope of subsidy-free solar farms entering the planning phase, and discusses their build potential as UK solar enters its next phase.
