Major materials science company, Royal DSM has sold its Resins & Functional Materials (RFM) businesses including the coatings activities of DSM Advanced Solar, known for its anti-reflective (AR) resin coatings for solar glass and on-field PV power plant upgrading, to rival Covestro AG for a cash sum of around €1.4 billion.
A new company, EnCORE PV has been established to build own and operate a 1GW heterojunction (HJ) plant in the region of Kaliningrad, located along the Baltic coast between Poland and Lithuania.
PV Tech’s analysis of ‘Solar Module Super League’ (SMSL) member JA Solar’s capacity expansion announcements in the first nine months of 2020 have revealed the company has already announced a total of over 104GW of combined plans, including ingot/wafer, solar cell and module assembly.
Leading ‘Solar Module Super League’ (SMSL) member JinkoSolar has made a major revision to its PV module assembly capacity expansion plans for 2020, intending to nearly double its nameplate assembly capacity to a new goal of 30GW by the end of 2020.
Ginlong Solis has introduced to the European market its latest utility-scale string inverter. The ‘Solis 255kW-EHV’ high voltage (1500V) inverter is designed to maximize PV power plant yields in the new era of high-performance large-area solar panels including bifacial panels, while significantly reducing plant LCOE (Levelized Cost of eElectricity) costs, compared to central inverters.
Soltec has launched its next-generation ‘SF8’ single-axis tracker system to meet the needs of utility-scale PV power plants adopting the new wave of large-area solar panels.
Major integrated PV module manufacturer, Suntech has started ramping up a 1GW integrated cell and module assembly plant in Indonesia, predominantly to serve the US market that takes its nameplate module assembly capacity above 10GW.
RainWise has introduced the ‘PVmet 500’ weather station series for commercial and utility-scale PV power plants, which is said to be the world’s first compact and customizable multi-function professional grade weather station specifically designed for PV efficiency monitoring. The PVmet 500 provides a cost-effective solution, measurement accuracy, and IEC-61724-1 compliance and handles multiple communication protocols for fast field acceptance.
Major polysilicon and merchant cell producer, Tongwei has secured a monocrystalline wafer supply deal from LONGi Green Energy (LONGi Group) that increases its wafer needs by 1 billion wafers to 2.6 billion as the cell producer plans to have more than 40GW of solar cell capacity in 2021.
