Market research firm, IHS iSuppli has undertaken its first product teardown and analysis within the PV industry. An Aurora PVI-4.2-OUTD-S-US Inverter from Power-One was used in the teardown, which IHS iSuppli said provided a path-setting benchmark for cost reduction within a sector of the industry expected to undergo rapid price erosion, inline with other industry sectors such as polysilicon, wafers, cells and modules.
GreenVolts has re-emerged with seeming aplomb from the disaster of 2009 with its new CPV system that it has branded as the PV industry’s “first complete and fully integrated solar system”.
The North American Development Bank (NADBank) revealed that it is lending up to US$88.5 million to SunEdison for the development of a 20MW solar park in Picture Rocks, Arizona. This is the largest, and second, solar project financed by the NADBank. The solar park is expected to generate enough electricity for nearly 3,500 homes in the metropolitan area of Tucson.
Bloomberg is reporting that Suntech Power Holdings and Canadian Solar will be providing their solar panels to Tata Power for its US$68 million solar project. The 25MW plant in western Gujarat state will use crystalline silicon-based modules to power the solar array.
Having secured funding, Tata Power is continuing with its three-fold project in cooperation with BP Solar installing plants located in the Patan, Kutch and Mithapur areas of the state of Gujarat to be completed under its Solar Power Policy 2009.
This month will see the completion of ESA Renewables’s 1.3MW commercial rooftop solar project in New Bern, North Carolina, US. ESA claims this will be one of the largest rooftop PV arrays in eastern North Carolina.
Soitec is looking to bring solar energy to even the most remote, and sunny, parts of the world with its newly launched Sunidarity program, an initiative to help development aid organizations in supporting their efforts to promote economic and human development in the more remote regions of the globe. Soitec plans to donate its new Plug&Sun technology to three selected projects, which will be chosen for their innovation, difficulty of the challenge they overcome and integration within a global development project.
Soltecture has revamped its solar energy services, going so far as to launch a new brand deign, in order to improve client accessibility. "The focus of our new brand design is our client: they will get a focused overview of our services and portfolio," explains Soltecture’s CSO Henrik Kruepper. "Through the integration of our system solutions with our range of services, and by renaming our products in less technical terms, we are delighted to give our brand a more focused and clear identity.”
PV Evolutions and Black & Veatch advised that they are collaborating to create what they deem as the industry’s first third-party PAN file generation and validation service. The companies’ overall aim is to provide accurate models of a PV project’s performance and value, which will in turn help the decision to investment in PV power plants easier on future project developers and investors.