Market Watch

Chile has long been a strong contender for PV deployment with a growing economy, great solar resources and plenty of land. But as Tom Kenning learns, the market has several challenges ahead on its path to two-cents solar.

The Spanish photovoltaic market, once the darling of the global industry, has been ailing for almost a decade. But a new government finds itself with a mandate to build capacity, repeal taxes and redress the balance. James Blackman polls the market on its hopes for a new start.

High up the debt list is PV module assembly subcontractor and single-axis tracker supplier, via its NEXTracker acquisition, Flextronics International (Flex), which is owed over US$44 million.

Solar photovoltaic manufacturing is benefiting today from increased allocations by leading producers for capex into new facilities and technologies. Capturing these trends in March 2016, the PVCellTech conference in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, hosted by Photovoltaics International’s publisher, Solar Media, provided a fascinating insight into what can be expected during the second half of 2016. Leading the drive to higher cell efficiencies and panel powers are efforts to increase the production of passivated emitter rear contact, or PERC, cells. This new trend can be seen to be driving the internal roadmaps of all silicon cell manufacturers, in addition to competing n-type and thin-film providers.

Through its Corporate Clean Energy Universe, market researcher Clean Edge is tracking the 37 US corporations leading the way on low-carbon and renewable energy adoption. Its managing director, Ron Pernick, tells Ben Willis of his hopes that a second wave of smaller companies will follow their lead as new green energy business models hit the mainstream.

After a series of hammer blows, and against the backdrop of Brexit uncertainty, the UK solar industry appears to have found some joy offering long-term contracts and self-consumption systems to commercial clients, a sector it had previously found hardest to crack, writes John Parnell.

The US solar market finds itself with the bizarre, but welcome, problem of having to “manage” a boom. Danielle Ola examines the impact of the ITC extension, alternative drivers of US solar and debunks the supply crunch myth.

Energy storage in the US is being propelled forward by falling costs and increasingly favourable markets and policy. But for the full value of storage to be realised, numerous regulatory and fiscal barriers must still be surmounted, writes Matt Roberts.

The latest developments from solar’s newest markets.

Community solar is emerging as a promising new source of demand in the US, opening up access to solar among previously excluded groups. John Parnell reports on the prospects for a new market segment whose time seems to have come.