The Virginia General Assembly has passed a bill to allow rooftop solar leasing with a third party in the state, and prohibit customers from being required to provide proof of liability insurance as a prerequisite for interconnection.
At the recently concluded 2024 edition of the World Future Energy Summit (WFES) in Abu Dhabi, major Chinese module manufacturer Tongwei displayed three product series: TPC, TNC and THC, focusing on its G12R, G12N and heterojunction (HJT) modules.
In a previous article for PV Tech, our head of research, Finlay Colville, discussed the sources of PV modules in the US. Modules assembled in Southeast Asia, including Vietnam, Thailand and Malaysia, accounted for about 70% of all solar PV modules landing in the US, he said. When it comes to company ownership, Colville said Chinese-owned companies supplied just over half of the modules consumed into US downstream channels in 2023.
US polysilicon manufacturer REC Silicon expects to ship the first solar-grade polysilicon from its Moses Lake, Washington facility by the end of June.
US solar tracker manufacturer Nextracker has completed an expansion of its manufacturing plant in Pennsylvania, US, increasing the manufacturing capacity to 4GW.
An increase in solar module prices is “hard to imagine unless there is a massive shortage in supply,” according to PV Tech head of research Finlay Colville, who spoke this morning at the Solar and Storage Live 2024 event in London.
The US Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) has published a report into the use of laser welding processes in solar module production, which researchers suggest could make the panels easier to recycle.
The European Parliament has approved the Net-Zero Industry Act (NZIA), aiming to produce 40% of its annual deployment needs in net zero technologies by 2030.
As the global solar sector grows, in both scale of deployments and volume of capital, there is an increasingly unwieldy volume of information in the industry. Data concerning optimal solar irradiance hours, plant performance and equipment maintenance and repair are all becoming increasingly commonplace in the solar sector, but this abundance of information could bring as many challenges as opportunities for a sector undergoing rapid change.
US renewables firm Clean Energy Associates (CEA) predicts that the solar industry’s latest anti-dumping and countervailing duty (AD/CVD) petition has a “high likelihood” of resulting in duties being paid on solar imports.
Over the past five years, solar panel design has evolved, with larger modules, thinner frames and different glass types becoming more commonplace. However, a representative from an independent third-party PV test and research lab suggests that this had led to a weakening of mechanical stability in modules.
The US Department of Energy (DOE) has established a new programme to “significantly improve” permitting and environmental processes for electricity transmission projects.
