Manufacturing

The energy storage company is ramping up R&D efforts to try and fast-track commercialization of the more productive – and more expensive – battery tech. The news was announced as part of an uninspiring first-half update thanks to falling lithium salt prices.

New analysis predicts more than 150 GW of tracker capacity will be installed in the next five years – around a third of all ground mount projects up to 2024. Rapid growth in Europe, the Middle East and Africa; and the better cost structures possible from combining trackers and bifacial modules are singled out as key trends.

Pilot-scale operations at a facility near Mumbai successfully recycled the spent Li-ion batteries. The company seeks to eventually scale up the capacity to recycle 500 tonnes of spent Li-ion batteries.

While China hosts the lion’s share of production capacity for solar modules, many other parts of the world harbor the ambition to build manufacturing industries of their own. Italy’s Ecoprogetti is building production lines all over the world in 2019, and pv magazine had the chance to catch up with the family-owned company’s CEO Laura Sartore, who sees India and the Middle East as the key markets for the PV production equipment business.

The state-run fossil fuel giant has partnered with an unnamed foreign start-up to produce electric vehicle batteries using raw materials easily available in India.

Bidders interested in competing for a tender which will allocate 6 GW of solar capacity linked, pro rata, with 2 GW of manufacturing output now have until September 11 to register their bid as administrator the Solar Energy Corporation of India will amend the exercise to incorporate developer feedback.

pv magazine test is a cooperative module testing procedure involving pv magazine, CEA and Gsolar. All tests are carried out at Gsolar’s test laboratory in Xi’an, China. CEA supervises them and designed both the indoor and outdoor testing procedures.

New incentive scheme will see state government offering up to 40% subsidy towards cost of residential solar systems with the aim of adding 8 lakh of new arrays by 2022.

As demand for atomic layer deposition equipment spreads among Chinese solar cell manufacturers, experts throughout the industry are sharing their insight on the merits of this emerging manufacturing technology. The numbers they crunch reveal tough competition for incumbent plasma-based deposition techniques. But beyond the hype, does atomic layer deposition truly offer the better deal?

Deploying commercial and industrial PV in China without subsidy is already profitable in some areas, according to a new study, but prohibitive soft costs and cheap electricity are the main barriers for such installations in areas where grid parity remains out of reach.