Magazine Archive 2016

Corporate funding update: Solar total corporate funding continues to decline, hitting a new low of $1.7 billion in the second quarter, says Mercom Capital CEO Raj Prabhu. However, residential and commercial project funds have picked up steam, attracting $1.4 billion in investment – a 36% increase.

Guggenheim Solar Index: Anticipated slowdown in the Chinese market, post-peak years on the cards for Japan, and with many U.S. developers viewing the ITC extension as a bit of breathing space, solar stocks have begun to slide.

Home monitoring: Solar monitoring companies that serve homeowners have an uphill battle in terms of educating their customers to use the systems to their full advantage.

Enel insight: Multinational power company Enel has in recent years placed renewable energy production center stage, boasting a highly diverse network of power plants ranging from hydroelectric to thermoelectric, nuclear, wind, and solar. pv magazine spoke with Antonio Cammisecra, head of global renewables business development, about the strategy and role of Enel in the solar industry, and its future market and technological goals.

Black sheep: latent hazard from supposedly direct-burial cables uncovered in the field last year proved another example of less-than-optimum practices and service carried out in the PV industry.

A snapshot of market pressures: Gäetan Masson, director of the Becquerel Institute, muses on the various trends and opinions currently shaping global solar markets, not least the notion of PV-as-a-commodity and the industry’s ability – or lack thereof – to move with the times.

It’s a fascinating time to be covering solar in the U.S. With the extension of the federal ITC we are looking forward to another year of dramatic growth across the nation, with multiple GW of solar projects under construction and solar contract prices that continue to redefine what we think of as cheap energy. Policy […]

Time-of-use savings: Bringing an average of 20% more energy to large-scale plants than those with fixed arrays, the benefits of single and double-axis trackers are even more apparent when state time-of-use charges are taken into account, helping large-scale solar plants to be good citizens of U.S. grids.

Ontario update: Canada’s Ontario leads the way in solar PV deployment, having employed a supportive, FIT-based incentive scheme. But with that support, and other incentives, set to end in 2018, will the province’s solar flair be dimmed?

Bangladesh: In contrast to India, which is the undisputed regional solar PV star that attracts all of the attention and most of the investment, neighboring Bangladesh is leading a quiet off-grid solar power revolution that has begun to alter societal dynamics. The nation is now ready to expand solar to its grids too. pv magazine offers a market and policy update on Bangladesh.