Canadian Solar

Canadian Solar has banked the cash for its growing portfolio of solar projects in a nation which had module demand of 5 GW last year.

State-owned China Xinhua Power Development has booked a $53 million discount on seven solar farms as developer Kongsun seeks to pay down debts, and Canadian Solar has landed a 45 MWh energy storage contract in Colombia.

The two big solar players are preparing to list big slices of their business on the STAR market tech board.

Two PV farms planned in Sicily by Canadian Solar, with a total 12 MWp generation capacity, will sell the electricity they produce to Axpo Italia under a ten-year PPA at a fixed rate which the Chinese-Canadian company did not reveal.

Oxford-based Habitat Energy uses machine learning algorithms, artificial intelligence (AI) and its own trading platform and software to maximize profits from utility scale storage facilities. A Canadian Solar statement about the arrangement, issued today, contained no financial details about the co-operation.

The panel was unveiled in October and is the most powerful product the company has brought to the market to date. The Chinese-Canadian manufacturer expects to reach, for this product, a 10 GW capacity by the end of the year.

Canadian Solar is pivoting towards energy storage and is preparing to IPO its manufacturing and Chinese solar project activity in China, under the CSI Solar operation, by July.

Berlin-based start-up Solarworx specializes in the supply of modular, off-grid, solar-plus-storage solutions.

The news comes on the day a private equity investor in the English North East announced plans to jointly develop a 1.4 GWp solar portfolio with Canadian Solar.

Throughout this year, a fast-moving story has played out in PV module technology, with the introduction of larger wafers and subsequently larger module formats seeing the industry break into two camps, backing either 182 mm or 210 mm wafers. It remains to be seen whether one or the other will become a new industry standard, and both sizes will likely be plentiful on the market for the next few years at least. pv magazine takes a look at how we got to this point.