Category Archives: The Solarserver
Solarserver.com – The Portal Site to Solar and Renewable Energy. Themost popular German Solar Portal Site provides extensive information onSolar Thermal, Photovoltaics, Solar Buildings and Renewables in Germanand English – since 1997. Awarded with the EUROSOLAR German Solar Prize2003 (Media). E-Mail: info@solarserver.de Articles l Homepage
Review: The 2012 Solar PV Industry
The difficulties that the global solar industry experienced in 2012 were both clear and expected. Continuing excess solar photovoltaic (PV) manufacturing capacity spurred a collapse in prices across the PV value chain, creating consistently negative margins and negative profitability for upstream PV manufacturers. This led to a large number of bankruptcies, insolvencies and acquisitions, but [...]
Derek Brown of Clean Fund Discusses PACE
Derek Brown is managing director and co-founder of Clean Fund LLC, a specialty finance company that invests in commercial PACE bonds. He is responsible for working with energy service companies and commercial property owners to identify PACE-eligible projects and to structure the PACE terms for those projects. Prior to Clean Fund Derek worked with Solar [...]
Thin Film: Positioned for the Coming Market Upswing
The drastic consolidations of the past months have caught the entire photovoltaic (PV) industry off guard. Nobody saw it coming, considering the booming regions in Asia, first and foremost India and China, which will lead to an overall record year in 2012 according to IMS Research. But whoever thinks photovoltaics can now be written off [...]
India’s Power Grid Failure: What Happened?
This is the first part of a two part piece by Raj Prabhu of Mercom Capital addressing the recent blackouts in India. This first part examines technical, regulatory and political dimensions of the problem, and the second part will deal with proposed solutions. The massive grid failure in India last week affected over 600 million [...]
Solar Potential in The Middle East and North Africa
The nations at the nexus of the continents of Europe, Asia and Africa, along with those along the strip of land between the Sahara Desert and the Mediterranean, have long been pivotal for global energy development. The Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region is also blessed with a quantity of annual sunlight which until [...]
In Focus: India’s Solar Industry
The feed-in-tariff (FiT) market in India is governed by various national and state policies. Solar installations prompted by project allocations under the National Solar Mission (NSM) and the Gujarat Solar Policy have driven India’s installed solar PV capacity from 22MW in January 2011 to 974.56MW in May 2012. This rapid ramp up of solar power [...]
Chris Brown Discusses the China PV Industry
Chris Brown serves as general manager for North America for Asia Cleantech Gateway, which specializes in assisting low carbon energy technology companies in both the Asia Pacific region and the West to share commercial opportunities and engage successfully with each other. Chris has worked in China energy policy analysis and consulting for over ten years [...]
Global PV Industry Will Survive – Just Has To Get Through Q3 2011
It is a foregone conclusion that the first half of 2011 was a particularly bad time for the solar photovoltaic (PV) industry along the value chain. In fact these were the worst two quarters in recent memory. Years of increasing investments in ever-larger production capacities led to spiraling overproduction at a time of weakening markets, [...]
Solar Frontier’s Kunitomi New PV Manufacturing Facility
It is a strange place for one of the largest and most advanced solar photovoltaic (PV) manufacturing facilities in the world. A few kilometers outside a sleepy seaside town in Southern Japan, past rice fields and small farms, as the road rises into the hills, the massive white forms of a factory emerge between cedar-lined [...]