Solar

The Malaysian Government is thinking about revamping the way it allocates feed-in tariff (FiT) to the solar power sector, as applications continue to far outstrip available budget. Under the country’s Renewable Energy Bill the Sustainable Energy Development Authority Malaysia (SEDA) allocates FiT budget – split between biogas, biomass, small hydro and solar photovoltaic – on a first-come, first-served basis, every six months. To fund the FiT Tenaga Nasional, the country’s state-controlled electricity company, charges customers on the Malaysian Peninsular a one percent levy on electricity bills.

German solar manufacturing technology supplier teamtechnik says it has completed solar plants almost with about 600-MW capacity in the cities of Tianjin, Hengshui and Xinxian on behalf of Yingli Solar.

Starting from tomorrow the European Union will impose duties of 11.8 percent on imports of Chinese-made solar panels, and those levies will rise to an average of 47.6 percent — and as high as 67.9 percent — in August unless an accord is reached beforehand.

Japanese government incentives to encourage clean energy following the Fukushima nuclear crisis will see the country succeed Germany as the world’s largest solar market by annual installations this year, ahead of China, according to revised projections from Bloomberg New Energy Finance.

The China Merchants New Energy Group (CMNE) has announced a deal with the city of Xingtai to build 300-MW of solar projects.

Solar Energy Corporation of India (SECI), the public sector company formed last year as the executive arm of the Jawaharlal Nehru National Solar Mission (JNNSM), is looking for partners to build four pilot solar thermal power projects in an apparent bid to increase the solar technology mix under the recently launched JNNSM Phase 2.

India’s ‘please all parties’ policy is taking the shine off growth in the country’s solar industry as it forgets one key stakeholder – the consumer – with installations flat-lining in 2013, according to a report by clean energy communications and consulting firm Mercom Capital.

China, the US and the EU appear to be looking for common ground in an effort to settle the long-running tit-for-tat dispute over the trade in solar equipment between the world’s largest economies.

China may be on the verge of imposing anti-dumping duties on imports of polysilicon in apparent retaliation for levies the EU is considering and the US has already imposed on Chinese solar exporters. According to a Bloomberg report, quoting anonymous sources, China’s Ministry of Commerce has completed probes that determined the US and EU are subsidizing producers of polysilicon and that imports of the commodity harmed its domestic companies.