Solar

Hong Kong company, Optimum Solar, has executed a memorandum of understanding agreement (MOU) and sold 25 percent to US-company Onyx Service and Solutions.

Dhaubadi, in remote Nepal has become the ADB's first 'renewable energy village',as the Times of India called it. Using money from the Asian Development Bank and in partnership with the local community and government, the pilot wind-solar hybrid power system brings power to the village. Other clean-tech solutions are being integrated into the pilot. The development allows villagers to work at night by light, recharge mobile phones and even watch television, but its key is local participation.

China's enormous desert forest that flanks 436-kilometres of the north-south highway that cuts the distance between Urumqi and Hotan is soon to be irrigated by solar power. A total of 108 highway maintenance stations were built along the highway, to pump underground saline water, irrigate and protect the "green corridor" in Taklimakan, the world's largest shifting sand desert located in Northwest China's Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region. The details of the technology is limited but the authorities say it will be finished by 2014.

The nascent solar arm of electronics giant, Samsung has been shuffled into subsidiary, Samsung SDI, known originally for flat panel display manufacturing but more recently for lithium ion battery manufacturing. Samsung said that the transaction, valued at approximately US$148 million was to 'manage the company's resources more efficiently and focus more on its key businesses.' Samsung SDI will take over the solar cell business on July 1, 2011.

A World Bank report has said that solar power schemes in rural Bangladesh, doubled over the past year. Over 870,000 homes and shops have now been fitted with solar power systems, benefiting from the 2009 grant of USD130 million from the World Bank.