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by info@greentechmedia.com

Installers and Integrators: Win a Kindle by Taking the GTM Research/SEIA Survey

9:00 am in Solar, News by info@greentechmedia.com

Greentech Media (GTM) Research has partnered with the Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA) to collect and publish quarterly data and analysis on the U.S. solar market. As part of this process, GTM Research is conducting our second quarterly Installer/Integrator Survey. The executive summary with results from the most recent U.S. Solar Market Insight report is available to download here.

If you or your organization were involved in any PV, solar heating/cooling, or solar pool heating installations during the second quarter (April – June) of 2011, please help us by filling out the survey. All survey responses will be held confidential and reported only in aggregate. We will ensure that no data items can be traced back to individual respondents.

This brief survey should take less than five minutes of your time and will be vital in helping GTM Research and SEIA to better understand trends in the U.S. solar market.

Please go to http://www.gtmresearch.com/survey, fill out the survey, and you will automatically be eligible to win an Amazon Kindle.* One lucky installer from Texas recently received a Kindle for his participation in the Q1 survey.

For additional information on the survey or the SEIA/GTM Research partnership, please contact surveys@greentechmedia.com.

 

*Only complete responses (number of projects, capacity and price for PV, SHC, SPH, or any combination thereof) will be entered to win the Kindle.

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by info@greentechmedia.com

Soitec Raises More Than $100M for CPV

12:00 pm in Solar, News by info@greentechmedia.com

The CPV market is seeing great cause for optimism these days. We've covered recent funding for GreenVolts, Semprius, and Morgan Solar and the positive environmental verdict here. We've also covered new projects from Soitec, Amonix, and SolFocus.

One of the leading CPV players, Soitec, has raised a $212 million "capital increase" of which half to two-thirds will be devoted to the CPV efforts of the public firm, according to Hans-Joerg Lerchenmueller of Soitec in a briefing last week at the Intersolar tradeshow in San Francisco.

Although the firm only shipped 2 megawatts in 2010, to support future projects, Soitec will build a 200-megawatt-capacity factory in the San Diego area for:

  • A 150-megawatt project with Tenaska (subject to a loan guarantee). The CPV solar power plant, known as Imperial Solar Energy Center (ISEC) West, will be built on a 1057-acre former farmland site in Southern California’s western Imperial County; completion is targeted in 2015.
  • A 155-megawatt project with SDG&E

Additional projects in the pipeline include:

  • A 10-megawatt project in Morocco currently under an MOU.
  • 50 megawatts awaiting a PPA in a South African project (Soitec is doing their own project development in this instance.)  Lerchenmueller said that there was a shortage of solar developers in South Africa despite its power shortfalls and high DNI.  

Soitec has already installed 60 kilowatts in South Africa and that project has been delivering performance data for eight months.

Of interest to any CPV supplier is the fact that there are two European countries with CPV-specific feed-in tariffs (FITs). According to Lerchenmueller, there are 40 megawatts of CPV-directed FITs in France, subject to competitive bidding, and 200 megawatts of CPV-specific FITs in Italy. Providing those figures remain stable, it looks like CPV companies should be able to capitalize on almost 250 megawatts of European CPV subsidies.

Soitec and Amonix are the two CPV players with the largest publicly declared project pipelines.

We expect additional CPV funding to be announced shortly. Stay tuned.

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