Ericsson announced the winners of the 2013 Ericsson Application Awards at a ceremony at the Ericsson Studio in Kista, Sweden. The winner of the student category was Portugal's GreenSpark, which developed a solar energy system monitoring app that reduces the complexity of maintaining and monitoring a household’s solar power system through a plug-and-play device using cloud-computing technology. Read more...

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 also trade wars between the United States and China, the EU and China, and between India and everyone else. Read more...

258,000 mirrors comprise the core of the largest operational concentrating solar power (CSP) plant in the world, providing heat for 100 MW of solar generation, coupled with 50 MW of natural gas generation. But perhaps more important than this record size is its presence here, in the oil-rich United Arab Emirates (UAE), as the first large solar plant of its kind in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. For these reasons, Solar Server brings you the Shams 1 Solar Energy Center as our April 2013 Solar Energy System of the Month. Read more...

SAINT-GOBAIN SOLAR SOLUTIONS are intelligent, innovative and instant solutions for solar module manufacturing, offer cost-effectiveness, easy application and durability for perimeter sealing of the PV laminate to the aluminium frame and can be used as a process aid in securing and sealing all module components Read more...

Solar Server: With so many approaches out there to improve PV efficiencies, what are the main compelling distinctions of Sol Voltaics' technology? Dave Epstein: Sol Voltaics is producing an active layer ink called Solink™ that goes on top of silicon solar panels. This ink contains tiny nanowires – just 1 to 2 microns long made of Gallium Arsenide. These wires act as miniature solar cells. Put billions of them together and you create a lot of energy. Read more...

Before examining the reasons surrounding India’s solar manufacturing anti-dumping investigation, one overarching point must be made clear: India needs power. It is estimated that there are roughly 400 million Indians without access to power – roughly a third of the country, according to World Bank. India has the largest population without power of any country, even after the government had committed to provide power to all Indians by 2012 as part of their “power for all” pledge. The people and businesses that do have power face acute power shortages – about 9 percent power deficit and about 10 percent peak power shortage. A few months ago India faced one of the largest blackouts ever, when 600 million people were out of power for several days due in large part to insufficient power generation. Read more...