Germany

With California getting a higher portion of its electricity from solar than any non-island nation, the stakes are high with this summer’s eclipse. Fortunately, Europe has already been down this road.

The German-American module maker shipped 382 MW in the first three months of this year. The company’s plan to focus on monocrystalline PERC products is being implemented according to schedule.

The German chemical company has said in its preliminary results for the first quarter of this year that polysilicon prices dropped significantly over the past weeks. Overall, the company expects to see its profits grow in 2017.

Researchers from NREL, Fraunhofer ISE and Japan’s AIST have released a new paper which looks at the barriers to deploying multiple terawatts of solar PV and what can be done to overcome them.

One of the pillars of Donald Trump’s election campaign was his pledge to protect the U.S. manufacturers from unfair competition. While it is still unclear whether he will follow through with his threats to increase import taxes on Chinese goods, SolarWorld took the opportunity of the historic meeting between President Trump and Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping to harangue China’s solar manufacturers and called for the issue of solar dumping to be raised.

The German/American PV maker has quarantined more than 60,000 PV modules in its inventory as well as recalling tens of thousands more, with a promise to replace the connectors.

The German PV module maker has confirmed its financial results for 2016. The company reiterated its outlook, which forecasts that it will become profitable again in 2019.

German technology group Heraeus and U.S. company Materion Advanced Materials have announced the completion of the latter’s acquisition of the target materials business belonging to Heraeus.

German solar research institute Fraunhofer ISE has reclaimed the multicrystalline PV cell efficiency record, achieving 21.9%. Fraunhofer researchers deployed n-type high-performance multicrystalline technology to produce the record-setting PV cell.

Interview: In December Energy Democracy, a book telling the story of Germany’s Energiewende from the perspective of citizen ownership of renewable energy, hit the shelves. The book is the latest collaboration of Political Scientist Arne Jungjohann and renewable energy writer Craig Morris, currently a senior fellow at the IASS in Potsdam, who worked together on the German Energy Transition website (energytransition.de). pv magazine caught up with Jungjohann to talk about the book, and why citizen involvement in energy is important.