Middle East

Yotta Energy just won seed funding to install batteries under solar modules — in an architecture analogous to microinverters and optimizers.

Despite the pandemic, residential solar growth continues. Commercial solar, always the problem child, is having trouble coping with the virus.

SolarEdge was able to keep its streak of profitable quarters going — in what was expected to be a hard-hit quarter for solar. The company sees “signs of recovery in the U.S.”

Also in the brief: As much as $600 billion could be invested in new solar generation between 2021 and 2025 worldwide, Duke Energy is set to construct the company’s first-ever solar facility on a retired landfill site and more.

pv magazine’s Amjad Khashman has spoken to Chinese solar developer Jinko Power about negotiating the world record low price tariff agreed for electricity generated at the Al Dhafra solar project in Abu Dhabi.

Across the industry, organizers are scrambling to find new ways for virtual trade shows to replicate the live networking and business building these events provide — and keep attendees engaged. We speak with the organizers of the trade show once known as SPI, as well as the folks at lntersolar and the event people at SolarEdge.

Glasspoint received more than $130M in VC from Oman’s sovereign wealth fund, along with the venture arm of Royal Dutch Shell. The plan was to use concentrated solar arrays housed in glass greenhouses to produce steam at gigawatt scale instead of natural gas for EOR.

A German-Israeli research group has gathered to discuss which storage technologies may outperform lithium-ion batteries in the future. They concluded that there is no such a thing as a “post Li‐ion” era in sight. They recommended a “side‐by‐side” approach for multiple technologies in different applications, as well as the hybridization of technologies.

Even though the U.S. market is showing some signs of stabilizing, the decline in installation rates in April alone was 33%.

The tariff is around $0.0021 lower than the $0.0156/kWh French oil giant Total and Japanese conglomerate Marubeni Corp offered in Qatar’s 800 MW tender in late January. French energy company EDF and Chinese solar company JinkoPower reportedly submitted the record bid in the UAE exercise.