China

Voith Hydro will supply equipment for hydro power projects in China and has secured two contracts worth €40m or $56.3 from two companies.

Security management in Chinese nuclear plants should be further improved with plans drawn up for extreme disasters, as well as secondary ones, said Zhao Chengkun, vice chairman of the China Nuclear Energy Association.

As Governments and utilities around the world continue to work on the deployment of the Smart Grid initiative, cyber security issues around such an infrastructure are now top priority in relation to national security and investment.

SolarBridge Technologies’ plans to increase the production capacity to over 70MW for its Pantheon microinverter have reached a promising new level with the beginning of the microinverter’s volume production at Celestica’s facility in Dongguan, China.

A strategic cooperation agreement was signed between CPI and Agricultural Bank of China was held in Beijing.

GCL-Poly Energy Holdings has placed an order with Applied Materials for wire saws with a wafering capacity of 2.5GW.

CWP's Inner Mongolia Wuchuan Yihemei wind farm CDM project has been successfully registered.

The 300 MW Unit 1 of Liangcun Co-generation Plant Phase 1 of CPI Hebei Branch was put into commercial operation after a successful 168-hour full-load test running.

United Solar Ovonic Jinneng will supply Uni-Solar thin-film PV laminates for the 565kW rooftop solar installation at Tianjin West Railway Station in Tianjin, China.

The Chinese Government increased the country’s target for PV installations from 5GW by 2015 to 10GW.

China Sunergy has obtained the UK’s Microgeneration Certification Scheme certification.

Centrosolar has commissioned its first anti-reflective coating glass line in Huzhou, China.

The first quarter of 2011 has seen a Y/Y decline in demand for solar PV modules, exposing several privately held Chinese PV manufacturers to potentially massive issues of over-supply. This comes at a time when the PRC has declared an intention to move away from an export-driven to a domestic demand-led economy and access to cheap credit from state-owned banks, something that Chinese renewable companies have enjoyed over the last while, comes to an end. As a result the Chinese government will be looking closely at the Chinese solar industry to ensure it remains a world-leading manufacturer of solar PV and healthy contributor to GDP growth.

Understandably with each natural catastrophe, man-made or otherwise, the overwhelming case for renewable energy as a core constituent to our power needs becomes more apparent and more pressing.

Affordable, reliable, clean energy is essential to the economic prosperity of all nations – especially to underpin the development of emerging and developing economies. The World Bank estimates that at least 1.4 billion people, mostly in Africa and Asia, lack access to electricity. For hundreds of millions of others, supply is often limited and/or unreliable. About 80% percent of the world’s total commercial energy demand is met by fossil fuels, with about 30% from coal. The U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) projects that world energy demand will grow by almost 40% by 2030 compared to 2007. Also, the International Energy Agency (IEA) has indicated that coal use has increased more than any other energy source worldwide over the past decade, mostly from the rapid expansion of coal power generation in Asia, especially in China and India.