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Avangrid, a subsidiary of Spanish power firm Iberdrola, has completed construction of its 166MWdc (120MWac) Tower Solar project in Oregon and connected the facility to the regional transmission grid. 
With commercial operations expected to begin later this summer, the project, located in Morrow County west of Boardman, comprises more than 250,000 solar modules assembled in the US by SEG Solar at its manufacturing facility in Houston, Texas. 
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Jim Wood, CEO of SEG Solar said: “This project aligns with our mission to strengthen the domestic energy supply chain. By providing fully compliant, traceable, and reliable solar solutions, we are meeting energy demands while driving American manufacturing and creating local jobs.”” 
Under a power purchase agreement (PPA) signed in 2024, once commissioned, the solar plant will supply electricity to utility Portland General Electric (PGE) under its Green Future Impact (GFI) programme and help support operations of data centre operator QTS in the region. 
The programme enables large commercial, industrial and municipal customers to procure electricity from newly developed renewable energy projects while covering any incremental costs associated with the clean energy supply. 
Meanwhile the renewable energy certificates (RECs) were earmarked for data centre operator QTS, which is developing a facility for Meta in the region as part of the tech company’s commitment to sourcing 100% renewable energy for its operations.    
“As demand for electricity continues to grow across the United States and in the Pacific Northwest, projects like Tower Solar are essential to delivering new generation at scale,” Avangrid CEO Jose Antonio Miranda said.  
“Furthermore, this project demonstrates how investment in America’s electrical infrastructure contributes to our domestic economy, supports union workers, and delivers reliable electricity to support the region’s growth.”   
Tower Solar is being developed on approximately 900 acres of industrially zoned land owned by the Port of Morrow and created approximately 200 construction jobs locally. 
The completion of Tower Solar adds to Avangrid’s renewable energy portfolio, which totals more than 11GW of installed generation capacity across nearly 100 projects in 25 US states. 
In February 2026, Avangrid brought two solar PV projects in Oregon into commercial operation. The adjacent Daybreak Solar (189MW) and Bakeoven Solar (80MW) plants, located in Wasco County, have a combined capacity of 269MW and feature approximately 650,000 installed solar modules. 
The company also partnered with a local sheep rancher to graze around 3,000 sheep across the sites, using solar grazing to manage vegetation while maintaining agricultural use of the land. 

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East St. Louis solar project could cut utility bills by 40%  FOX 2
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Global South Utilities (GSU), an Abu Dhabi-headquartered resources investment firm, has initiated construction of a 12 MWp solar photovoltaic facility paired with a 70 MWh battery energy storage system in Berbera. This effort falls under Phase II of the Green Berbera Initiative.
The undertaking follows the activation of GSU’s 5 MWp solar installation in the city during February 2026. The initial phase involved 11.2 km of 33 kV transmission lines and set the stage for decreasing dependence on imported diesel power in this key port location.
Phase II substantially enlarges renewable energy capacity and adds utility-scale battery storage aimed at enhancing grid stability and ensuring electricity availability during evening peak times and when solar generation is lower. When operational, the facility is anticipated to produce roughly 24,000 MWh of green electricity each year, sufficient to meet the needs of about 67,000 households annually.
The initiative is also expected to prevent around 16,500 metric tons of CO2 emissions per year, comparable to removing more than 3,800 gasoline-powered vehicles from roads for twelve months by replacing diesel-based electricity. Over a typical project lifespan, total avoided emissions would surpass 330,000 metric tons of CO2, equivalent to taking over 76,000 gasoline cars out of service for a year.
Combined output from both phases is forecast to provide power for nearly 95,000 households each year, greatly broadening renewable energy availability throughout Berbera. After Phase II becomes operational, Berbera is set to become one of the earliest cities in the Horn of Africa to accomplish a full-scale shift away from fossil-fuel-based electricity generation.
Ali Alshimmari, CEO and Managing Director of GSU and Vice Chairman of Berbera Electricity Company, remarked that Phase II signifies a sustained commitment to Berbera’s infrastructure and economic robustness. He emphasized that dependable and affordably priced power is crucial for urban development, port functionality, and industrial growth. Alshimmari further pointed out that merging large-scale solar with battery storage bolsters Berbera’s status as a vital regional port economy and provides a tangible example of renewable-led progress in the Horn of Africa.
In February 2026, Alshimmari unveiled the Green Berbera Vision, a systematic plan to convert Berbera’s power system from diesel reliance to a renewable-based utility utilizing solar PV and battery storage. GSU owns a 45% share in Berbera Electricity Company, the sole electricity provider for the city. BEC presently manages a 20.38 MW portfolio along with 2 MWh of battery storage, with renewable capacity projected to double by 2027 as part of the wider Green Berbera Vision.
A central element of the project is delivering 100% renewable electricity to the Berbera Economic Zone, a strategically significant trade and logistics hub in the region. The presence of dependable, competitively priced clean energy is expected to enhance the BEZ’s appeal to global investors, industrial firms, and sustainability-oriented enterprises aiming for low-carbon operations in East Africa and the Horn of Africa.
In addition to environmental advantages, the project is anticipated to produce considerable economic and social benefits through local hiring, knowledge transfer, and enduring workforce development. Construction and startup activities will involve local engineers, technicians, construction laborers, and service suppliers, while long-term operations will foster new employment in renewable energy production, battery management, and grid oversight.
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Millvale groups celebrate activation of new solar energy system on North Avenue  TribLIVE.com
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At last month’s Renewables Procurement & Revenue summit, hosted by PV Tech publisher Solar Media in London, PV Tech Premium heard that, in general, the UK renewable energy investment landscape is “quite good”.
This was the opinion of Anastasios Christakis, COO at Queequeg Renewables, who spoke to PV Tech Premium during the event, following his appearance at a panel discussion on solar-plus-storage financing on the second day of the conference. His optimism echoed that of Bob Psaradellis, CEO of Island Green Power, who called the UK’s auction programme in particular the “gold standard” for solar investment opportunities at an earlier Solar Media event this year, reflecting a longstanding opinion in the industry that the UK is something of a leader in the European renewable energy space.
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Indeed, the last twelve months have seen a number of successes for the UK renewable energy sector. Last July, the UK’s largest solar project, Cleve Hill, entered commercial operation, demonstrating the efficacy of both constructing large-scale solar-plus-storage projects, and working through the nationally significant infrastructure programme (NSIP) in the UK.
In the year since, a mammoth 800MW solar PV project has been approved in Lincolnshire and the distributed solar sector will benefit from the introduction of new legislation regarding low carbon housing, set to come into force in 2028. While European renewables face a wave of long-term political uncertainty, the UK’s supportive policy framework continues to attract investors and developers to its energy transition.
“The landscape, in general, is quite good in terms of how it can evolve and how it can develop,” Christakis told PV Tech Premium during the event. “Of course, we’ll need policy support for that, and also legislative support.”
A lot of his optimism comes from the efficacy of the UK’s Contracts for Difference (CfD) scheme, which was a frequent topic of conversation during the summit. The programme allows developers to secure an offtake agreement where the length is measured in decades and the counterparty risk is minimised by working with a national government, and developers throughout the event discussed the attractiveness of the programme.
“We see the CfD scheme as very attractive, from the generator’s perspective, for different reasons,” agreed Francisco del Rio, head of power sales Europe at NTR plc, who also spoke to PV Tech Premium during the event. “One of them is [that the contracts are] long-term, up to 20 years, which provides stable cash inflows and predictability and stability in terms of price.
“That opens the door for financing and raising debt, as well, and with low margins on interest rates. Additionally, indexation is also attractive because it’s a hedge on the opex, which is normally linked to inflation long-term.”
The sheer scale of the scheme is something to behold; its most recent round, allocation round 7a, saw CfDs awarded to a record 155 individual solar PV projects with 4.9GW of capacity, at a price 10% lower than was awarded in the last round.
“[It’s] a good scheme and it has helped to create bankability for the projects that we have,” said Christakis. “Obviously it has its limitations, but in general terms we see that it is working [and] has been working, and helpfully can take the learnings from the previous rounds and apply them to the next rounds, to make it even better.”
Other experts at the summit suggested that the CfD scheme is of the greatest benefit in the long-term, as fundamentally changing the UK’s energy mix from one reliant on fossil fuels to one reliant on clean energy will simply take time, and processes like the CfD scheme have enabled that transition to be financially viable for developers and investors.
“There’s a short-term and a long-term,” said Matt Parry, head of power and energy demand at REA, who spoke during the first panel of the summit. “[The UK government] is doing quite a good job in the long-term, so encouraging investment in renewables and building out battery storage and long-duration energy storage (LDES).”
However, Parry argued that the financial mechanisms affecting UK energy prices, in particular, are “very complicated”, and that for all the optimism about the UK’s long-term energy future, it is likely that the country’s already-high power prices will rise.
This complicated economic background, where the UK is caught between the old fossil fuel energy system and the more distributed, renewables-led mix of the future, means that renewable energy can sometimes not take into account the range of factors that affect a project’s valuation and, ultimately, its bottom line.
In response, Christakis said that project financing needs to become more complex, so that projects are able to compete for both CfD contracts and private offtake agreements, sometimes simultaneously.
“We reached the point where a lot of these projects purely rely on the auctions and the tariffs we get, but we can see a mix where we can guarantee a partial supply to the grid in order to qualify for the auction and get the tariffs, and the other part is merchant, so it’s more like a hybrid model that investors are looking at,” explained Christakis.
“You try to have a private PPA with a private offtaker, like a big utility, [but] the market is not as advanced in this regard, compared to other markets in Europe, but there is a good track record in order to grow even bigger.”
“The longer tenors of the CfDs makes corporate PPAs more challenging, so I think it’s sometimes difficult to find the angle to structure a PPA with a corporate,” added del Rio, suggesting that the popularity and the prevalence of the CfD scheme means that signing deals outside of its parameters can prove difficult.
“They normally want to have shorter tenors than the CfDs, but there are compatible ways to have different commercial schemes in place for different assets, when we’re talking about investors or generators that have a wide portfolio of assets.”
Speakers at the event also suggested that the CfD scheme has a fundamental weakness, in that its continued function is reliant on the sustained support of a government that wants to advance the energy transition. A number of speakers referred to the recent strong performance of the Reform UK party in polls, which is openly more hostile to renewables than the current Labour government, suggesting that this supportive legislative framework could be undone in the event of a new government.
Indeed, del Rio went on to say that some of the political uncertainty that is affecting the UK is something that governments “all across Europe” are having to contend with at present.
“In terms of uncertainty, all across Europe, the governments have implemented some action items, specifically for vulnerable consumers,” he told PV Tech Premium. “That’s something that we see all across Europe recently that has been exacerbated by the recent conflict in the Middle East, so that’s something that all the governments have different actions but in the same direction.”
“Sometimes we might have been surprised because the UK, historically, didn’t have this kind of political or regulatory uncertainty,” he continued, suggesting that this scale of uncertainty is a new kind of risk for actors in the UK. The UK, therefore, compares unfavourably to countries like Ireland, which BNRG’s David Maguire told PV Tech Premium ahead of the event was a notably “stable” political landscape that facilitated long-term dealmaking.
“Given the geopolitical uncertainty, I think this is something that’s new for the vast majority of countries across Europe,” del Rio added.
Christakis said, however, that this widespread uncertainty means the UK has plenty of opportunities to learn about how to navigate this kind of environment from its European neighbours.
“There are some good things that the UK market can adopt from other countries,” he told PV Tech Premium. “I was thinking [how] in Italy they’ve done a very good job of integrating agrivoltaics, and because the solar industry has suffered quite a lot here in the UK with a bit of resistance from those who own the land and communities—rightly or not, based on the way the industry presents itself—and by implementing rules about agrivoltaics, you accentuate the benefits of solar, because [now] this can create biodiversity.
“With regards to the routes to market, which is the auction system, the UK has the CfD system [and] compared to Italy, a market I know very well, the Italian market is more flexible. In Italy, the authority is waiting for the market to tell what they would like to have, so they can secure more capacity into a system, whereas in the UK they put a ceiling on capacity.”
He added that the UK could do with better embedding small-scale solar generation, such as agrivoltaics, “into our business case” to ensure that the sector is not entirely reliant on a single kind of project size, such as utility-scale solar.
“The other thing is that we don’t need to underestimate the power of the smaller producers—those below 1MW,” he added. “The energy communities framework has worked very well in many European countries, so probably you can implement it here, because there are a lot of small developers that are going to make a difference by creating these projects, plus embracing the communities close to these projects.”
However, del Rio concluded by saying that, while the UK could benefit from a more diversified offtake space, in the manner of other European countries, the CfD scheme remains a “really attractive” programme that is the driving force behind UK solar.
“The governmental schemes—the CfD scheme in the UK or the RESS scheme in Ireland—are really attractive from the generators’ perspective in terms of certainty and price stability in the long run,” he said.

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NTPC Renewable Energy Ltd (NTPC REL) has issued separate tenders for a 300 MW solar PV project in Rajasthan and up to 2 GW/12 GWh of interstate transmission system (ISTS)-connected pumped hydro energy storage capacity under a long-term service model.
The solar EPC tender covers the development of a 300 MW grid-connected PV project near Nokhra, Rajasthan. The selected contractor will be responsible for the design, engineering, procurement, supply, installation, testing, and commissioning of the project, including the supply of solar modules. The scope also includes comprehensive operation and maintenance services for three years after commissioning.
In a separate tender, NTPC REL has invited bids for the development of 2 GW/12 GWh of ISTS-connected pumped hydro energy storage projects located anywhere in India.
The state-owned company plans to use the storage capacity to support its round-the-clock (RTC) renewable energy commitments by integrating pumped hydro storage with its solar and wind power projects.
Under the tender terms, developers must offer a minimum capacity of 500 MW at a single location, although bidders may quote higher capacities up to the aggregate requirement of 2 GW. Each project must provide a minimum storage duration of six hours.
The capacity will be procured through a global competitive bidding process followed by a reverse auction. NTPC REL will sign energy storage service agreements with the selected developers on an annual fixed-charge basis for a period of 25 years.
Electricity generated from NTPC and NTPC REL renewable energy projects will be used to charge the storage facilities. The company will dispatch the stored energy on demand during peak and off-peak periods to meet its RTC renewable power supply obligations.
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India’s solar manufacturing sector entered a new regulatory era on June 1, 2026, when the Ministry of New and Renewable Energy’s ALMM List-II mandate took effect, requiring every solar module installed in government-backed, net-metered, and open-access projects to contain cells made by a domestically approved manufacturer. For Pahal Solar, a Surat-based solar energy company that spent the past eight months building exactly that capability, the timing was deliberate — the Gujarat manufacturer secured its ALMM List-I module approval in February 2026, signed a 500 MW encapsulant supply agreement with RenewSys in December 2025, and broke ground on a 2 GW TOPCon solar cell plant in October 2025 to integrate the full production chain before the law changed.
The company, which featured as the designated AI-powered module partner at Goa’s inaugural Solar & Storage Expo just days before the mandate went live, now enters the post-June 1 market in a position few smaller Indian module makers can match: building the cells its modules require, rather than competing for the small open-market supply that analysts say covers less than 2 percent of standalone manufacturers’ collective needs.
The ALMM List-II policy was designed to deepen India’s solar value chain beyond module assembly. Until now, India had built 193 gigawatts of approved module manufacturing capacity while domestic solar cell production stood at just 31 GW — roughly one-sixth the volume. The mismatch is sharpest in TOPCon, the cell architecture that now accounts for nearly 89 percent of India’s approved module output. Of India’s approximately 172 GW of approved TOPCon module capacity, only around 10 GW of domestically approved TOPCon cell manufacturing existed as of the policy’s effective date, according to analysis published by Down to Earth on June 3.
That gap creates an acute supply problem for the roughly 138 standalone module assemblers — companies that laminate and frame cells into panels but do not manufacture the cells themselves — who collectively hold about 134 GW of module capacity. After integrated manufacturers use approximately 28,579 MW of cell output for their own captive production, only about 2,558 MW is available on the open market, meeting less than 1.9 percent of standalone manufacturers’ requirements.
Binit Das, programme manager for renewable energy at the Centre for Science and Environment, noted that many cell manufacturers use their own production internally, leaving limited supplies available to standalone assemblers. “The concern around ALMM List-II is that the requirement to use domestically manufactured solar cells is coming into effect at a time when domestic cell manufacturing capacity is still much lower than module manufacturing capacity,” Das told Down to Earth.
Rounak Muthiyan, founder of EPC firm Kalpa Power, added a further complication: new cell lines require a minimum of six months of stabilization before they can reliably deliver the performance consistency that generation-guarantee contracts demand. “For developers, independent power producers, or EPC companies that need to provide generation guarantees, it is an extremely sensitive matter,” Muthiyan said.
The 2 GW cell plant Pahal Solar is building in Surat will produce TOPCon cells — a next-generation architecture that generates measurably more electricity from the same surface area than the previous industry standard, PERC (Passivated Emitter and Rear Cell), while degrading more slowly over a panel’s 25-year lifespan.
TOPCon stands for Tunnel Oxide Passivated Contact. The technology, developed at Germany’s Fraunhofer Institute in 2013, adds an ultra-thin silicon dioxide layer — approximately 1 to 2 nanometers thick — to the rear surface of an n-type silicon wafer, along with a phosphorus-doped polycrystalline silicon film deposited on top of it via plasma-enhanced chemical vapor deposition (PECVD). This layered structure enables a quantum-mechanical effect called tunneling: electrons generated by incoming photons pass through the oxide barrier to reach the external circuit, while the barrier simultaneously blocks the reverse flow that causes recombination losses. The result is a higher open-circuit voltage and better fill factor than PERC cells can achieve. In mass production, TOPCon cells routinely reach 24 to 25.2 percent conversion efficiency; leading manufacturers have demonstrated 26 percent in pilot lines. PERC cells, by contrast, typically achieve 21 to 22 percent. N-type TOPCon panels also degrade more slowly — at 0.27 to 0.4 percent per year versus roughly 0.5 percent for standard p-type PERC — meaning they generate more cumulative electricity over their warranted life.
The manufacturing cost of a TOPCon cell line is substantially higher than a standard module assembly facility. Establishing 1 GW of solar cell manufacturing capacity requires investment of approximately ₹250 crore to ₹400 crore — five to eight times the ₹50 crore to ₹80 crore required for 1 GW of module assembly. Cell lines also require a gestation period of 18 to 24 months before reaching stable production yields. That capital barrier is precisely why most of India’s 138 standalone module makers did not build cell capacity, and why integrated players are now structurally better positioned under the new policy.
Pahal Solar’s existing facilities in Olpad, Surat, already deploy AI-integrated quality control using electroluminescence (EL) imaging — a technique in which a weak electrical current passes through completed panels, causing defective cells to emit characteristic luminescent signatures that a trained deep-learning model identifies in under 30 seconds per panel. The approach detects micro-cracks, broken contact fingers, and shunting defects invisible to human inspectors at production-line speeds, and is being extended to the new cell plant to maintain output consistency from the first stages of cell fabrication through final module assembly.
The regulatory timing coincided with a public moment for Pahal Solar in its home market. The company served as the official AI-powered module partner at the Solar & Storage Expo Goa 2026, held on May 28 at Novotel Goa Panjim — the first dedicated renewable energy expo in the state, drawing government ministers, developers, EPC contractors, and investors from across India.
Nitin Barvaliya, Pahal Solar’s Vice President, was among the speakers at the event, which opened with a ceremonial lamp-lighting inauguration led by Shri Ramkrishna Alias Sudin Dhavalikar, Goa’s Minister for Power, New and Renewable Energy, and featured a special address from Shri Sanjeev Joglekar, Member Secretary of the Goa Energy Development Agency. Shri Shripad Yesso Naik, Union Minister of State for New and Renewable Energy, attended as Chief Guest.
The expo’s Goa Energy Excellence Awards 2026, felicitated by MLA Shri Rodolfo Fernandes, recognized regional solar excellence. Kunde Solar Solutions received the Solar EPC Company of the Year — Residential award, accepted by partner Sahil Kerkar. Solstar Ultima LLP took the Best Rooftop Solar Installer — Residential prize, accepted by Dinesh Naik, Partner and Business Development Head. The awards highlighted Goa’s growing local solar installation ecosystem at the precise moment when national policy is reshaping who can supply the modules those installers use.
For homeowners and businesses commissioning rooftop solar after June 1, 2026, the ALMM List-II mandate introduces a new compliance layer. Net-metering projects commissioned on or after June 1 must use modules whose cells are sourced from an ALMM List-II approved manufacturer. For residential projects under the PM Surya Ghar Muft Bijli Yojana scheme — which offers direct subsidies of up to ₹78,000 per household — modules must be both ALMM List-I approved and made with ALMM List-II certified cells to qualify.
DCR-compliant modules now carry a cost premium of roughly ₹8 to ₹10 per watt over non-DCR modules, according to industry data. For a typical 3 kW residential rooftop system, that translates to an additional upfront cost of approximately ₹24,000 to ₹30,000 before subsidy offsets are applied.
Ganesh Moorthi, Chief Technology Officer at Luminous Power Technologies, acknowledged the near-term supply constraint for rooftop solar but described the broader trajectory positively. “The implementation of the Domestic Content Requirement mandate from June 1 marks a significant step towards strengthening India’s solar manufacturing ecosystem and advancing the vision of a self-reliant renewable energy sector,” Moorthi said, adding that continued government support could accelerate capacity expansion and enable a smoother transition.
Ishver Dholakiya, founder and managing director of Goldi Solar, put the policy’s intent even more directly: “ALMM List-II is more than a compliance measure; it is India’s clearest signal yet that the next phase of the solar transition will be built on domestic capability, not import dependence.”
The government has signaled that the current policy is not the endpoint. In March 2026, MNRE announced ALMM List-III — an extension of the approved-list framework to cover solar ingots and wafers, the upstream input material for cell manufacturing. List-III is scheduled to take effect from June 1, 2028, pushing the Atmanirbhar Bharat domestic manufacturing strategy one level further up the photovoltaic value chain. For solar energy companies like Pahal Solar, whose new Surat complex includes both the 2 GW TOPCon cell plant and a 2 GW aluminum frame production unit expected to commission by late 2026, the 2028 deadline sets the next milestone for whether to extend vertical integration to the wafer stage.
India’s Q1 2026 solar additions jumped 143 percent year-over-year to 15.3 GW — a record driven in part by developers accelerating project execution ahead of the June 1 deadline. As of April 30, 2026, ALMM List-II total enrolled cell capacity stood at 30.3 GW per the 7th revision of the list. India’s peak power demand hit 270.8 GW on May 21, 2026 — a national record — with solar accounting for nearly one-fifth of electricity supply. The country experienced power shortages on 13 of the last 15 nights in April, underscoring both the scale of the buildout and the grid management challenge that accompanies it.
For a solar energy company in the market to supply that buildout under the new rules, vertical integration into domestic cell manufacturing is no longer optional infrastructure — it is the compliance structure itself.
What is India’s ALMM List-II solar cell mandate?
India’s Approved List of Models and Manufacturers List-II, which took effect June 1, 2026, requires all solar modules used in government-backed, net-metered, and open-access renewable energy projects to be manufactured using solar cells made by an MNRE-approved domestic manufacturer. The policy is designed to build a self-reliant Indian solar supply chain and reduce dependence on imported cells, particularly from China.
What are TOPCon solar panels and how do they differ from PERC?
TOPCon (Tunnel Oxide Passivated Contact) panels use a 1 to 2 nanometer silicon dioxide tunnel oxide layer on the cell’s rear surface, deposited via plasma-enhanced chemical vapor deposition, to reduce electron recombination losses and increase conversion efficiency to 24 to 25 percent — roughly 2 to 3 percentage points higher than standard PERC cells. TOPCon cells also degrade more slowly over a 25-year lifespan, making them less expensive on a levelized cost-per-kilowatt-hour basis even when the upfront price per watt is higher.
Which solar energy companies in India benefit from the ALMM cell mandate?
Vertically integrated manufacturers that produce both solar cells and modules — including companies like Pahal Solar that are building domestic cell capacity in Gujarat — are positioned to supply compliant modules without depending on the open market. Standalone module assemblers that do not manufacture cells face a significantly constrained open-market cell supply, with industry estimates suggesting less than 2 percent of their collective module capacity is serviceable with domestically available cells.
How does the ALMM mandate affect rooftop solar buyers in India?
Homeowners and businesses commissioning rooftop systems after June 1, 2026 must use ALMM List-II compliant modules to qualify for net-metering connections and government subsidies, including the PM Surya Ghar scheme’s subsidy of up to ₹78,000. DCR-compliant modules carry a current cost premium of roughly ₹8 to ₹10 per watt over non-compliant alternatives, adding approximately ₹24,000 to ₹30,000 to a standard 3 kW residential installation before subsidy offsets.
ⓒ 2026 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.

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For Bronx small businesses and landlords, complying with the city’s climate law, Local Law 97, is a huge challenge. But one Riverdale resident tenant and owner found a solution right on her own rooftop. 
Emily Weisberg owns eight small commercial buildings in the Bronx, which have been in her family for generations, and also runs the Moss Cafe in Riverdale while leasing the space. She said she took over property management with the advantage of several long-term commercial tenants but little experience with everything required of a landlord. 
“Managing real estate is my job, even if it isn’t my primary job,” she told the Bronx Times. 
Local Law 97 took effect in 2019 with the ambitious goal of reducing emissions from buildings over 25,000 square feet by 40% by 2030, leading to net zero by 2050. But some of the city’s own LL97 websites are lengthy pages of links, forms, calculators, rules and exceptions, and though the city offers assistance programs, the process is daunting for most. 
The law has sent many landlords scrambling to retrofit their aging buildings, purchase carbon offsets or other fixes that can be costly. Owners also face an annual May 1 deadline to file reports outlining their compliance. Though the city recently announced that 92% of Bronx building owners filed the necessary reports showing their 2024 compliance, among a citywide average of 93%, some are still receiving fines for not doing so. 
Since its inception, LL97 has sparked debate and even protests throughout the city, with some opponents calling it a punitive “unfunded mandate.” 
In Weisberg’s case, she knew one of her buildings needed a new roof in order to comply with the law, but she also worried about the costs and about disrupting the longtime tenants. Minus a multimillion-dollar investment, she said she didn’t think the building could really become more energy-efficient.
Already facing high property taxes and operating costs, “It all just felt very overwhelming,” she said. 

The power of community solar  

Through the small landlord grapevine, Weisberg heard about Bronx-based Fieldston Power, a company that has worked to greenify old buildings in neighborhoods like West Farms, Kingsbridge, Harlem and Washington Heights. 
Adam Zucker, Bronx native and co-founder of Fieldston Power, said in a statement to the Bronx Times that Weisberg’s predicament is common. 
“Many Bronx building owners are facing the same challenge: aging infrastructure, rising operating costs and increasing pressure to comply with Local Law 97. Historically, making major energy upgrades required significant upfront capital, which made these projects difficult for many owners to pursue,” he said. 
Zucker’s company finances, builds, owns and operates solar infrastructure atop other owners’ roofs — often making major repairs first, he said. 
“For building owners, it’s a practical way to improve infrastructure, reduce emissions exposure, lower operating costs, and make progress toward Local Law 97 compliance. More broadly, it’s an example of how private investment can help modernize New York City’s aging housing stock while creating benefits for both property owners and residents.”
At first, Weisberg said she was hesitant, wondering, “What’s the catch?” But Fieldston Power did cover the entire cost of replacing the roof membrane and installing solar panels and now, the company essentially rents the roof from her to operate the community solar grid. 
Weisberg then started subscribing at a discount to the power generated atop her building — which also flows to the space she rents for the Moss Cafe. She estimated savings of around 20% compared to last year and said community solar creates “a cool circular economic loop that I think is really special.”
Weisberg said that while the process seemed complicated on Fieldston’s end, it was “frictionless” and cost-free for her. “It was such a relief. I didn’t have to be the expert.” 
Overall, Weisberg said she fully supports the goals of LL97. “I think it’s important for us to take responsibility for greening the city, and I think it’s a great initiative,” she said. However, “It’s a massive job, and there’s no funding for it at all.”
She said the costs of compliance — and the requirements to prove it — are probably challenging even for massive companies. But Weisberg said she heard of other small landlords who just sold their properties rather than figure it out. “It falls entirely on the landlord to do it,” she said. 
From the outside, Weisberg said she may seem like a smooth success story. However, “Just like going to the gas station or grocery store is harder and harder, it’s also harder to run a business,” she said.
“It’s not like asset owners have barrels of cash incoming all the time. The expenses are so high for everything to stay operational, there has to be funding for these things.” 
Weisberg said she remains cautiously optimistic about the future of her business and rental properties in the Bronx. She’s focused on keeping her non-corporate commercial tenants — no need for “scary” private equity investors — and reducing emissions right in her neighborhood. 
As an owner, “There will always be new policies and more to learn,” she said. But given her unique experience, “I really do understand both sides in older buildings in the Bronx.” 
Reach Emily Swanson at eswanson@schnepsmedia.com or (646) 717-0015. For more coverage, subscribe to our newsletter and follow us on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram!
Emily Swanson is a reporter at the Bronx Times and 2023 graduate of the CUNY Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism. Originally from Minneapolis, MN, she now lives in the South Bronx neighborhood of Port Morris. She enjoys cooking, photography and rooting for the Knicks, Timberwolves, Liberty and Yankees.
All comments are subject to our Community Guidelines. Schneps Media does not endorse the views shared by readers in our comment sections.
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After more than 30 years without electricity, a remote community in the mountainous Eastern Free State is now enjoying power in their homes for the first time from off-grid renewable energy.
The Santiago community is situated in an environmentally sensitive area near Verkykerskop, about 65 km from Harrismith. Due to the difficult terrain and the potential environmental impact of constructing a powerline to serve the villages in the area, household electrification had long remained out of reach. 
On Saturday, May 30, the lights were switched on at some homes for the first time after the installation of a hybrid off-grid photovoltaic (solar) system.
Each house is now fitted with a carport-style photovoltaic system, an inverter, battery and a 20 Amp meter. Although the supply is off grid rather than through conventional powerlines, customers will still purchase prepaid electricity through Eskom’s standard vending system. 
“Projects like this reflect Eskom’s commitment to powering growth sustainably and ensuring that no community is left behind,” said Zetu Nciza, Eskom CentralEast Cluster’s acting Senior Manager: Asset Creation.
“Through innovative solutions such as off-grid solar systems, we can extend access to electricity in a responsible and sustainable way, improving quality of life, supporting socio-economic development and helping to build a better future for all,” Nciza added.
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Photovoltaic (PV) panels of the agri-PV complementary power station generate green energy under the sun in Xianju county of East China’s Zhejiang Province on June 3, 2026. By introducing PV power generation projects, the county has promoted local economic development. Photo: VCG
Neatly arranged photovoltaic (PV) panels complement green hills, trees, farmland and village houses, painting a vivid picture of …
China-Europe freight trains are being assembled and preparing to depart from Jinhuadong Railway Station in Jinhua, East China’s …
A worker processes a new type of power transmission equipment while an industrial robot works on the production …

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Niranjan Kaggere is a Senior Assistant Editor with over 20 years of experience and adept at writing, reporting on wide range of issues that affect society. Passionate about reporting on environment, wildlife, energy, history & state secretariat, his news reports deliver in-depth, engaging content to diverse audiences. In free time, Niranjan sets out to forest, farms exploring the natural world.Read More

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NTPC Renewable Energy has issued an EPC tender for a 300 MW grid-connected solar PV project near Devikot in Rajasthan. Bid submission ends on June 26, 2026.
June 03, 2026. By Mrinmoy Dey

Future of Renewable Infra Will Be Built on Resilient Structures, Not Cheapest Ones: Vedant Goel

AI, Digitalisation Will Drive Next Phase of India’s Energy Transition: Schneider’s Udai Singh

Iron-Air Batteries Can Power India’s Renewable Ambitions: Stuti Kakkar, Meine Electric

India’s EV Future Depends on Highway Charging Corridors: Kartikey Hariyani, ChargeZone

GoodWe India’s Aniket Sawant on Crossing 6 GW Shipments and the Future of Energy Storage

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Clean Max Enviro Energy Solutions (CleanMax) has secured a hybrid renewable energy project to decarbonize Gujarat Alkalies and Chemicals Ltd’s (GACL) manufacturing operations in Gujarat. The project will comprise 75.90 MW of wind capacity and 84.34 MWp of solar capacity, from which hybrid renewable energy will be supplied to GACL’s Dahej and Vadodara units under the group captive structure.
All the power generated from the said facilities will be utilized by GACL, supporting the company’s transition toward cleaner and more sustainable industrial operations.
The project is being implemented across four of CleanMax’s renewable energy sites in Gujarat: Kalikanagar, Aji Dahisarda, Rajula and Ghuntu. “Together, this project is expected to generate 36.9 crore units of clean power annually, helping to offset CO₂ emissions by 2,64,204 tons per year—equivalent to the environmental benefit of planting nearly 15.27 million trees annually,” according to CleanMax.
The project is being executed in two phases” Phase 1 comprises 16.50 MW of wind capacity and 21.701 MWp of solar capacity, while Phase 2 comprises 59.40 MW of wind capacity and 62.64 MWp of solar capacity. Both the phases will be commissioned in accordance with the contractual timelines as agreed between CleanMax and GACL.
Clean Max Enviro Energy is India’s largest pureplay commercial & industrial (C&I) renewable energy company with more than 15 years of operations. Its contracted renewable energy portfolio reached 5.7 GW in FY 2025-26, with 74% of new contracted capacity driven by existing customers.
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The new pv magazine Global May issue is now available!
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April 01 – August 31, 2026
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Five rejoinders: What Ramachandra Guha gets wrong about Rahul Gandhi
Why India is not able to fully use the solar power it generates
In this speculative memoir, an academic writes about chronic pain and liminal spaces she exists in
Ramachandra Guha: How the Gandhi family has helped Modi consolidate power
The Muslim maestro at the heart of a Hindu temple tradition
Why Delhi University’s four-year undergraduate programme has left students in panic
Fraternity and caste society: The prospects and risks of a Madras High Court order
Before the 21st century’s climate grief, there was Bibhutibhusan Bandyopadhyay’s 1939 novel Aranyak’
Rush Hour: Delhi fire leaves 21 dead, Indian killed in attack on Kuwait airport and more
Hindusthan Records: How the shepherd boy playing a flute brought music into Indian homes
Pro-Palestine NGO urges India to arrest Israeli reservist in Himachal for alleged crimes in Gaza
Iran war: Indian killed in attack on Kuwait airport

Five rejoinders: What Ramachandra Guha gets wrong about Rahul Gandhi
Why India is not able to fully use the solar power it generates
In this speculative memoir, an academic writes about chronic pain and liminal spaces she exists in
Ramachandra Guha: How the Gandhi family has helped Modi consolidate power
The Muslim maestro at the heart of a Hindu temple tradition
Why Delhi University’s four-year undergraduate programme has left students in panic
Fraternity and caste society: The prospects and risks of a Madras High Court order
Before the 21st century’s climate grief, there was Bibhutibhusan Bandyopadhyay’s 1939 novel Aranyak’
Rush Hour: Delhi fire leaves 21 dead, Indian killed in attack on Kuwait airport and more
Hindusthan Records: How the shepherd boy playing a flute brought music into Indian homes
At 3.30 in the afternoon on May 21, India registered its highest-ever power demand, of more than 270 GW.
It was a day when most of north, west and central India was seeing heatwaves, during which power demand typically spikes as millions of people use cooling devices simultaneously. While coal-based thermal power met almost 63% of the demand during the peak, solar power was the next biggest contributor, and supplied 28% of all power that was consumed.
Data from that day suggests its contribution could have been higher. Across the day, India generated around 10 gigawatt-hours less solar energy than it had capacity to, according to the daily report by Grid India, which operates the country’s power system. The data traces this unused capacity specifically to facilities in Gujarat and Rajasthan.
A key problem in this regard is insufficient transmission capacity – transmission lines are needed to evacuate power from generation plants. Typically, solar power capacity goes untapped because “the solar plant might not have enough capacity to evacuate the power to the nearest node”, explained Sunil Dahiya, founder and lead analyst at Envirocatalysts, a Delhi-based think-tank that works on environment and climate.
While India has added significant solar capacity in recent years, it has not built adequate transmission infrastructure required to move power from generation plants to the demand hotspots. When there is “more supply in the grid than can be evacuated, operators are asked to limit the generation to maintain grid stability”, Dahiya said.
Tracking the power demand and supply through that day reveals another problem in the generation of power from solar energy.
As the day wore on, the demand dipped slightly, then rose again after 7 pm, reaching 250 GW by 11 pm. During this second peak, however, there was no solar power to feed the demand – in fact, by 7.30 pm, after sunset, the contribution of solar power to the electricity grid fell to zero and coal-based thermal power took over entirely.
This need not have been the case. In many countries, solar power is available round the clock since it is stored in battery energy storage systems.
But India faces the twin limitations of inadequate transmission infrastructure and a lack of battery energy storage systems – as a result, the country’s solar power capacity is not being fully used.
In the first quarter of this year, a massive 78 GWh of renewable energy, of which most, 72 GWh, was solar, was curtailed.
The trend continued as summer arrived. On April 2, for instance, around 5.09 GWh of solar power capacity was not used in Gujarat “in view of system requirement and grid security and stability”. Similarly, on May 12, 2.16 GWh went unutilised in Rajasthan for the same reason.
With millions of Indians facing power cuts during heat waves this summer, experts say it is important to speedily build the systems needed to fully utilise the country’s solar generation capacity, particularly since India has ambitious targets to add more capacity in the coming years. India’s current installed solar capacity is 150 GW. It plans to take this to 300 GW by 2030.
While a solar plant can be built within six months to a year, adding a transmission line can take up to 30 months, said Dahiya. The gap could lead to more power capacity being wasted. “This can be reduced by battery storage, not only to meet the slower pace of transmission lines, but also to meet the night-time peaks,” he said.
India’s transmission infrastructure is falling short of targets. In 2024-’25, 42% of the planned lines of inter-state transmission systems, or ISTS, were not built on time.
According to a report by global energy think-tank Ember, one in four inter-state transmission systems stand delayed by a year or more.
“With ISTS projects, getting right of way is a challenge, especially when such transmission lines pass through several states and need negotiations with multiple actors,” said Duttatreya Das, Energy Analyst-Asia at Ember. A key challenge is “fragmented land ownership”, according to the report.
Experts also point to a lack of adequate planning. “Since renewable projects come at a much faster pace, project developers have not done that kind of planning in advance about how this renewable energy capacity would be evacuated,” said Vibhuti Garg, South Asia director at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis.
The Ember report highlights that solar projects “enter a pipeline” without “general network access” – or permission to use the transmission network.
Earlier, such permission was granted by the Central Transmission Utility, after a solar project had signed contracts to sell power to specific buyers. Since 2022, this process has been made easier and projects can now seek and gain network access even before they have locked in buyers.
But as the Ember report points out, many solar projects fail to seek network access in a timely manner, and are able to evacuate power only when the network has spare capacity.
Das explained that when renewable energy plants come up without adequate infrastructure of transmission lines, the developers worry about the money they stand to lose on account of wasted capacity. “It becomes like a chicken-and-egg problem,” he said. “If the current bottlenecks continue developers will shy away from aggressively deploying solar capacity.”
Experts say that transmission bottlenecks are more difficult to solve than low storage capacity. Therefore, they say, India could focus primarily on creating battery energy storage systems, or BESS, which can supply power at night when no solar energy is generated.
A report by the Bengaluru think-tank Climate Risk Horizons that focused on Rajasthan noted that if an 8-hour battery storage system with a capacity of around 2 GW was installed along with solar panels that generated around 7 GW, together the system could supply up to 18 hours of renewable energy per day. Such systems could help “manage peak demand, reduce reliance on thermal power for balancing, and enhance overall grid reliability”, the report said.
Moreover, it could also make renewable energy available at a much cheaper cost. “The costs of renewable energy will definitely be at par or lesser than the lowest-costing coal,” said Ember’s Das.
However, India has been slow to create battery energy storage systems. Between 2022 and May 2025, India auctioned around 13 gigawatt-hours of BESS capacity. As of August 2025, only about 219 megawatt-hours of capacity were “reported to be operational”, a study by the Institute of Energy Economics and Financial Analysis found.
Garg observed that a key reason for this shortfall could be that the prices at which companies bid to set up battery capacity “were not commercially viable”. The report by her institute noted that players were bidding at lower prices which may become unviable later during implementation, and “can jeopardise the successful commissioning of projects.”
Garg added, “While competition is good, auctions might not be the best for BESS. There is a need to revisit the process.”
Further, BESS projects have also seen delays in the signing of power purchase agreements with distribution utilities. Like power generation plants, battery energy storage systems also sell power to distribution utilities, which are typically state-owned firms that sell power to consumers. But the utilities “expect further price reductions in a rapidly evolving competitive market”, an IEEFA report suggested.
Recognising the importance of battery storage systems, the government has been pushing for solar projects to incorporate them at the inception stage itself.
In February 2025, the ministry of power issued an advisory to states to “incorporate a minimum of 2-hour co-located energy storage systems equivalent to 10% of the installed solar project capacity in future solar tenders”.
But this will need a strong policy push, experts observed. “A majority of transmission lines are built by the government but batteries are not. It is market driven,” said Dahiya. In contrast to advisories, he added, “At this point there is no strict regulation of exactly how much capacity should be. There needs to be stricter push for battery storage in all upcoming solar.”
Garg, however, cautioned that there is a need to look beyond lithium-ion batteries, for which India is dependent on imports from China, to other battery technologies, such as sodium-ion batteries, which have longer life spans and lower exposure to supply chain risks. “The supply chains of these face risk with global disruptions,” she said.
There are other pathways to solving the problem of unused solar capacity, she pointed out. For instance, she explained, renewable energy projects that are not linked to transmission lines can be incentivised, such as solar water pumps that can generate solar energy and supply water to specific areas. “This can reduce the pressure on the grids,” Garg said.
Dahiya also suggested that policy initiatives could help shift the night-time demand for power in commercial and residential sectors to the morning, when solar power is available. “For instance, people mostly charge their EVs at night,” he said. “It is also cheaper to do so.” By introducing cheaper tariffs in the morning, people can be “nudged to charge their EVs in the morning hours when there is solar available”, he added.

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Some 269,000 solar installations were completed across the UK in 2025, a 37% increase on the previous year, in what was the strongest year to date for solar deployment in the country, according to the UK’s Department for Energy Security and Net Zero.
Some 95% of these were rooftop solar systems – or around 255,000 installations – which means that a new rooftop solar array was installed every two minutes throughout the year.
This momentum has continued into 2026. April saw some 23,000 solar installations, while nine of the 10 best-performing months to date all occurred in the past year.
More than half of the installations for the month were on the roofs of homes, indicating how ‘households are increasingly choosing to generate their own power’, the government said in a statement.
The government linked the acceleration in demand to growing concerns around energy security following the conflict in the Middle East, as well as falling installation costs. Recent data indicates that the cost of acquiring and installing solar photovoltaic systems has decreased by up to 9%.
“As we face a second fossil fuel crisis in five years, Britain is taking back control of their energy by generating more clean power than ever before,” commented energy secretary Ed Miliband. “Record-breaking solar growth means greater energy security, [and] lower exposure to volatile fossil fuel markets which we can’t control.
“This is what our clean power mission looks like: backing homegrown energy, giving people more control over their bills, and building a stronger, more resilient energy system for the future.”
According to the government, households adopting rooftop solar could save up to £480 per month on energy bills, while plans are underway for the rollout of low-cost ‘plug-in’ solar panels in stores later this year.
Larger scale initiatives, meanwhile, include the granting of approval for the Springwell Solar Farm, described by the government as the ‘largest power-producing solar farm in UK history’. Read more here.

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AIIMS Nagpur Signs MoU with MAHAPREIT for 4 MW Solar Power Project  SolarQuarter
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8 Emerging Technologies Generating Clean Energy from the Built Environment  parametric-architecture.com
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Across solar portfolios, actual performance frequently falls short of modeled expectations. The gap between expected and realized production is a long-standing issue, and addressing it has only grown more important as project economics change. This is not simply an equipment problem, it’s an operations one: Too many systems are not fully understood or actively managed once they are in service. 
What makes this challenge particularly difficult to address is that it rarely presents itself in obvious ways. It is not typically a major outage or a clear system failure that drives losses. More often, it is a collection of small, persistent inefficiencies that go unnoticed or unresolved: Slight phase imbalances that never quite trigger concern, inverters that intermittently derate and recover before anyone takes a closer look, or tracker behavior that appears acceptable at a glance but is consistently under-optimized. Individually, these conditions can seem immaterial, but across a portfolio they add up quickly: A 2023 report by kWh Analytics found underperformance costs the solar industry $2.5 billion a year. 
Data drives smarter solar decisions
Portfolio owners do not lack data on their solar assets. In fact, most systems today are producing more data than ever before, but that data is often fragmented, lacks context, or is presented in a way that does not translate into action. Many solar monitoring platforms were not built with long-term operations in mind, and while they function well as visualization tools, they often fall short when it comes to diagnosing issues or guiding response. This creates a familiar tension where operators are either overwhelmed with alerts that are difficult to prioritize or lack the visibility needed to identify more subtle performance issues, forcing a reliance on manual analysis and experience that does not scale across growing portfolios.
At the same time, the market itself has evolved. Solar assets are now supported by a broader group of stakeholders than ever before, including independent power producers, asset managers, O&M providers, and third-party service teams, all interacting with the same systems with different objectives and levels of technical depth. The handoff from EPC to long-term operations remains one of the more challenging transitions, where design assumptions are not always validated against real-world conditions. As a result, performance is not just under-optimized, it is often interpreted differently depending on who is looking at it.
This is where monitoring needs to play a more central role. It can no longer be a tool used only by performance engineers or analysts. Instead, the data must be accessible and understandable across all stakeholders while still maintaining the technical depth required to diagnose issues properly. In many ways, these systems tell a story about how an asset is behaving, and the challenge is ensuring that everyone involved is reading the same version of that story.
That shared understanding becomes especially important when work arises that is not always planned or budgeted. In many cases, the technical team can clearly identify an issue and understand its long-term impact, but that urgency does not always translate to asset managers or capital decision makers. Without the proper context, these issues can appear minor or deferrable, and approval is delayed until performance degradation becomes more visible or more costly. When the data provides clear context and communicates the operational and financial impact, it becomes much easier to align stakeholders and move from identification to action, whereas without that, alignment delays are inevitable as teams work to reconcile differing interpretations of system performance.
Equally important is the level of detail that is captured and surfaced. Portfolio averages and high-level KPIs can mask localized issues that persist over time, and without visibility into component-level behavior and the ability to compare performance across systems and timeframes, many of these inefficiencies remain hidden in plain sight. Context also plays a critical role, as a fault or alert on its own rarely provides enough information to act and only becomes meaningful when it can be tied back to electrical behavior, historical trends, and system design. 
Managing energy value in-house 
As an energy professional of many years, I’ve seen firsthand the immense cost that portfolio owners bear as a consequence of underanalyzed performance data. A recent commercial client of ours at NextWave was experiencing what they thought was underperformance, but which turned out to be a simple data management issue. 
The company had begun the process of hiring an outside asset management firm to find a solution before realizing that they could get value they needed from their energy systems by implementing better data management. In a less costly move, they adopted a monitoring system with a more intuitive portfolio dashboard, and trained their in-house team to manage their assets, no contractors required. 
This example, among many in the solar energy industry, represents a portion of the billions of dollars in lost value that can be recovered by implementing smarter data capture, analysis, and decision making. 
Alignment turns performance insights into action
Identifying an issue is only part of the equation, and the speed at which it is addressed ultimately determines its impact. Monitoring should therefore be viewed as an active part of the operational workflow that drives prioritization, coordination, and resolution rather than as a passive layer of reporting.
As the industry continues to mature, the next gains in performance are unlikely to come from hardware alone. They will come from improving how systems are observed, interpreted, and managed over time. For asset owners and operators, this requires a shift in perspective, including a closer look at whether current tools are truly surfacing lost value or simply confirming that systems are online, and whether all stakeholders are working from a shared and reliable understanding of performance.
Many of the most meaningful opportunities for improvement are already visible within the data being collected, but they are not being surfaced or acted on consistently. The gap between expected and actual performance is present across portfolios today. Closing that gap will depend on the industry’s ability to see these issues clearly, align around them, and respond before small inefficiencies become permanent losses.
Nader Yarpezeshkan is the founder and CEO of NextWave Energy Monitoring, an industry-built monitoring platform for commercial, industrial, and utility-scale solar assets that combines intuitive PVPulse software with U.S.-manufactured grid-edge hardware and onsite engineering services. A veteran of the solar industry, he has worked across the full project lifecycle, from origination and development through long-term asset operations and performance management. Nader also serves as co-founder and president of Phoenix Renewable Services, an engineering-driven operations & maintenance provider specializing in preventive and corrective maintenance, inverter refurbishment, and repowering services for solar and energy storage systems throughout the United States.
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PRO-8 inaugurates 48-kW solar system, targets P150K monthly savings  Philippine News Agency
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India overtakes US to become second-largest solar growth market in 2025  Business Standard
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A planned photovoltaic gigafactory in France, developed by the start-up HoloSolis, is set to receive a portion of a EUR100 million (US$116 million) investment from the water technology company Ecolab. This information was reported by PV Tech on June 3, 2026.
Ecolab is allocating the funds to two industrial projects that the French government has designated as strategically important. The other recipient of the investment is GravitHy, a company working on a green iron production facility in southern France.
HoloSolis is advancing its plans to construct a 5GW solar cell and module manufacturing plant in northeastern France. The company aims to start production in 2028 and, at full capacity, expects to produce up to ten million modules annually. HoloSolis has already secured investment from multiple public and private sources. Last year, it announced a licensing agreement with Trinasolar to manufacture modules in Europe using the Chinese PV manufacturer’s TOPCon cell technology.
Christophe Beck, chairman and CEO of Ecolab, commented that Europe requires a strong, competitive, and decarbonized industry. He stated that by investing in GravitHy and HoloSolis, the company is supporting players who are reshaping Europe’s industrial model. Beck described the company’s mission as demonstrating that economic performance and sustainability are not conflicting objectives but rather the twin foundations of a resilient, future-ready industry.
This new investment represents a positive development for Europe’s PV manufacturing sector, which has faced challenges in recent years as it lost ground to China and, more recently, to emerging manufacturing centers such as India. Despite various policy efforts to bolster European PV manufacturing, difficulties persist. Late last month, Carbon, another French start-up, announced it was abandoning plans for a vertically integrated PV manufacturing facility, citing a lack of clear policy at both the EU and Member State levels regarding the establishment of a strictly European photovoltaic market.
This report provides a comprehensive view of the solar cells and light-emitting diodes industry in France, tracking demand, supply, and trade flows across the national value chain. It explains how demand across key channels and end-use segments shapes consumption patterns, while also mapping the role of input availability, production efficiency, and regulatory standards on supply.
Beyond headline metrics, the study benchmarks prices, margins, and trade routes so you can see where value is created and how it moves between domestic suppliers and international partners. The analysis is designed to support strategic planning, market entry, portfolio prioritization, and risk management in the solar cells and light-emitting diodes landscape in France.
The report combines market sizing with trade intelligence and price analytics for France. It covers both historical performance and the forward outlook to 2035, allowing you to compare cycles, structural shifts, and policy impacts.
This report provides a consistent view of market size, trade balance, prices, and per-capita indicators for France. The profile highlights demand structure and trade position, enabling benchmarking against regional and global peers.
The analysis is built on a multi-source framework that combines official statistics, trade records, company disclosures, and expert validation. Data are standardized, reconciled, and cross-checked to ensure consistency across time series.
All data are normalized to a common product definition and mapped to a consistent set of codes. This ensures that comparisons across time are aligned and actionable.
The forecast horizon extends to 2035 and is based on a structured model that links solar cells and light-emitting diodes demand and supply to macroeconomic indicators, trade patterns, and sector-specific drivers. The model captures both cyclical and structural factors and reflects known policy and technology shifts in France.
Each projection is built from national historical patterns and the broader regional context, allowing the report to show where growth is concentrated and where risks are elevated.
Prices are analyzed in detail, including export and import unit values, regional spreads, and changes in trade costs. The report highlights how seasonality, freight rates, exchange rates, and supply disruptions influence pricing and margins.
Key producers, exporters, and distributors are profiled with a focus on their operational scale, geographic footprint, product mix, and market positioning. This helps identify competitive pressure points, partnership opportunities, and routes to differentiation.
This report is designed for manufacturers, distributors, importers, wholesalers, investors, and advisors who need a clear, data-driven picture of solar cells and light-emitting diodes dynamics in France.
The market size aggregates consumption and trade data, presented in both value and volume terms.
The projections combine historical trends with macroeconomic indicators, trade dynamics, and sector-specific drivers.
Yes, it includes export and import unit values, regional spreads, and a pricing outlook to 2035.
The report benchmarks market size, trade balance, prices, and per-capita indicators for France.
Yes, it highlights demand hotspots, trade routes, pricing trends, and competitive context.
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Market Size, Growth and Scenario Framing
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How the Market Splits Into Decision-Relevant Buckets
Where Demand Comes From and How It Behaves
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Trade Flows and External Dependence
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CEBU CITY, Philippines — The Cebu City government is moving to adopt solar power as part of its efforts to improve energy efficiency after breaking ground for a P12-million on-grid rooftop solar photovoltaic (PV) system for the Executive and Legislative buildings on Wednesday, June 3.
The project, which city officials said is targeted for completion by August, is expected to offset around 30 percent of the electricity consumption of the two buildings.
READ: DTI eyes mandatory certification for solar panels, batteries
READ: Renewable energy: A naturally brighter solution

Mayor Nestor Archival led the groundbreaking ceremony together with officials from the Department of Energy (DOE), the Department of General Services (DGS), and the city’s Energy Conservation Office.
Archival said the two buildings currently incur around P1.5 million in monthly electricity costs.
Based on the contractor’s estimates and the project’s terms of reference, the solar PV system is expected to reduce power consumption by at least 30 percent, although actual output may vary depending on weather conditions.
The mayor said the projected reduction could translate to savings of around P400,000 to P500,000 a month.
Annual savings could reach around P4.8 million to P6 million.
The city government initially allocated P15 million for the project, but the contract was eventually awarded for around P12 million covering both buildings.
READ: Use of renewable energy in Cebu’s supply chain pushed amid oil price hikes

Officials said the solar facilities are expected to be operational by August.
Archival explained that the project utilizes an on-grid system, meaning the solar panels are connected to the existing power distribution network.
Under the setup, electricity generated by the solar panels supplements power supplied by the utility provider. If solar generation decreases due to cloudy weather or other factors, the remaining power requirement is automatically sourced from the grid.
He said the system does not prioritize specific facilities or equipment, such as elevators or air-conditioning units, but instead contributes to the buildings’ total electricity demand.
However, Archival noted that because the project does not include battery storage, the solar panels cannot provide electricity during power outages.
“Kung mag-brownout unya wala ta’y battery, wa’y gamit ang solar. Mapawong gihapon,” he said.
(If there is a power outage and there are no batteries, the solar system cannot operate and power will still go out.)
According to Archival, Cebu City currently has around 17 to 18 major government buildings.
He said the city aims to install solar systems in at least half of these facilities within the next three years.
The mayor said savings generated from the initial project will help fund additional solar installations in the future.
Department of General Services head Atty. June Maratas said the project forms part of the implementation of City Ordinance No. 2772, which Archival authored while serving as a city councilor.
The ordinance provides for the upgrading of city government buildings to solar power systems.
READ: Eastern Visayas police headquarters shifts to solar power

Maratas said the city had already energized a 300-kilowatt solar panel system at the South Road Properties (SRP) Complex last year, making the Executive and Legislative Building project the second major solar installation undertaken by the city government.
He added that another solar power project is expected to be installed before the end of the year at the ABC Building and Bagsakan Complex in the SRP.
Department of Energy-Central Visayas Regional Director Renante Sevilla said the agency is encouraging local government units across Cebu and the rest of Central Visayas to undertake similar renewable energy projects.
Sevilla said cities with high electricity demand stand to benefit from adopting solar power systems.
“We really encourage them. Kung naa ilahang rooftop, then, we encourage them to put up also, same with what Mayor Nestor also did diri sa Cebu City,” he said.
READ: Green groups urge gov’t to fast-track energy transition

(We really encourage them if they have available rooftops, then we encourage them to put up also, same with what Mayor Nestor did here in Cebu City.)
He noted that Mandaue City has already started implementing similar initiatives and encouraged other local governments with available rooftop spaces to consider installing solar facilities.
According to Sevilla, Cebu City’s electricity requirements make it one of the local government units that could significantly benefit from shifting to renewable energy.
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India Extends Countervailing Duty On Malaysian Solar Glass For Five More Years  SolarQuarter
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Google, AirTrunk and European Energy Australia have announced that the 25 MW Mulwala Solar Farm in New South Wales is nearing completion and is preparing to begin supplying electricity to Australia’s National Electricity Market. The project forms part of a corporate power purchase agreement announced by the three companies in 2023. According to the companies, the solar farm will add new generation capacity to the grid as demand for digital infrastructure, including cloud and AI-related services, continues t
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PetroGreen Energy secures ECC for 98-MW solar park  Inquirer.net
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Solar Power World
By Kelly Pickerel | June 3, 2026
RETC, part of the VDE Group, has released its 2026 PV Module Index (PVMI) Report, which features 19 solar panel manufacturers earning recognition across multiple testing disciplines and award categories. Thirteen manufacturers achieved Overall Highest Achiever status.
The report provides independent, comparative data on solar PV modules across reliability, performance and quality metrics.
“Certifications require products to meet a minimum baseline standard; however, they do not necessarily address how assets will perform throughout their projected lifetime in the field, specifically in recent years, under increasingly extreme conditions,” said Cherif Kedir, CEO of RETC. “In 2026, solar is now both critical infrastructure and a commoditized product, which makes quality differentiation paramount for long-term reliability, consistency and performance. Stakeholders require more confidence that the products being deployed today will continue performing reliably over decades, especially as new manufacturing scales rapidly and new materials and supply chains hastily enter the market.”
Based on testing conducted between Q2 of 2025 and Q1 of 2026, the 2026 PVMI evaluates PV modules using RETC’s extended real-world testing protocols designed to identify potential long-term reliability and performance risks that may not appear in standard certification testing. The report highlights several emerging trends shaping solar procurement, manufacturing and risk evaluation decisions across the industry.
Visual inspection. Credit: Augustin Rajkumar/RETC, VDE Group
“What we are seeing is an industry moving from a deployment story to a performance and risk management story,” Kedir said. “The PVMI gives developers, financiers and asset owners a clearer view of which modules perform under extended stress conditions designed to reflect the realities they will face in the field.”
The 2026 Photovoltaic Module Index Report highlights several reliability and performance trends emerging from RETC’s extended laboratory testing, including:
Another independent testing lab, Kiwa PVEL, also highlighted troubling reliability markers in its latest solar panel report.

Kelly Pickerel has more than 15 years of experience reporting on the U.S. solar industry and is currently editor in chief of Solar Power World. Email Kelly.

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NTPC Green Energy Ltd (NGEL) is tendering for engineering, procurement and construction (EPC) contracts to develop 3,300MWh of battery storage capacity at the 30GW Khavda hybrid renewable energy park in Gujarat, India.
The renewable energy subsidiary of state-owned power producer NTPC published its Notice Inviting Tender (NIT) last week (29 May), with documents going on sale on 5 June and the bid submission window closing 25 June.
Posted on the parent company’s tendering portal, the tender will award EPC package contracts through a competitive bidding process.
The battery energy storage system (BESS) facilities will be deployed at NTPC REL Khavda Solar Plant, located within the huge complex in Gujarat’s Kutch district that spans 72,400 hectares. Strategically situated in an area of western India rich in solar and wind potential, the park is connected to India’s Interstate Transmission System (ISTS).  
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Four separate blocks of BESS will be installed: three of 300MW rated AC discharge capacity at the point of injection at ISTS substations, with 900MWh capacity each and another of 200MW/600MWh. Each will connect at the 33kV level to a designated 300MW solar PV plant at the complex.
The EPC package includes a full scope of work spanning design to supply, installation and commissioning of BESS assets on a turnkey basis, as well as integration with the solar PV assets and the grid.
NGEL requires BESS assets to have a 25-year operational lifetime from the date of commissioning, accounting for capacity degradation and offering a minimum 10,000 cycles of operation.
Operations and maintenance (O&M) contracts with 15-year terms will be included in the scope of bidding, while the minimum monthly round-trip efficiency (RTE) must be at least 80%, including auxiliary consumption, and 98% annual availability must be maintained, according to NGEL documents.
The issuing of NGEL’s tender follows the recent announcement from Adani Green Energy, the Adani Group subsidiary that is overseeing the hybrid park’s overall development, that it has to date already commissioned 3.37GWh of cumulative BESS capacity at the Khavda park.
As reported by our colleagues at PV Tech, NGEL announced in March that it has now deployed more than 2.2GW of solar PV generation capacity at the Khavda project, at which several developers are building solar, wind and BESS facilities on contiguous land. The announcement took NGEL’s total installed renewable energy capacity across India to more than 10GW.   
According to a blog post from Blackridge Research & Consulting, Khavda, planned to comprise 26GW of solar and 4GW of wind, is estimated to cost around US$18.7 billion and is planned for completion in 2030.  

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India's clean energy journey has the potential to generate more than 44 lakh jobs by 2030, with rooftop solar emerging as the single largest employment driver, accounting for around 43% of the projected workforce, a recent study finds.
The findings come at a time when the government is accelerating renewable energy deployment through various schemes aimed at expanding solar adoption across households and agriculture.
Rooftop solar leads workforce expansion
According to the CEEW and NRDC study titled Driving Energy Transition: Workforce, Skills, and Gender in India’s Renewable Energy Sector, rooftop solar has already emerged as the largest contributor to clean energy job creation. Of the 6.5 lakh clean energy workers added between FY23 and FY26, rooftop solar accounted for 62% of the total workforce addition.
PM-KUSUM followed with a 16.3% share, while biomass power contributed 12.6% and ground-mounted solar projects accounted for around 6%.
Why rooftop solar?
The report attributed rooftop solar's strong employment potential to its decentralised nature.
Unlike utility-scale renewable projects, which are developed at a single location, rooftop systems require installation across individual homes, commercial establishments and institutional buildings.
This creates demand for workers at every stage—from customer acquisition and site assessment to installation, grid integration and maintenance.
The study estimates rooftop solar generates nearly 45 full-time equivalent (FTE) job-years per megawatt (MW), compared with just one FTE job-year per MW for ground-mounted solar projects and around 0.6 FTE job-year per MW for wind power installations.
Business development emerges as top hiring segment
When CNBC-TV18 asked about the roles that will see the highest demand in rooftop solar, Akanksha Tyagi, Programme Lead at CEEW, said, "Among the different phases of deploying a rooftop solar plant, the business development phase has the highest employment potential. This phase accounts for about 38% of the total full-time equivalent jobs in rooftop solar."
She added that this phase requires significant customer acquisition efforts and navigating subsidies under the PM Surya Ghar Yojana and various state schemes, leading to high employment intensity.
Explaining other segments, Tyagi said that construction and commissioning follow business development, accounting for about 31% of the total jobs created through the deployment of a rooftop solar plant.
Demand rising for technical and customer-facing skills
As the sector expands, employers are increasingly looking for workers with specialised technical capabilities.
According to Tyagi, key technical skills in demand include:
On the non-technical side, Tyagi said employers are seeking candidates with strong business communication skills, regulatory knowledge and client relationship management capabilities. Prior experience in the renewable energy sector is increasingly becoming a preferred qualification.
Women remain underrepresented in the clean energy workforce
Despite rapid growth in employment opportunities, the report highlights persistent gender gaps across the sector. Women currently account for only 11% of the workforce in solar and wind deployment and manufacturing segments.
According to the study, women's participation is highest in rooftop solar at 15%, followed by solar module manufacturing at 13%.
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The global news and digital marketing platform for Renewable Energies. We create spaces designed to position companies in the sector.
Copyright © Energía Estratégica 2026.

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Renewables Now is a leading business news source for renewable energy professionals globally. Trust us for comprehensive coverage of major deals, projects and industry trends. We’ve done this since 2009.
Stay on top of sector news with with Renewables Now. Get access to extra articles and insights with our subscription plans and set up your own focused newsletters and alerts.

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India’s solar boom eases daytime demand, but night shortages persist  Business Standard
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The Philippines’ Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) is in the process of placing solar equipment, including PV panels and batteries, under its mandatory product certification program to ensure renewable energy products sold in the country are reliable, safe, and of a high technical standard.
On 25 May 2026, the DTI published a Draft Administrative Order proposing mandatory product certification for PV modules, inverters, battery energy storage systems (BESS), rapid shutdown devices, battery charge controllers, and PV cables, citing reports of various safety incidents involving potential hazards associated with solar energy systems, including panel overheating, electrical fires from faulty wiring or inverters, battery explosions, damage due to improper installation, and electric shock hazards during operation and maintenance.
The DTI’s draft document declared that the rapid growth of solar deployment in the Philippines “has highlighted the need to establish appropriate technical standards, safety requirements, and regulatory measures to ensure the safe, reliable, and compliant installation and operation of solar energy systems.”
All solar and energy storage components – whether locally manufactured or imported – mentioned in the document must comply with the Philippine National Standards, enforced by the DTI’s Bureau of Philippine Standards (PBS). This applies to products for the commercial and residential markets.
The draft document includes recommended procedures in case of non-conformance, including requirements for product recall. If the PBS finds that a product is non-conforming, it will notify the manufacturer or importer, and they will have 15 days from receipt of notice to recall the product.
Under the new proposed system only products bearing the PS Safety Mark and ICC certification will be allowed for distribution in the market.
Manufacturers, assemblers and importers of products operating in the Philippines will have to pay fees for auditing and inspection, testing, processing fees, and licensing fees. Those who fail to comply with the rules will have their license to operate in the Philippines suspended or cancelled. The BPS said it would publish a list of revoked or withdrawn product licenses on its website.
The DTI held a public consultation on the draft document following its publication. Stakeholders such as Manila Electric Co. (Meralco) and the country’s energy regulator attended. They will have 60 days to submit comments and recommendations on the proposed new rules. The industry will be given one year to adjust to the proposed new system once it is enforced.
The Philippines imports much of its solar panels from China. According to a recent report from Ember, the nation imported 4 GW of Chinese solar panels in the period January to April this year. Ember’s tracking of the Philippines’ customs data showed net solar imports have been increasing steadily over the past few years – something the think tank said pointed to an expected surge in rooftop solar deployment in the country. Currently, the Philippines’ rooftop capacity stands at around 1.3 GW, up from 721 MW at the start of 2025.
Domestic manufacturing is also taking off, with Singaporean solar manufacturer Gstar operating two 1 GW plants.
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Energy-hungry data centers open new doors for solar and storage.
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Delays in connecting to the U.S. power grid, causing multi-year waits in most regions, map neatly against the increase in data center investments in on-site power.
That can include generation (including solar PV and backup gas or diesel generators), conventional UPS systems, and large-scale battery energy storage.
Across that portfolio, one layer determines how well the entire system performs: power conversion and controllable power delivery. Power conversion systems (PCS), transformers, switchgear, and controls govern how electricity moves between sources and critical loads — and how smoothly the site rides through disturbances.
Energy storage can cover generation gaps and provide flexibility. But it delivers the most value when it is fully integrated into a broader power architecture and operating strategy.
When evaluating such high-ticket items, data center operators should prioritize solutions that support fast commissioning and reliable long-term operation. Batteries need to integrate cleanly with the power conversion equipment, controls, and UPS. And they must meet local safety and compliance standards.
Meeting the power challenge with a diverse portfolio
Data centers already consume over 4.4% of U.S. electricity. That’s projected to rise in three years to anywhere from 6.7% to 12%, as AI adoption races forward.
The AI pioneers building these data centers now feel the pain of everyone who has worked on electric transmission and reliability for decades: having to connect to a power grid with outdated infrastructure and a flagging ability to respond to the first growth in a generation in demand, especially at peak times when the cost of capacity spikes.
The U.S. currently plans to retire 104 gigawatts (GW) of firm generation by 2030, just as a gap in new supply looms. Of the 154 GW in advanced development, only 19 GW can operate 24/7.
According to Open AI, the U.S. needs 100 GW a year in new electrons.
This will not happen overnight, so data centers must invest now in self-powering solutions to maintain 24/7 operations and hold down rapidly rising costs.
Policy challenges
Cuts to the tax incentives in the Inflation Reduction Act have increased uncertainty and costs for those pursuing solar and energy storage.
State and local programs can help. California’s Self-Generation Incentive Program (SGIP) advantages battery storage and other clean energy investments. But not every state has a similar tool.
In some states, on-site power can be a stepping stone to participating in grid services that support overall reliability, such as frequency regulation, demand response, and peak load management.
Flexible, controllable resources can respond to these market opportunities and offset the cost of on-site power.
However, the regulatory environment remains fragmented, and timelines for permitting and interconnection vary widely.
Evaluating on-site power 
In addition to addressing the grid problem, modern on-site power systems offer compelling operational advantages for data centers.
As utility-scale and commercial applications expand, manufacturers have refined the underlying power stack — including PCS, controls, and batteries — for higher efficiency, longer service life, and easier commissioning.
However, such complex systems can introduce risks if not properly designed, commissioned, and maintained. No single asset makes the difference: It’s whether the power conversion and control layer can coordinate multiple resources — including UPS systems, solar PV, other generation, and batteries — while maintaining power quality and predictable transitions.
Data center operators should evaluate:
Essential safety and health regulations to follow
Certifications and code compliance are foundational. Securing approval from Authorities Having Jurisdiction (AHJs) directly impacts uptime and insurability, as well as safety.
The UL 9540 standard covers integration of batteries, power conversion, and control software, while UL 9540A tests battery behavior during thermal runaway, including fire spread and gas release.
At the component level, UL 1973 ensures battery modules and packs meet electrical, mechanical, and environmental safety standards, reducing internal failures.
At interconnection, standards such as UL 1741, IEEE 1547/1547a, and CSA C22.2 verify that inverters and PCS connect reliably and safely to the grid, maintaining voltage and frequency response while preventing unsafe islanding.
Fire marshals, insurers and emergency responders must also be satisfied. Adherence protects facilities teams, and reduces operational risk.
Security and resilience in a volatile world
As data centers become more critical to national infrastructure, they face heightened risks from extreme weather, and physical disruptions. Operations that rely solely on long-distance transmission may have more to fear. 
Some on-site power systems allow for autonomous operation during grid disturbances, increasingly common as power becomes less reliable overall.
Batteries work best when evaluated as one module within an overall power architecture. In addition to cost and long life, managers must consider safety, energy efficiency, commissioning complexity, and how well they integrate with UPS systems, generators, and the site’s power conversion and control layer.
Andy Han is the Director of ESS Technical Solutions and Engineering at Sungrow North America, where he specializes in the design and deployment of grid-scale energy storage and power conversion systems.
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Kehua has deployed its SPI350K-B-H X2 PV string inverters paired with PSS8960K transformers at a 9MW self-consumption solar project in Argentina, commissioned in May.  
The SPI350K-B-H X2 inverter is engineered for maximum energy yield with its wide-voltage MPPT (860–1,400 Vdc), supporting a DC/AC ratio above 1.3. Fully compatible with both 182 mm and 210 mm PV modules, it simplifies system design, improves flexibility and ensures optimal energy harvest from installed capacity.
Paired with the PSS8960K transformer, the system’s high power density significantly reduces initial investment costs while maintaining robust grid-connected performance.
Equipped with smart automatic breakers and integrated DC/AC terminal temperature monitoring, the SPI350K-B-H X2 minimizes operational risks and enhances system safety. Multi-layer protection has proven reliable across diverse climatic and grid conditions.
With IP66 ingress protection and optional C5 anti-corrosion capability, the inverter is designed for extreme environments. Optimized thermal management ensures full 350 kW output at 33°C and 320 kW at 43°C, enabling stable performance even in hot climates.
The inverter delivers rapid active and reactive power response (≤30 ms), supporting precise grid dispatch and stability. Its L4-level I-V curve scanning and self-cleaning reverse-rotation fan enable fast fault detection, reduce maintenance, and lower lifecycle O&M costs,  maximizing long-term operational value.

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Buildings could soon be used to generate clean energy thanks to a new type of ultrathin solar cell that can be placed into windows. 
The discovery, made by scientists from the Nanyang Technological University (NTU) of Singapore, paves the way to a future where an electric vehicle (EV) can charge via its sunroof while parked under the sun, or wearable devices such as smart glasses or watches can use sunlight to charge via minute solar panel cells.
Led by Associate Professor Annalisa Bruno, the researchers created a perovskite (PV) solar cell  50 times thinner than conventional PV cells. To put it in perspective, that’s around 10,000 times thinner than a strand of human hair. 
The semi-transparent PV solar cells recorded 7.6% efficiency, meaning it converted 7.6% of the sunlight it absorbed into electricity. The opaque cells recorded efficiency levels as high as 12%. 
The cells’ power to generate renewable energy while allowing natural light to pass through means they can be used in a lot of different areas, such as buildings, industrial areas or vehicles. 
One of the researchers, Dr Luke White, said it  “opens up new possibilities for sustainable architecture, such as tinted windows that generate electricity.”
As well as the fact they can be used on-the-go (in the sunroof of an EV, for instance), the solar cells are also colour-neutral and transparent enough to be put onto windows and building fronts without significant aesthetic changes. 
Associate Professor Bruno, Cluster Director for renewables, low-carbon solutions and energy storage, who conducted the experiments at the Energy Research Institute, explained that “the built environment accounts for roughly 40% of global energy consumption, so technologies that seamlessly convert buildings’ surfaces into power-generating assets are gaining urgency.”
She added that the “perovskite solar cells offer distinct advantages as they can be manufactured using simple processes at relatively low temperatures. 
“They can also be tuned to absorb specific wavelengths while remaining transparent, and could potentially be scaled over large areas, reducing their carbon footprint.” 
In contrast to traditional silicon solar technology, these perovskite-based cells can harvest energy from diffused or indirect light. This  makes them particularly effective for cities, where cloud cover and vertical architecture often restricts direct sunlight. 
Should the technology be expanded at its current efficiency, buildings with expansive glass exteriors could be repurposed as functional surfaces for capturing solar energy. In Singapore, initial projections indicate that applying these cells to a  structure like the Marina Bay Sands has the potential to produce hundreds of megawatt-hours of power each year. This amount of power generation would be comparable to the yearly electricity needs of approximately 100 four-room public housing flats.
Professor Sam Stranks, Professor of Energy Materials and Optoelectronics at the University of Cambridge, said: “Semi-transparent perovskite solar cells are an exciting route to harvesting energy from surfaces that are difficult to use with conventional silicon panels, such as windows, façades and lightweight electronics. 
“The results reported here show a promising balance between transparency and power generation in very thin devices, while the next critical tests will be long-term stability, durability and performance over larger areas.”
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Max joined The Eco Experts as content manager in February 2024 and became deputy editor in 2025. He has written about sustainability issues across numerous industries, including maritime, supply chain, finance, mining, and retail. He has also written extensively for consumer titles like City AM, The Morning Star, and The Daily Express.
He has represented The Eco Experts on national television several times, including the BBC’s Sunday Morning Live and ITV Tonight .
In 2020, he covered in detail the International Maritime Organisation’s (IMO) legislation on sulphur emissions and its effects on the global container shipping market as online editor of Port Technology International.
He also explored the initiatives major container ports and terminals have launched in order to ship vital goods across the world without polluting the environment.
Since then, he has reported heavily on the impact made by environmental, social, and governance (ESG) practices on the supply chain of minerals, with a particular focus on rare earth mining in Africa.
As part of this, in 2022 Max visited mines and ports in Angola to hone in on the challenges being faced by one of the world’s biggest producers of rare earth minerals.
His most recent sustainability-related work came much closer to home, as he investigated the eco-challenges faced by independent retailers in the UK, specifically looking at how they can cut emissions and continue to thrive.
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By Canary Media
Canary Media
1 June 2026
When Steve Ault got an offer about six years ago to lease a bit of his 100-acre family farm in Prince Edward County, Virginia, for solar panels, he let the letter sit on the kitchen table for a few days.
Then he showed it to his wife, Chris. ​“Well, shoot,” she recalled telling her husband. ​“Let’s give them a call and see what they’ve got to say.”
The couple ultimately agreed to rent 20 acres of their pastureland to developer Dimension Energy for a small, 5-megawatt solar array, nestled behind a nearby railroad track and far from public view. Called a ​“shared solar farm,” it serves customers who subscribe through their utility, Dominion Energy.
As groundbreaking neared, they took some initial flak from their neighbors in this bucolic county on the edge of Amish country, about 80 miles from Richmond.
“We saw the signs going up,” Steve said, which read ​“Stop the solar grab.” But now, the couple believes, some of those same neighbors are probably envious. After all, the duo, who began raising hogs, sheep, and other livestock two decades ago as a second career, have netted tens of thousands of dollars each year on the panels, which began sending power to the grid in February 2024. The funds have enabled them to retire comfortably.
“They’re going to pay three times what this farm’s worth at the end of the day,” Steve said.
The grass beneath the panels in the solar field, a stone’s throw from the couple’s renovated 19th-century farmhouse, is maintained by an area shepherd and his 50-some sheep. All in all, Steve said, the solar array ​“has been such a win-win.”
Now, many more farmers can take advantage of the same opportunity, thanks to a pair of laws signed this spring by Gov. Abigail Spanberger, a Democrat who has made containing energy prices a focus of her administration.
The laws require Dominion and Appalachian Power, the state’s other investor-owned utility, to develop more shared solar farms — also known as community solar — like the one on the Aults’ property. Up to 5 megawatts in size, the arrays are partially financed by subscribers who want solar energy but don’t own their homes, have shaded roofs, or otherwise aren’t in a position to invest in their own panels.
“The Spanberger administration and the state legislature realized they had to tackle affordability,” said Brandon Smithwood, Dimension Energy’s vice president of policy. With shared solar, he said, ​“that comes on two fronts.”
For one, subscribers can lower their bills because solar is generally cheaper, and its costs are less volatile, than electrons produced from fossil fuels. Plus, Smithwood said, small solar farms are relatively quick to develop — adding valuable capacity as prices soar in across the regional grid and data centers strain supply.
“You can tuck this in a farmer’s back 40 where it can’t be seen from a road,” Smithwood said, just as the Aults’ solar array is. ​“Standing up a program like this reduces both near-term and long-term energy costs that benefit all ratepayers” — even those who don’t subscribe.
Sponsored by northern Virginia Democrats Sen. Scott Surovell, the Democratic majority leader, and Del. Rip Sullivan, the two new statutes are the latest chapter on shared solar in Virginia.
In 2020, state lawmakers passed the Clean Economy Act, which required Dominion and Appalachian Power — known as APCo — to sell 100% carbon-free electricity by midcentury. That law directed Dominion to develop 200 megawatts of shared solar farms. A follow-up measure in 2024 required APCo, the smaller of the two utilities, which serves mostly southwest Virginia, to invest in 50 megawatts.
Consumers eagerly embraced the opportunity to take part in shared solar, according to the national trade group Coalition for Community Solar Access. In Dominion territory, the original 200-megawatt offering serves tens of thousands of residents across 52 projects. APCo’s version launched in 2025 and was almost immediately oversubscribed.
At the same time, dozens of renewable energy developers are waiting in the wings, ready to deploy more shared solar for both Dominion and APCo customers.
The new laws require the utilities to respond to all this interest. Under Senate Bill 254/​House Bill 807, Dominion must make another 525 megawatts of shared solar available for consumers beginning this summer. Under Senate Bill 255/​House Bill 809, APCo will improve its billing practices and offer up another 100 megawatts.
“This program expansion is a reflection of a new affordability politics,” Smithwood said, whereby policymakers are relying on clean energy and efficiency to lower utility bills, rather than doubling down on expensive fossil fuels.
Indeed, this year lawmakers passed, and Spanberger signed, a flurry of clean energy bills aimed at curbing costs. The measures include allowing plug-in balcony solar units, reining in local restrictions on large solar farms, and pushing for better utilization of the state’s existing network of poles and wires.
“‘Affordability’ is the word of the decade, of the year,” said Charlie Coggeshall, the mid-Atlantic regional director for Coalition for Community Solar Access. ​“We were grateful that community solar was recognized as part of the affordability solution.”
Data from the National Laboratory of the Rockies shows how the expansion to 875 megawatts could catapult Virginia to fifth in the country for shared solar, just behind Minnesota, which has one of the oldest such programs in the U.S.
Depending on how it’s designed, shared solar saves consumers around the country between 5% and 15% on their utility bills, while delivering millions of dollars in system-wide benefits by reducing the need for costly generation, transmission, and distribution investments.
But Virginia’s shared solar scheme has a key feature that distinguishes it from those in many leading states: Subscribers are charged a minimum monthly fee.
The concept, known as a minimum bill, is a concession by clean energy advocates, who tout the net benefits of the shared solar for all ratepayers. And in early versions of the Virginia program, the minimum was set so high that only those exempt from paying it — low-income customers — ended up subscribing.
Yet after years of debate and refinement, Coggeshall and others are hopeful that policymakers have finally set the right balance.
“The gist of it is you’re paying at least $25 or $50 on your electricity bill every month,” Coggeshall said. ​“It just ensures that the utility is always going to get paid: Essentially, you can’t zero out your bill.”
The lower minimum bill should invite more diverse participation among customers of all income levels.
“What’s exciting is, not only are we going to be able to serve more Virginians in terms of numbers,” Smithwood said, ​“but we’re going to be able to serve people of different incomes and different parts of the state.”
To wit: Dimension Energy expects the Virginia expansion to cut bills by at least 10% for another 125,000 households in the state.
Dominion and APCo will be still required to serve a set target of low-income customers. That, in addition to the economics and sustainability of solar, was a key draw for the Aults years ago.
“The energy we generate here serves low-income [households],” Chris Ault said. ​“I really like that.”

Elizabeth Ouzts is a contributing reporter at Canary Media who covers North Carolina and Virginia.
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Recurrent Energy, a subsidiary of Canadian Solar, has inaugurated the Rey Solar photovoltaic project in Carmona, Andalusia. Reaching commercial operation in December 2025, the plant is expected to power over 275,000…
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UAE based GSU announces second phase of Green Berbera Initiative  ZAWYA
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UK solar M&A is showing a clear shift toward Ready-to-Build PV assets as buyers prioritize grid certainty, planning progress, faster construction timelines, and lower execution risk over early-stage pipeline exposure.
Gülermak Renewables’ acquisition of a 19.3 MWp Ready-to-Build PV project in Steyning, West Sussex, from Cero Generation reflects this buyer preference. The project gives Gülermak a de-risked UK solar entry point as the company expands its solar, wind, and storage portfolio across Britain and mainland Europe.
The deal value was not disclosed, but the commercial signal is important. Buyers are no longer looking only for pipeline scale. They are targeting assets where key development milestones have already been secured and where construction can begin with fewer delays. RtB status gives buyers better visibility on delivery, grid connection, permitting, EPC planning, and offtake discussions.
For Gülermak, the attraction is not just 19.3 MWp of additional capacity. It is control over a project that can move quickly from acquisition into construction, while also creating a reference transaction for future vendor and offtaker relationships in the UK. The company has already stated that it is in active discussions with project vendors and offtakers in Britain, Germany, and Poland.
For Cero Generation, the transaction fits a broader capital recycling strategy. Developers with large European pipelines can monetize projects once they reach higher-value milestones and redeploy capital into larger, co-located, or later-stage solar and storage portfolios.
This mirrors wider European renewable energy M&A behavior. Enerdatics data shows that Europe recorded $7 billion of renewable energy M&A in Q3 2025, with buyers increasingly focused on de-risked solar, BESS, and hybrid assets. Around 70% of European solar deals in the quarter targeted early-to-advanced development assets, with investors showing stronger appetite for projects that offer visible grid access, permitting progress, and a clearer route to construction.
The valuation signal is also clear. Enerdatics data shows that utility-scale solar projects in Europe excluding Germany typically attracted developer premiums of $20,000–35,000 per MW at early stage, rising to as much as $160,000 per MW for Ready-to-Build projects with co-located BESS. This pricing gap shows how strongly buyers now value development certainty.
For strategic buyers, RtB projects offer a cleaner underwriting case than early-stage development portfolios. The premium is not just for megawatts. It reflects avoided development attrition, reduced grid risk, lower permitting uncertainty, and a shorter path to revenue generation.
For sellers, the message is direct. Ready-to-Build assets can command stronger buyer interest because valuation can be anchored around execution readiness rather than speculative pipeline scale. Developers holding early-stage UK solar projects may face more pressure unless they can show grid certainty, planning progress, offtake visibility, or a clear route to construction.
For offtakers, the Gülermak deal also matters. The company’s direct call for offtakers suggests that buyers are moving closer to revenue formation, not just asset accumulation. Projects that can support corporate PPAs, hybrid revenue structures, or storage co-location are likely to attract stronger interest from buyers building long-term European renewables platforms.
The next phase of UK solar M&A is likely to favor small-to-mid-sized RtB assets, especially those that can be paired with storage, contracted with corporate offtakers, or integrated into broader European renewables portfolios. The Gülermak–Cero transaction is not a scale deal. It is a readiness deal. That is the market shift. Buyers are paying for projects that reduce uncertainty, shorten execution timelines, and open repeatable vendor relationships
Want to track the latest M&A, financings, PPAs, and key developments across the industry? Explore the Enerdatics Insights page.
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Pan-European independent power producer (IPP), R.Power, has signed a project finance facility of approximately PLN 270 million (€64 million) for the construction of its 150 MW/300 MWh Jedwabno battery energy storage system (BESS) in Poland. This is the largest project finance transaction to be completed for a utility scale BESS asset in the Polish market and ensures the progression of one of R.Power’s flagship projects.
The facility has been structured as a club deal between Siemens Financial Services through Siemens Bank and Erste Group Bank AG and represents an important milestone for the development of the Polish energy storage sector. The transaction demonstrates that large scale BESS projects in Central and Eastern Europe can attract the same level of institutional lending support that has long characterised solar and wind financing.
Central to the project’s bankability are a 17-year contract secured through Poland’s capacity market auction and a long-term optimisation agreement with Axpo. Combined, these contracts provide the long-term cashflow visibility required to support project finance structures of this scale.
Construction at the Jedwabno site is already well underway, with completion targeted for the end of 2026. Jedwabno will become one of Poland’s largest operational utility scale BESS assets – providing critical grid stabilisation capacity as the country accelerates its transition away from coal.
Michal Swól, Chief Investment Officer at R.Power, said: “Jedwabno is a crucial step – for R.Power and for the Polish energy storage market. Securing project finance at this scale, underpinned by long-term revenue contracts, shows that large scale BESS is now fully bankable in CEE.”
“We are grateful to the teams at Siemens Financial Services, with their experience in BESS financing, and Erste Group, a long-term financing partner for our PV portfolios, for the confidence they have shown in this project. It is testament to the trust our lending partners have placed not only in R.Power, but in the viability of large scale energy storage as a bankable asset class in this market.”
Jenny Blackford, CEO of Siemens Bank, added: “Jedwabno BESS will make a meaningful contribution to Poland's grid resilience as the country accelerates its renewable energy transition and we commend R.Power for their desire to develop, one of the first and, to date, the largest project finance solution in the utility scale BESS sector. We are particularly proud to support R.Power in building this essential infrastructure backed by our deep expertise in energy storage financing and our existing presence in the Polish renewables sector.”
Juan de Porras Aguirre, Executive Director Corporates at Erste Group, commented: “This landmark transaction reflects Erste Group’s strong commitment to accelerating the energy transition at a time when energy security and independence are more important than ever. BESS projects like Jedwabno are a crucial piece of this puzzle because they enable flexibility and resilience in the power system.
Delivering one of the first large scale non-recourse financings for a standalone battery storage project in Poland demonstrates both our structuring expertise and our confidence in the country’s rapidly evolving energy landscape. It also underlines the strategic importance of Poland following Erste’s recent expansion into the country, as we continue to deploy capital into Poland’s future-oriented infrastructure.”
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Though the technology to capture photovoltaic (PV) power and turn it into electricity was invented back in the 1950s, solar panels have yet to take over much more than calculators. It takes a lot of space to power more complicated technology, meaning solar panels can’t produce as much as we need to fit our increasing electricity needs. However, a recent study published in Nature Sustainability links coal plants to reduced performance from solar panels, showing that solar energy could be more efficient if it wasn’t for continued use of fossil fuels.
One reason why coal plants are making solar power less efficient is pretty obvious. Air pollution blocks sunlight, meaning there’s less for solar panels to capture, resulting in reduced electricity output. Further impacting solar energy production is that aerosols produced from burning coal impact the reflectivity and coverage of clouds.
The scientists studied energy production from over 140,000 solar installations between 2017–2023 and connected coal plants to energy production from existing solar installations being reduced by an amount equivalent to nearly one-third of output from new systems. In 2023 alone, aerosols reduced solar energy production by 5.8% overall. As a result, current projections are likely overestimating how much solar power can contribute to climate-conscious energy goals, especially in places where the PV loss rate is rising.
Read more: What’s Happening To Earth Right Now Can’t Be Explained By Climate Models
This study makes clear that, unsurprisingly, burning fossil fuels is making the transition to clean energy even more difficult. Burning coal means more air pollution, and the dirtier the air gets, the less we’ll get out of solar power. PV loss is lower in places like the United States and Europe, but the rate is actually increasing annually.
China, the world leader in PV power, is currently losing the most energy, but it’s also the only place where the PV loss rate is decreasing. That can be attributed to China implementing measures to reduce its air pollution since 2013, drastically improving the country’s air quality in the years since. However, those policies may have also sped up global warming. Aerosols blocking solar energy may be bad for PV output, but they help cool the Earth by reflecting solar radiation. Plus, even though the country has cleaned up its air, China is still responsible for over half of all coal use.
Phasing out fossil fuels in favor of clean, renewable energy sources is a vital part of fighting climate change and its increasingly devastating impact on the environment. PV loss isn’t the only challenge solar energy faces — inconsistent sunlight availability and birds being unable to tell the difference between solar farms and lakes also need to be addressed — but it’s another example of how continuing to burn coal is making it harder to combat the real problem.
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27 May 2026
31 May 2026
01 Jun 2026
As Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University celebrates its 20th anniversary, the University has launched a special alumni story series under the “Next Together” global initiative. The series highlights the diverse career journeys and personal growth of XJTLU’s outstanding graduates.
This edition features Jingkang Gui, who joined XJTLU in 2007. He was the principal engineer at SP Group, previously served as the VP head of smart PV digital power at Huawei (Singapore), and is now General Manager of Solar PV and Battery Energy Storage Systems at Keppel.

Jingkang Gui at the “Next Together” event in Singapore
Q: Looking back, what made you choose XJTLU and the BEng Telecommunications Engineering programme?
A: Choosing XJTLU actually came from an interesting coincidence. The daughter of one of my father’s friends was part of XJTLU’s first cohort, and after hearing her sharing about the University’s international educational philosophy, excellent academic staff, and open atmosphere, I became very drawn to it.
As for the programme itself, I was just as uncertain as many students are. I only knew I was interested in science-related subjects but had no clear direction at the time. I chose Telecommunications Engineering mainly because I believed the industry had strong future prospects.
Q: When you first arrived at XJTLU, what was different from what you had imagined?
A: First of all, the campus itself. Back when I was studying there, the University only had one main building, and we used to joke that it was a “one-building university”. Although the space was small, people felt much closer to one another, and communication was more direct.
Another difference was the teaching style. It was no longer the traditional one-way classroom model, but instead focused more on seminars, presentations, and extracurricular practice.
In addition, the fully English-speaking environment and the teachers and students from different cultural backgrounds gave me my first real understanding of what internationalisation truly meant. It also gradually taught me to look at problems from a more open-minded and critical perspective.

Q: What had the greatest impact on you during your time at XJTLU?
A: My postgraduate decision was a turning point in my life. After graduation, I received offers from Imperial College London (IC), The University of Hong Kong (HKU), and Nanyang Technological University (NTU) at the same time. At that time, not many students chose Singapore. Compared with NTU, most people paid more attention to IC’s rankings or had emotional ties to HKU. At this crossroads, an external mentor from XJTLU advised me to choose NTU’s Power Engineering programme. Instead of focusing solely on rankings, he encouraged me to consider regional development, industry trends, and future opportunities.
Looking back, his judgment had a significant impact on the direction of my future career. Over the following decade, Singapore developed rapidly, and the energy sector entered a golden era. Back then, we were among the first group of XJTLU students to come to Singapore. Today, there are a lot of students arriving every year. I’m still very grateful for the external mentor platform provided by the University.

Jingkang Gui at Ningxia Baofeng Agri-PV Power Station in 2023
Q: You joined SP Group right after graduation. What do you consider to be your core strengths?
A: During my master’s studies, I focused deeply on my field and graduated top of my programme at NTU, which strengthened my academic foundation. Before the interviews, I would simulate interview scenarios and refine my communication to ensure I was fully prepared. The confidence and composure I demonstrated during the all-English interview process largely came from the four years of international education at XJTLU, which helped me adapt smoothly to professional workplace assessments.
Q: Looking at your career journey, from SP Group to Huawei and later Keppel, it appears quite smooth. Did you ever experience confusion or bottlenecks along the way?
A: After graduation, I joined SP Group and stayed there for more than seven years. The promotion pace there is relatively structured and fixed, and after some time, I could clearly feel a career ceiling approaching. So, I decided to actively challenge myself. I obtained Singapore’s Professional Engineer licence and prepared for an MBA in the United States by taking the GMAT (Graduate Management Admission Test).
During that period, I was involved in renewable energy projects, where I collaborated with Huawei teams. Later, I joined Huawei Digital Power and built a business team from scratch. Afterwards, I joined Keppel, where I was responsible for business related to the development of solar and energy storage projects.
Along the way, I certainly encountered many supportive mentors and opportunities, but I also believe it was because I never stopped moving forward that I was able to seize those opportunities when they came.

Singapore’s Senior Minister of State for the Ministry of Defence and the Ministry of Sustainability and the Environment, Zaqy Mohamad (left), presenting the Professional Engineers certificate to Jingkang Gui (centre) in 2018

Jingkang Gui (left) with Zhengfei Ren, founder and CEO of Huawei, in 2023
Q: What advice would you give to younger students hoping to build careers overseas?
A: First, embrace AI and lifelong learning, and keep updating your skills and awareness. Second, practise long-termism and focus on steady growth. Continuous work on fundamentals is key to greater responsibilities later. Long-term accumulation matters more than short-term luck. Third, plan early if you want to work overseas. Make full use of university resources like mentors, internships, and industry projects, and actively build experience, language ability, and competitiveness.
Q: As the head of the Singapore Alumni Association, what keeps you closely connected with your alma mater?
A: XJTLU has changed the trajectory of my life, and I hope to give back in my own way by offering practical support and advice to younger students whenever possible.
The alumni network itself is also an invaluable resource for career development. Through exchanges with alumni in similar professional or industry fields, we can discover opportunities for collaboration and gain a better understanding of industry trends.
Q: During XJTLU’s 10th anniversary, you said, “I hope by the 20th anniversary, we will all have achieved what we wanted and become who we hoped to be.” Now that the 20th anniversary has arrived, how would you respond to your younger self?
A: Ten years ago, I was still in my first job and uncertain about my future direction. Today, after years of working in Singapore’s renewable energy sector, I have built strong industry connections, found a career I genuinely love, and gained the ability to help pave the way for others. I think that counts as a fairly satisfying answer to my younger self. I hope that in the future, I can continue growing upward without setting limits on myself.

Q: In your view, what has been XJTLU’s biggest change over the past 20 years?
A: From being “a one-building university” to now having multiple campuses, and from being asked “What kind of university is this?” to becoming a benchmark for Sino-foreign cooperative education, XJTLU’s most remarkable transformation over the past two decades has been its journey from being “noticed” to being truly “recognised”. It has evolved from an explorer into a leader, providing a vivid and practical example for innovation in higher education in China.
Q: Finally, could you leave a message for XJTLU on its 20th anniversary?
A: I hope XJTLU will continue to serve as a bridge connecting China and the world, linking knowledge with industry, and empowering every student to pursue their dreams and future aspirations.
By Zewei Huang
Edited by Patricia Pieterse
Supervising editor: Tiantian Xu
01 Jun 2026
As Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University celebrates its 20th anniversary, the University has launched a special alumni story series under the “Next Together” g…
In April, Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University (XJTLU) held a themed alumni gathering in Singapore to mark its 20th anniversary, focusing on education and tec…
Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University (XJTLU) officially opened a new overseas division in Singapore as part of its growing initiatives to connect academic exp…

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Joint Solar Expands TOPCon Module Manufacturing Amid Rising Demand for High-Efficiency Solar Technologies  SolarQuarter
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The electricity demand in Spain rises by 0.1% in May and photovoltaic achieves a historic share  Demócrata
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