Wednesday, 19 August 2026

India's installed solar capacity has climbed from 7 GW in 2016 to more than 150 GW in 2026, according to pv magazine, a more than twentyfold increase.

The next stage of that build-out may lean more heavily on distributed generation, with economic gains for rural communities, according to Shantanu Roy of the Center for Study of Science, Technology and Policy, cited by pv magazine.

pv magazine attributes both the capacity figures and the twentyfold comparison to its report on India's model solar villages.

Translucent Energy has launched a 1.2 GW solar module assembly plant in Summerville, South Carolina, according to pv magazine. The first phase carries a USD 15.6 million investment and is expected to create 167 local jobs.

Commercial shipments are due to start in December, with the manufacturer targeting 600 MW to 800 MW of deliveries in the plant's first full year, pv magazine reported.

Equipment for the assembly lines is scheduled to reach Summerville in October, once factory acceptance testing is complete.

The site covers 26,105 m². Managing Director Augustus Rylands said it marks the first step in a broader multi-year domestic manufacturing roadmap.

According to pv magazine, the factory will ramp shifts to capture demand driven by Section 232 trade tariffs.

Japan's plan to burn ammonia alongside coal in its power stations carries higher costs and tighter supply than renewable alternatives, according to a fact sheet published by IEEFA.

The co-firing pathway is staged. Japan is targeting a 20% ammonia share in coal-fired power plants by 2030, then 50% or more after 2030, and 100% by 2050, IEEFA said. The strategy is framed as part of the country's power sector decarbonization approach.

IEEFA's assessment is that ammonia co-firing in Japan faces both higher costs and constrained supply relative to renewables.

On the supply side, IEEFA points to the Blue Point Complex in the United States as a prospective source. The project plans an ammonia production facility of 1.4 million tonnes per annum and is expected to help meet Japan's future demand, according to the fact sheet.

Sage Geosystems is producing power from its first next-generation geothermal plant, sited on a rugged tract near San Antonio in the United States, according to Canary Media.

Canary Media reported that the installation is the third next-generation geothermal system of its kind to come online in the United States. The outlet framed the start-up against a sector racing to commercialize geothermal as a source of on-demand clean electricity.

Thailand should scrap its net billing arrangement for rooftop solar and move to net metering, IEEFA said, arguing the switch would cut residential payback periods to roughly 5.5 years for 5kW systems and 4.5 years for 10kW systems by letting households offset consumption at retail rates.

The pricing gap is the core of the complaint. Under the "Solar for Thai People" net billing scheme, exported power earns THB2.2 (USD0.07) per kWh, while retail tariffs average about THB3.88/kWh (USD0.12/kWh), according to IEEFA.

Installed costs compound the problem. IEEFA put Thai rooftop systems at approximately USD936 per kW, nearly 50% above regional peers including Pakistan, Malaysia and Vietnam.

Rooftop capacity remains a minority of the solar fleet. Thailand had roughly 11.8 GW of solar capacity as of early 2026, split between 8GW of utility-scale ground-mounted plants and 3.6GW of rooftop, IEEFA reported.

Quota design has also constrained the segment. The 90-MW residential quota set in the 2019 net billing scheme was meant to last until 2030, but was fully taken up by 2024, according to IEEFA.

The backdrop is a power system built on imported and domestic gas. Natural gas accounts for 66% of Thailand's electricity generation, IEEFA said.

That exposure has left a mark on the balance sheet of the state utility. By March 2026, EGAT carried more than THB36 billion (USD1 billion) in losses from past energy crises, according to IEEFA.

India had more than 150 GW of renewable energy capacity under construction as of June 30, 2026, according to pv magazine, even as fresh tendering activity dropped to a fraction of its recent peak.

The auction slowdown is stark. Awarded renewable capacity fell to 14.7 GW in 2025-26 from 40.6 GW in 2024-25, pv magazine reported, and only 4.7 GW had been awarded in the current financial year as of August 10, 2026.

Offtake remains the bottleneck behind the awarded volumes. Unsigned power purchase agreement capacity stood at 40-45 GW as of April 2026.

Rating agency ICRA expects renewable energy, including large hydropower, to supply more than 35% of India's total electricity generation by 2029-30, up from 22% in 2024-25, pv magazine reported. That trajectory rests on the construction pipeline clearing rather than on new awards.

Grid congestion is already cutting into output at specific nodes. Around 37% of the capacity at impacted substations in North, West and South India operates under transmission general network access and faces curtailment of 30-50% during solar hours, according to ICRA's Girishkumar Kadam, cited by pv magazine.

Storage procurement has moved faster than the generation auctions it is meant to support. Total awarded battery energy storage system capacity in India, counting both under-construction and operational projects, reached around 90 GWh as of June 2026, pv magazine reported.

On cost, ICRA estimates the levelized cost of storage for two- to four-hour BESS projects at INR 4/kWh to INR 7/kWh, against around INR 5/kWh for pumped storage hydropower, according to pv magazine. The overlap in those ranges leaves pumped hydro competitive at the longer end of the battery cost band.

The gap between the 150 GW under construction and the 4.7 GW awarded so far this financial year sets up a build-out concentrated in projects already contracted, with grid access and storage readiness determining how much of that capacity earns full output.

Ten U.S. states have adopted plug-in solar legislation, and more are expected to follow, according to pv magazine. Most of those laws cap system size at 1,200 W, with Colorado the exception at up to 1,920 W, pv magazine reported, citing Bright Saver.

The safety benchmark behind the state rules is UL 3700, published in late 2025, which sets construction, performance and labeling criteria for plug-in solar systems, according to pv magazine. Maine, New York and Vermont go further than a device-level requirement: the inverter, panels, cables and mounting hardware must all meet UL 3700 or a comparable standard.

Pricing sits at roughly USD 1.50 per watt, according to Bright Saver, which anticipates prices falling sharply over the coming year, pv magazine reported. The cheapest systems already sell for under USD 500. Stephan Scherer put the category at about half to a third the cost of traditional solar, according to pv magazine.

The format is not new. The concept took off in Germany during the 2010s, and more than one million plug-in solar devices are now registered there, pv magazine reported. That installed base is the reference point for a U.S. market where legislation is only now arriving state by state, with the wattage cap and the certification scope as the two variables that differ between jurisdictions.

Barley, maize, cabbage, potatoes and field beans can adapt their photosynthesis to the partial shading created by agrivoltaic installations, according to a University of Hohenheim study reported by pv magazine.

The research team grew the five crops at five locations across Germany, with photovoltaic modules mounted above the plots, pv magazine reported. Fully sunlit plots were used as the reference for comparison.

Under the shaded conditions, both dark respiration and the light compensation point fell across every crop in the trial, according to pv magazine. Lower dark respiration means less of the carbon fixed during the day is burned off, and a lower light compensation point means the leaf reaches break-even between photosynthesis and respiration at weaker light.

That physiological response does not automatically translate into more harvested output. The adaptations do not necessarily result in higher yields, according to the study as reported by pv magazine. The finding separates leaf-level acclimation from farm-level productivity, the metric that determines whether a dual land use site pays for the farmer as well as the module owner.

The work was published in the European Journal of Agronomy under the title "Partial shade effects of dual land use systems: Harnessing plant acclimation to drive sustainable farming solutions," pv magazine said.