Financial & Legal

An announcement by Sharp Solar outlining the potential boom in the Turkish PV market has referred to the country’s government’s recent introduction of a €0.28 feed-in tariff for the first 10 years, with a rate of €0.22 thereafter for another 10-year period. Turkey receives an average of seven hours of sunshine per day, with a radiation intensity of 1,300 kilowatt-hours per square metre.

Preliminary 2009 market figures for the PV industry have been issued by the European Photovoltaic Industry Association (EPIA), after its recent workshop was held in Rome, Italy. The EPIA said that 6.4GW of newly installed capacity was achieved in 2009, reaching a total capacity of over 20GW worldwide. Although this was hailed as being the most important annual capacity increase ever, due in part to the economic recession, 2010 is expected to see installations increase by at least 40%, while the annual growth is expected to increase by more than 15%.

Allora Minerals has been busy, acquiring the remaining assets of OptiSolar, receiving preliminary approval to garner millions of Euro in grants for German projects, and getting shareholder approval to change its name to that of another company whose assets it's buying, EPOD Solar (ESI). The OptiSolar deal will bring the once-promising thin-film PV company's intellectual property and its manufacturing and R&D facilities in Northern California into ESI's portfolio.