On Wednesday this week, Panasonic announced its intentions to purchase remaining shares of Sanyo Electric Co and Panasonic Electric Works (PEW). Panasonic already had a 50% stake in Sanyo as of last year. Sanyo is a big player in the solar market and producer of lithium-ion batteries.

The solar PV development company Recurrent Energy has been making some big project announcements lately. The developer said yesterday that it had raised $18 million in debt for a 5-MW PV system in San Francisco.

The cylindrical CIGS thin-film manufacturer Solyndra just signed a power purchase agreement with the utility Southern California Edison for 16-MW of projects.

Ahead of the First Concentrated Solar Thermal Power Summit India, CSP Today catches up with Anoop Mathur from Terrafore, who will be speaking at the Summit.

What happens when the U.S. government awards DuPont, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Bosch, and 3M $1.6 million to develop a longer-lasting, less expensive way to store clean energy? We will soon find out.

According to EUPD Research, an organization that is studying the UK PV market, an important aspect of the feed-in tariff (FIT) regulation could stymie growth of the solar market in the UK.

SMA America LLC, the U.S.-based subsidiary of global solar technology leader SMA Solar Technology AG, has expanded its U.S. line of utility products with the Sunny Central High Efficiency (HE) line of solar inverters. The new 500 and 630 kilowatt inverters provide integrators, project developers and EPCs with a utility-scale 1000VDC solution that features the industry's best efficiency in the medium voltage interconnection category.

Michael Lamb tells editor Debra Vogler how the company's vBoost technology and its partnership announcement with Shoales will address reduced balance-of-system (BoS) costs.

Eberspacher summarizes sessions on thin-film photovoltaics and PV fab management from Intersolar NA 2010.

SolarEdge Technologies, a provider of end-to-end Distributed Solar Power Harvesting and monitoring solutions, is expanding its activity in Greece, announcing a partnership with Enolia Solar Systems SA, a leading Greek company active in the development of PV projects, trading of PV solar equipment and design and implementation of rooftop applications in the rapidly developing PV markets of Greece, Cyprus and Bulgaria.

The research and consulting firm Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF) reports that subsidies for fossil energies are far outweighing those for renewables. While many governments are putting support behind clean energy, the figures show that renewables are still far behind, reports BNEF.

The U.S. Department of Energy Announced earlier this month that it would set aside more than $100 million to create an "Energy Innovation Hub" to encourage innovation around producing fuels directly from sunlight.

If you're wondering where the Concentrating Solar Power (CSP) is heading from here, crane your neck and look upward. Forecasts show industry growth climbing steeply from 2010.