China’s National Energy Administration (NEA) announced on March 16 that it has revised the country’s overall PV installation target from the original 15GW to 17.8GW. Additionally, the government will increase its efforts to supervise closely on the previous year’s projects that are unfinished and ongoing.
If energy consumption continues to follow the same cost pattern and fail to uphold the spirit of sustainability, the concentration of greenhouse gases may double in 2050. By then, climate change will be more severe. Therefore, many countries have been promoting the use of green energies through energy subsidy policies or industrial regulations, and this has progressively led to a boom in the development of green energy industry.
On Feb.24th, Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry announced it will make a substantial cut to the PV rate in its feed-in tariff (FiT) program for renewable energies. The rate of return for the PV system as a whole has also been revised significantly downward. This in turn seriously affects Japan’s 2015 PV market, which is projected to shrink perhaps by 20%. This will naturally add uncertainties to the global market.
Chai Jing’s documentary, “Under the Dome” has stirred up Chinese society’s deep concern about smog and other pollution problems that are widespread in the country. While China annual GDP on average has grown by about 10% over the last 20 years, the amount of GDP spent on addressing environmental issues during the same period has seen less than 1% growth.
Due to increases in both shipments and conversion efficiency, Taiwanese PV cell makers experienced a record shipment growth in 2014, according to the latest report by EnergyTrend, a division of TrendForce. This growth was in spite of being under the anti-dumping and countervailing investigation by the United States International Trade Commission (referred to here as the USITC) during the year.
