Trina Solar completes NZ’s largest solar farm with 61,000 Vertex panels; Pingmei LONGi upgrades PERC lines to TOPCon; Autowell’s FY2023 revenue up 78.05% YoY; GCL Si’s Wuhu base hits record highs in TOPCon cell production indicators.
Trina Solar powers New Zealand’s largest solar farm: Solar module manufacturer Trina Solar has announced the completion of the Kohirā solar farm, dubbed the largest solar farm in New Zealand, in collaboration with Lodestone Energy. The company says this is the first project where Trina Solar modules have been integrated with TrinaTracker tracking systems in the Asia Pacific region. The project is spread across 64 hectares in Kaitāia, equipped with 61,000 Vertex 550W bifacial dual-glass panels mounted on Vanguard 2P smart tracking systems, with 33 MW DC capacity. The farm is expected to produce 55 GWh of electricity annually, powering over 7,770 households.
Earlier this month, TrinaTracker secured a contract to supply 200 MW Vanguard 2P trackers and Trina Smart Cloud monitoring platform to ZTPC (see China Solar PV News Snippets).
LONGi subsidiary to upgrade PERC cell production lines to TOPCon: Pingmei LONGi, a LONGi and Yicheng New Energy joint venture, has announced its plans to upgrade its PERC solar cell project to n-type monocrystalline TOPCon cells. According to the announcement, one workshop of Pingmei LONGi Phase I will upgrade 3 of its existing PERC production lines to TOPCon.
With a construction period of 6 months, the company expects to start trial production in July 2024. It has invested a total of RMB 349 million ($48.47 million) in this upgrade that is expected to produce 215 million TOPCon cells annually when complete. Pingmei LONGi currently has 20 PERC production lines.
The company says this move was necessitated by the industry’s move to TOPCon, given its better cost-performance and clear path to efficiency improvement. While PERC has almost reached its theoretical efficiency limit, TOPCon is expected to overtake PERC in the near future (see Chinese Solar Industry To Get Bigger & Better In 2024).
Autowell’s FY2023 revenue up 78.05% YoY: Automation equipment manufacturer Autowell Technology has reported a revenue of RMB 6.302 billion ($875.28 million) for FY2023, an increase of 78.05% YoY. The company has beat its own forecast last month for a 77.59% increase on the upper end, albeit only slightly (see China Solar PV News Snippets). Its PV equipment revenues were about RMB 5.364 billion ($744.44 million), up 79.15% YoY. The company reported a net profit for the period of RMB 1.256 billion ($174.44 million), which is up 76.10% YoY. Autowell attributed the significant growth in its 2023 performance to the strong demand from downstream customers.
GCL Si’s Wuhu base claims record highs in multiple production indicators: Solar PV cell and module manufacturer GCL System Integration (GCL Si) has announced via WeChat that its Wuhu base is seeing record high production indicators for n-type TOPCon cells. Having announced that the base had reached full production during Spring Festival, the company says that the 10 GW Phase I took just over 5 months from start to production, and starting production in just 48 days. It claims that its daily capacity is over 4 million cells with a mass production efficiency of over 26.2%. The company also claims that it has achieved a yield of over 98%, while its non-silicon costs continue to decline.
