Solar material maker Giga Solar Materials Corp (碩禾電子) yesterday said it is targeting securing several new solar farm projects in fast-growing Southeast Asian markets by the end of this year at the earliest, making significant progress in diversifying into the relatively lucrative solar power farm business.
Giga Solar started its new business in the local market. The company built and is operating a 1.2 megawatt solar power farm, the nation’s biggest privately owned solar plant, in Tainan and had the solar systems connected to the national grid in June.
The solar farm generates 160,000 units of electricity a month, equal to the monthly consumption of 400 households.
The company expects to make NT$12 million (US$409,527) to NT$15 million in revenue a year from the solar plant, company chairman Jerry Chen (陳繼仁) told a media briefing at the company’s booth during the annual photovoltaics show in Taipei.
Giga Solar spent about NT$80 million in establishing the solar farm, Chen said.
“We are preparing for bidding for new projects next year, including in overseas markets,” Chen said. “We are seeing building solar power plants as a core business for the group.”
Giga Solar, a subsidiary of disc storage company Gigastorage Corp (國碩), would leverage Giga-storage’s presence in Thailand to bid for solar farm projects there, Chen said.
“The Thai and Malaysian governments aggressively promote the use of “green” energy, such as solar power, he said.
Gigastorage has been operating an optical disc factory in Thailand for about six years.
Chen also urged the government to give more support to Taiwan’s solar industry. Raising the solar system installation quota should be the first step, he said.
“The 100 megawatt quota this year is not enough,” Chen said.
Green Energy Technology Inc (綠能科技), the nation’s biggest solar wafer maker, said it has formed a joint venture with a Thai solar engineering, procurement and construction company to build and operate a 1 gigawatt solar farm. The solar farm is expected to be completed early next year, Green Energy said.
Separately, Chinese solar wafer and module maker ReneSola Ltd (昱輝陽光) yesterday launched its Taiwanese office in Hsinchu in an effort to build closer ties with local partners. ReneSola is the second Chinese solar company to open a Taiwanese office after GCL-Poly Energy Holdings Ltd (保利協鑫能源).
ReneSola planned to more than double its outsource of solar cell production to 400 megawatt next year from this year’s 150 megawatt, according to Stephen Huang (黃頌德), a president of the company’s Asia-Pacific, Middle East and African regions.
That is part of the Chinese solar wafer and module company’s efforts to allocate its solar cell manufacturing to areas outside China in order to get around heavy tariffs imposed by the US after anti-dumping probes.
The nation’s biggest solar cell maker Motech Industries Inc (茂迪) and Gintech Energy Corp (昱晶) make solar cells for ReneSola, Huang said.
Next year, ReneSola plans to add two or three more solar cell manufacturing partners, he said.
Sweeping policy changes under US Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr are having a chilling effect on vaccine makers as anti-vaccine rhetoric has turned into concrete changes in inoculation schedules and recommendations, investors and executives said. The administration of US President Donald Trump has in the past year upended vaccine recommendations, with the country last month ending its longstanding guidance that all children receive inoculations against flu, hepatitis A and other diseases. The unprecedented changes have led to diminished vaccine usage, hurt the investment case for some biotechs, and created a drag that would likely dent revenues and
Global semiconductor stocks advanced yesterday, as comments by Nvidia Corp chief executive officer Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) at Davos, Switzerland, helped reinforce investor enthusiasm for artificial intelligence (AI). Samsung Electronics Co gained as much as 5 percent to an all-time high, helping drive South Korea’s benchmark KOSPI above 5,000 for the first time. That came after the Philadelphia Semiconductor Index rose more than 3 percent to a fresh record on Wednesday, with a boost from Nvidia. The gains came amid broad risk-on trade after US President Donald Trump withdrew his threat of tariffs on some European nations over backing for Greenland. Huang further
CULPRITS: Factors that affected the slip included falling global crude oil prices, wait-and-see consumer attitudes due to US tariffs and a different Lunar New Year holiday schedule Taiwan’s retail sales ended a nine-year growth streak last year, slipping 0.2 percent from a year earlier as uncertainty over US tariff policies affected demand for durable goods, data released on Friday by the Ministry of Economic Affairs showed. Last year’s retail sales totaled NT$4.84 trillion (US$153.27 billion), down about NT$9.5 billion, or 0.2 percent, from 2024. Despite the decline, the figure was still the second-highest annual sales total on record. Ministry statistics department deputy head Chen Yu-fang (陳玉芳) said sales of cars, motorcycles and related products, which accounted for 17.4 percent of total retail rales last year, fell NT$68.1 billion, or
Macronix International Co (旺宏), the world’s biggest NOR flash memory supplier, yesterday said it would spend NT$22 billion (US$699.1 million) on capacity expansion this year to increase its production of mid-to-low-density memory chips as the world’s major memorychip suppliers are phasing out the market. The company said its planned capital expenditures are about 11 times higher than the NT$1.8 billion it spent on new facilities and equipment last year. A majority of this year’s outlay would be allocated to step up capacity of multi-level cell (MLC) NAND flash memory chips, which are used in embedded multimedia cards (eMMC), a managed
RSS