Manufacturing NEWS

The solar industry has spent decades slashing the cost of generating electricity direct from the sun. Now it’s focusing on making panels even more powerful. With savings in equipment manufacturing hitting a plateau, and more recently pressured by rising prices of raw materials, producers are stepping up work on advances in technology — building better components and employing increasingly sophisticated designs to generate more electricity from the same-sized solar farms.

Gujarat is making rapid strides into the renewable energy (RE) sector with a slew of mega green energy projects. These projects relate not just to electricity generation but also to equipment manufacturing. Backed by policy initiatives and strong investor support, Gujarat’s renewable power generation capacity is expected to jump to 38,466MW by 2025 and 61,466MW by 2030, according to the state government’s estimates.

Chiranjeev Saluja is scaling up. In April 2021, when CarbonCopy spoke to him, installed capacity at his solar module and cell manufacturing company, Telangana-based Premier Energies, stood at 500 MW. That was set to change. “We are opening a new unit producing modules worth 750 MW next month,” said the firm’s founder and managing director. “With that, our scale will go up to 1.25 GW in modules and 500 MW in cells.”

American technology giant, Apple’s manufacturing partners are joining the company’s drive to become carbon neutral by 2030. The company today announced that 110 of its manufacturing suppliers, including those in India, will be moving to “100 percent renewable energy" for production of Apple’s products. The company said its partners have nearly 8 gigawatts of planned clean energy set to come online by 2030.

A private equity firm, Arcline Investment Management has announced the acquisition of BHGE's Reciprocating Compression division. This division manufactures and services mission-critical compression and engine systems. "We plan to aggressively invest in our long-standing, loyal employee base so that they can support every brand of our equipment operating in the field", commented Arcline. Arcline currently has $1.5 billion of capital under management.

The successful merger of Anvil International and Smith-Cooper International (SCI) has been announced. This merger will place both the companies in a leading position as designer, manufacturer and provider of piping system products. This group has added to its portfolio global brands including AFCON, Anvil, Anvil EPS, AnvilPress Anvil-Strut, Basic-PSA, Beck, Catawissa, Cooplok, Cooplet, FlexHead, FPPI, Gruvlok, J.B. Smith, Merit, Megawatt, North Alabama Pipe, SCI, Sharpe, SPF/Anvil and SprinkFLEX.

USA’s oilfield services firm Weatherford International reported heavy losses in its third quarter earnings. The firm went through a loss of $199 million which is slightly less than a loss of $256 million last year. The revenue of the company also dropped and was $1.44 billion. The CEO of the company commented that this condition was due to the inefficiencies of supply chain and manufacturing.