Japan and Taiwan: Growing with Clean Energy

        Japan has continuously thrived towards solar energy and other renewable energy sources (as well as being a nation of energy storage), after an earthquake occurred in destroying Fukushima, a nuclear power plant, in March 2011. The government had put in place generous amounts of subsidies for alternative energy development. Both IHS and Bloomberg New Energy Finance predicts that Japan will be growing extensively towards solar energy than any other country, with the exception of China, in 2013.
        The natural disaster affecting the destruction of Fukushima has also triggered Taiwan to re-evaluate its nuclear power policy and has stirred protests against the construction of a fourth nuclear power plant, which is nearing its completion.
        Taiwan is also subsidizing clean energy and is planning to increase solar and wind energy development. Late last year, the government had raised the 2013 target for new solar energy by 30% to 130 megawatts. Not only this but Taiwan is actually home to major solar cell makers. By promoting more production of solar energy, this would help Taiwan's domestic solar manufacturers, who have been lately devastated by an oversupply of solar cells in the global market over the past two years. This, in turn, has caused prices to crash and forced many solar manufacturers to go out of business.
        However, one of the largest Taiwanese solar cell makers, Neo Solar Power, recently had announced a survival plan to merge with another Taiwanese solar cell maker, DelSolar. Neo Solar had claimed that the combined company will have "close to 2 gigawatts" of production capacity, which would be comparable to First Solar Inc.'s capacity of 1.9 gigawatts.

Miaoli, Taiwan

Solar "Power" Couple Wins Award

        Dr. Jianhua Zhao and Aihua Wang were joint recipients for an Advance Global Australian Award for contributions to the field of clean technology. The award ceremony, organized in partnership with the Australian Government and the Australian Financial Review, was held at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney on March 21, 2013.
        The pair, who are the first Chinese-Australians ever to receive this award, also won a special Australia in the Asian Century Award for their contribution in the Asia region. Australia's Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, also made a video speech to them to endorsing the award. "Jianhua and Aihua were excellent students and staff members here at the University of New South Wales (UNSW), and prolific researchers," says Scientia Professor Martin Green, Director of the AFC Photovoltaics Center of Excellence, and who nominated Dr. Zhao and Dr. Wang for the award. "They took us to the position where we can now make the most efficient cells in the world and nobody yet has been able to catch up. They are both well-respected internationally and have played an influential role in establishing China as a major producer of solar power and PV technology."
        In 1999, the pair developed the high efficiency crystallized Silicon PERL cell and set a new record, demonstrating 25% energy conversion efficiency, which remains the highest level achieved in the world so far.
       In 2004, Zhao co-founded the Chinese solar cell and manufacturing company China Sunergy, where he is now Chief Technology Officer and Director. Wang, who also completed her Ph.D. degree and worked at UNSW for more than a decade, is the company's Vice-President of research and development.
       The duo are now leading China Sunergy's participation in an 863 program, a National High Technology Research and Development Program in China that supports and encourages the development and commercialization of solar cells with a high efficiency rate (over 20%) and a low production cost.

Source : UNSW