ET Solar to sell modules to Italy

Nanjing, China-based ET Solar announced it has signed a deal with Helios Technology to provide 15 megawatts of modules.

Photovoltaic manufacturer ET Solar expects to deliver the modules from now through March 2009. Financial terms of the contract were not disclosed.

Italy-based Helios manufactures photovoltaic cells, modules, inverters and charge regulators.

Italy is seen as one of the next big solar markets in Europe. As Spain and Germany look at lower feed-in tariffs, Italy has established a 20-year feed-in tariff of €0.44 to €0.49 per kilowatt hour.

The potential growth there is what drew ET Solar to break into the Italian market with the Helios deal, according to CSO Dennis Shaw.

"We see the Italian PV market as one of the fastest growing markets in the global PV industry," he said.

In September, ET Solar signed a 1-MW deal with California-based Premier Power Renewable Energy for dual-axis tracking systems (see ET Solar signs dual-axis tracking deal).

Those systems were jointly developed with Meca Solar, a European tracking system manufacturer. Each system has a peak power of more than 11 kilowatts and tracks the arc of the sun by the use of an astronomical program. The project is scheduled to be completed before the end of this year.

ET Solar has two manufacturing facilities in Taizhou, China. The company's products include mono- and multi-crystalline ingots, silicon wafers, modules, and dual-axis tracking systems.

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