CleanTechnica Interview With Yingli Solar — Not JUST About The World Cup

All the cool new stuff from Yingli Solar

Yingli Solar exhibited at the Intersolar USA Conference in San Francisco in July, and I was fortunate enough to corner marketing director Helena Kimball for an exclusive walk-through on all of Yingli’s new developments in cleantech. And, of course, chat about their sponsorship of the 2014 World Cup (which I was lucky enough to attend).

The first development Yingli showcased at Intersolar was a hot-off-the presses 1500-volt bracketed solar panel. According to Kimball, this was in direct response to demand from utility-scale customers. The previous standard was 1000 volts, and I asked Kimball why this change happened. She recognized me as a technophobe (might’ve been my decade-old microphone and flip camera I was using for the interview), and just suggested that the reasoning was for optimization. Got it. She suggested that the actual market would not get red hot for this panel until next year, as Yingli is going through certification with Underwriters Lab for the product at the moment.

Yingli was also showcasing its new strategic partnerships for fully integrated solar installation systems for both residential and commercial customers. SolarEdge has partnered with Yingli to produce residential and commercial inverters, for instance, and Kimball said that the market has been moving toward this consolidation for a while. Its now bringing 25 and 30 kilowatt inverters through a partnership with Huawei, one of China’s largest telecomm companies, in a first-of-its-kind partnership. She suggested that this might be particularly interesting for commercial customers seeking a string inverter.

Yingli is also working on space-limited 4-bus-bar panel systems for both commercial and residential applications. Check out my interview with Kimball below for more.

CleanTechnica Interview with Yingli Solar from Important Media on Vimeo.