Searching Weekly Analysis
Searching Weekly Analysis
The Queensland government’s plans for the 2 GW, 48 GWh Borumba pumped hydro station has seen its projected cost double to $9.5 billion before work has begun. LONGi will supply 1.5 GW of its modules to Energy3000, an Austrian distributor. Canadian Solar has announced Mesquite, Texas, as the site of its new 5 GW module factory, which will come online producing TOPCon from end-2023 with a $250 million investment. Nithin Sai Renewables has entered solar manufacturing by announcing a 500 MW module factory to be built in Bangalore, India, which will be expanded to 2 GW. Maxeon has taken Tongwei to court in Dusseldorf, Germany, over alleged patent infringement of its shingled solar cell technology. Air Liquide has signed a…
Against every single other indication of the global energy market, Danish SMR (Small Nuclear Reactor) developer, Copenhagen Atomics, claims it can deliver electricity at $20/MWh. Pretty revolutionary if it manages to follow through on its promises. Rethink Energy sat down with Thomas Jam Pedersen, one of the four founders of Copenhagen Atomics, and asked the burning question of “how sure are you of delivering electricity at $20/MWh? ” – in context of the pink ammonia project from Borneo, Indonesia that the company is running a feasibility study for. Pedersen replied that the company was to run the feasibility studies with the $20/MWh target in mind as that’s what it promised the other parties involved in the deal. Hydrogen or no…
In solar wafer manufacturing, the industry norm has forever been square wafers. The latest two main sizes written in full are 182mm*182mm and 210mm*210mm, for example. The next norm may be rectangular, due to several considerations including the puzzle of how to fit as much solar wattage as possible into a shipping container. The rectangular concept saw brief mention in 2020 with a proposed 182*158mm or 182*180mm size, but this didn’t catch on at that point. The idea got off the ground in a big way when Trina Solar released its 210mm*182mm wafer, called 210R, in April 2022 – and Trina’s is still the only 210mm-based rectangular wafer. Several 182R wafers have also entered mass production including 183.75*182mm from LONGi,…
Parallel Wireless continues its painstaking recovery from near extinction in 2022, when it shed at least half of its 850 staff, blaming failure of the burgeoning Open RAN market to advance as quickly as it had hoped and expected. The company had been more guilty than its peers of overreach, as rivals such as Mavenir and Casa Systems came in with smaller staff cuts in proportion to the total. The company’s CEO and founder Steve Papa spun this as right-sizing at the time, blaming global economic conditions and Covid supply chain constraints as major contributors to OpenRAN’s slow pace of adoption. While it is certainly true that the pandemic made many operators more risk averse and slowed down pace of…
After several years of caution around cloud-based RAN architectures, this year has seen Ericsson get off the fence and seek leadership of emerging mobile platforms. Not only has it expanded its own proprietary vRAN portfolio, but it is contributing to next-generation Open RAN specifications, not just in the orchestration layer, but right down in the radio interfaces. More whole-hearted support for vRAN, and even Open RAN, from the market leader brings a welcome boost of credibility, in a month when Open RAN supporter Fujitsu emulated NEC in warning of the limited commercial appeal of current products. But Ericsson will not join a market it does not believe it can lead, and there are already signs that it will use its…
Nokia has been the main bearer of network slicing hopes among the major 5G equipment vendors and is having a third attempt at convincing operators of its monetization potential ahead of Android 14 – scheduled for launch in August 2023. The relevance of this latest Android release is that it allows Nokia to demonstrate network slicing to order on phones, arguing that it will have more appeal if it can be obtained dynamically on demand. There is the risk though of Nokia appearing to be offering the same old bait, time and time again, in the hope that some operators will eventually bite. Even now, Nokia has been unable to elaborate on when these new features will be available in…
As one of the oldest names in semiconductors Analog Devices (ADI) has plotted steady progress through the whole of the silicon era while more recent upstarts have either come and gone or sailed past it. Yet now the company is in a stronger position than it has ever been, and has seen fit to raise the volume of its marketing to trumpet recent successes, as well as a strong commitment to the European semiconductor market. This commitment goes hand in glove with devotion to sustainability through efficient power management, that being one of its three main strands, alongside signal processing and data conversion. The company can also sum up its whole portfolio under the banner of integration of the physical…
The latest session in the Sustainability Experts Series, coming to us live on the second Tuesday of every month, was poised to position open source software as one of the keys to creating more sustainable businesses in media and entertainment. What transpired for the following hour was a vanity project dwelling on personal passions and individual achievements, instead of a discussion digressing on what the video technology industry as a collective – open source or not – can do to reduce carbon emissions. Our main gripe is the manner in which the open source multimedia framework GPAC (Graphics Project on Advanced Content) was being framed during the webinar as the “greenest” packaging software available anywhere – but without a crumb…
The opening panel session during day 2 of the StreamTV Show, hosted in Denver, Colorado, was the executive personification of Four Weddings and a Funeral. One overenthusiastic moderator and three optimistic cable veterans found themselves battling against the cynical musings of a video industry executive who had all the makings of someone suffering from a chronic conference hangover. That said, we agreed with most of what the pessimistic panelist – Shane Cannon, President at US streaming TV service Vidgo – had to say. Sports, rebundling and FAST (free ad-supported streaming TV) services were the gist of the panel discussion, and Cannon was particularly bullish on the latter. “The model is broken in so many ways – something needs to happen,”…
Faultline has stumbled across a sneak preview that will interest parties in the media transport protocol space. RIST – the Reliable Internet Stream Transport protocol for low-latency contribution in professional video – has added a relay function that injects a multicast flavor into the protocol. Such is the internal enthusiasm over RIST Relay, that there are even suggestions that the new feature has the potential to wipe out and eventually replace WebRTC – the open-source browser project for real-time communications. Our introduction to RIST Relay comes courtesy of a presentation from Adi Rozenberg, CTO and co-founder of video delivery intelligence provider Alvalinks, on the capabilities and use cases of the new RIST Relay function – ahead of its official publication…
Netflix’s first entrance into live sports is a celebrity golf tournament – so much for Formula 1, eh? The rumored competition will combine stars from documentaries it has produced for both of those sports, and will provide another chance to test its platform before presumably stepping up to the big leagues. Netflix had been linked to the US sports rights for the Formula 1 motorsport competition, to build on the back of its Formula 1: Drive to Survive series – which has been credited with driving interest in the sport in the US. Disney’s ESPN ultimately signed a three-year rights extension for Formula 1, thought to be worth up to $90 million per year. Comcast and Amazon had also bid.…
Silvio Berlusconi, the divisive former Italian Prime Minister and boss of mass media group Mediaset (now doing business as MediaForEurope – MFE), has died aged 86. Faultline usually steers clear of giving airtime to individuals, but such has been Berlusconi’s seizing influence on the media landscape, that his legacy – like it or not – lives on, inevitably. This influence has of course been most significant in Europe, but the businessman and politician has arguably played an understated part in US politics, where it has been proposed that Berlusconi inspired the rise of Donald Trump into the White House. The comparison is about the blurring of the lines between entertainment and politics. In Berlusconi’s case, he held a monopoly over…
How apt that a new video industry forum called the Independent Streaming Alliance (ISA) should be announced just hours after the death of Italian media mogul Silvio Berlusconi. Political views aside, Berlusconi invested substantial sums into the vision of a pan-European OTT video collective to help traditional media organizations survive the streaming wars. The project did not exactly pan out as planned, but by the same token was not a complete failure either. You can read more about this in a separate story published this week, while here we look at whether another new streaming collective is destined for longevity or futility. With the ISA effectively an advertising group focused on free ad-supported streaming TV (FAST) services, it does raise…
Electrolyzer maker Thyssenkrupp Nucera is set to go public through an IPO before the summer. The German company, majority-owned by Thyssenkrupp and with 34% ownership by De Nora, anticipates generating proceeds of around €500m-600m ($539m-647m) from the share sale. Ørsted and Vestas have announced a commercial sustainability partnership. As part of the agreement, Ørsted will source low-carbon steel wind turbine towers and blades made from recycled materials from Vestas for their joint offshore wind projects. This collaboration aims to enhance the environmental sustainability of their operations. Toyota shares jumped 5% Tuesday as president of the company’s new unit BEV Factory Takeru Kato has announced the company will introduce a full range of BEVs with “next generation” batteries from 2026. BEV…
South America is red hot this week when it comes to hydrogen news. Rethink has a pretty good idea of which country is best positioned to dominate the continental race and perhaps even take Australia for a spin in the run in for the global hydrogen leader title. Some of the news this week involved Chile, Brazil and Uruguay. The latter is betting on biofuels produced from green hydrogen as Uruguayan state-owned oil company, ANCAP, revealed that HIF Global, a Chilean biofuels producer and developer, will manufacture and export biofuels and green methanol from Uruguay as early as 2024. The project will cost around $4 billion and will consist of a 1 GW alkaline electrolyzer powered by 2 GW of…
The short answer is the IRA (Inflation Reduction Act). New policy should back clean energy but instead, American policy backs decision making which, as we see it, will be detrimental in the long term because decision making has only one goal in a capitalistic environment like the US: quarterly returns. And not to fully impeach the IRA, as it will do a lot of good by kickstarting the US hydrogen industry, but this is what it does to American businessmen. At a recent event that Rethink attended in New York organized by Reuters, Global Energy Transition 2023, Todd Becker, the CEO of Green Plains, pointed out that 18 months ago his company wouldn’t have paid much attention to biofuels. What…
The whole mobile delivery supply chain has been hit by sharp fluctuations in supply and demand at various stages of the pipeline, ever since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic. These ructions were then aggravated by subsequent global geopolitical events, such as China’s disastrous zero Covid policy which was sustained too long, and the Ukraine war. There has also been the deepening rift between the Chinese and American axes, leaving few national 5G networks open to all potential equipment suppliers. On the face of it, the semiconductor supply chain has returned closer to normal faster than appeared likely at the height of the pandemic. But, this has been partly the result of declining demand both for smartphones and equipment for…
The injection of €3 billion ($3.2 billion) by the French government into a joint fabrication plant between the country’s chip maker STMicroelectronics and Global Foundries is part of a broader global realignment of the semiconductor industry that has been gathering steam for several years. Several factors have been at play, with the increasing tensions between the US and China playing a part, which has exacerbated fears over the high concentration of foundry capacity in Taiwan. There has also been a concurrent desire among the world’s major trading blocs or economic powers, including the EU, India and to an extent Japan, on top of the US and China, for autonomy in prime technological or industrial sectors. This reduces dependency on foreign…
Taiwan Mobile, a local operator with 522,000 cable TV subscribers and 7.5 million mobile customers, has jumped into bed with French CDN software specialist Broadpeak, for the services of improved multiscreen delivery for the 5G era. It is notable that, despite having over half a million pay TV subs, the announcement – emanating out of Singapore-based trade fair Broadcast Asia this week – does not mention Taiwan Mobile’s cable TV base even once. The reasoning is that this is a deal draped in efficiencies for video delivery over 5G networks, with Taiwan Mobile deploying Broadpeak’s BkS350 Origin Packager. The technology enables Taiwan Mobile to package and protect mobile-delivered ABR content – raising the bar for video quality, while reducing costs…
A deluge of private 5G announcements from operators was unleased by Mobile World Congress 2023, as MNOs fell over each other to position themselves as pioneers of the enterprise field in some way or other. After some early dabbling it seems major tier 1s have rather belatedly determined that private enterprise represents a seismic shift in the field away from commoditized consumer services resistant to any rise in ARPU, where improvements in performance are taken as given. Consumer perceptions have not been helped by inconsistent coverage and performance on the macro side but there is a growing conviction that private 5G represents a major source of innovation and efficiency for many enterprises themselves, as well as an opportunity for MNOs.…