Four foreign manufacturers of solar equipment are planning to set up panel-assembly plants in Brazil, thanks in large part to efforts by the Brazilian government to spur solar power generation through renewable energy auctions for project developers and panel makers. Such projects will give Brazil its first industrial-scale solar-panel-supply capacity, relieving developers of the need to import virtually all their solar panels and most other components—and to pay steep import taxes to do so. “Assembling solar panels in Brazil will make them much cheaper than foreign-bought panels subject to import taxes, and this gives us a competitive advantage in a market with too much solar growth potential to ignore,” says Adalberto Maluf, marketing director of the Brazilian subsidiary of... [Log in to read more]