This Week in Solar

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Canadian Solar (Nasdaq: CSIQ) kicked the week off on a positive note, with an announcement that the firm had "recently signed or reconfirmed sales contracts, contract extensions or received purchase orders for delivery of about 120MW of solar module products." Of course, that was too wordy for the press release's headline, which simply read "Canadian Solar Announces 120MW of Recent Sales Orders." Same difference, right?

Rather than slam CSI for this bit of spin, I will point out that this announcement follows the firm's decision a few weeks ago to restart its module expansion program. Further, one of CSI's customers, an integrator by the name of Systaic, spoke in the release of the improving financing environment in its native Germany, and the bankability of CSI-powered solar plants. That's more than PR fluff.

On Tuesday, Suntech Power (NYSE: STP) pulled down a $50 million loan from the IFC, a division of the World Bank. I'm not sure if it was this financing, or the rumors of a giant new solar project in the Sichuan province of China, but some analysts hiked their ratings on the solar slugger the following day.

By Friday, it was confirmed by Suntech reps that the firm had indeed entered into "a non-binding strategic agreement similar to our agreement with the Qinghai government," referring to an equally mammoth 500-megawatt project that came to light earlier this month.

Also seeing some Chinese love this week was Yingli Green Energy (NYSE: YGE), which pulled down a much more modest 10MW project. I'm increasingly getting the sense that hometown heroes are going to have a near-lock on the Chinese market for the foreseeable future, which poses an interesting medium-term challenge for outsiders like SunPower (Nasdaq: SPWRA) (Nasdaq: SPWRB) and First Solar (Nasdaq: FSLR).