Toyota Tsusho has agreed to buy an 85% stake in Softbank’s renewable energy unit, SB Energy, which owns and operates 773 MW of renewable energy assets in Japan, including 667.1 MW of solar and 55.9 MW of wind capacity.

Chinese scientists have simulated a new photovoltaic-thermoelectric technology, based on radiative cooling and III-V solar cells, to generate electricity at night.

Scientists in Spain have developed a transparent solar cell with an average visible transmittance of up to 66%. The device could be used for ubiquitous device functionalization, including indoor PV and agrivoltaics.

Indian scientists have developed a panel with an electrical efficiency of 13% and and thermal efficiency of 66.6 %. They built the system with a 100 W PV panel, a rectangular absorber, and a cooling technique based on a phase change material (PCM) that uses biochar derived from water hyacinth.

Saudi Arabia researchers claim to have improved the outdoor stability of a tandem perovskite-silicon solar cell by using proper encapsulation. By the end of the first year of operation, the cell’s fill factor remained above 70%.

Botswana has kicked off a tender for seven solar projects. The installations are expected to help the sub-Saharan country to reduce its dependence on electricity imports from South Africa.

The House of Representatives of the Netherlands has voted to end net metering. If the Dutch Senate approves the proposal, it could usher in a new era for rooftop PV, with storage becoming crucial for the country’s energy transition.

French scientists have developed a dataset to enable the creation of installation registries, by extracting small-scale PV metadata from overhead imagery. It can be used to provide training data for remote PV mapping algorithms and test the robustness of machine-learning models.

Chinese scientists have developed a photovoltaic-thermal air conditioning system that uses an air-cooled condenser and a PV/T condenser combined in series. The system reportedly offers better cooling performance under night conditions.

The Bern University of Applied Sciences in Switzerland has published the initial results of a survey on the durability and performance of residential PV inverters and power optimizers over a 15-year period. They found that more than 65% of the inverters did not present yield-relevant faults by their 15th year of operation.