Solis has developed new 125 kW and 60 kW string inverters for the US and Canadian markets, both with a maximum efficiency of at least 98.5%

Scientists in Morocco have evaluated how hybrid wind solar plants may be combined with pumped hydro storage to power remote rural areas. The proposed system was found to have an LCOE $0.03831/kWh and a 86% use factor.

Scientists in South Africa have conducted full-scale research on the effect of wind load on PV panel mounting rails for more than 100 days. Compared to standard design codes, they found lower combined wind load coefficients. Maximum loads occurred for an easterly wind direction.

Conceived by French scientists, the novel system uses ensemble learning and does not require anything more than a commercially available optimizer. Before it makes a decision, the method combines K nearest neighbors, support vector machine, and decision tree learning. Accuracy is reportedly up to 89%.

Researchers have analyzed the viability of floating PV in terms of net present value, internal rate of return, and LCOE. They included 25 European countries in their work, including Germany, the United Kingdom, Spain, and Italy.

Conceived by researchers in Canada, the novel method combines image processing and deep learning techniques to locate the areas of the solar panels covered with snow. It reportedly performed better than three other popular image processing-based segmentation methods.

A survey of 1,797 residents was used to determine the willingness to pay for low-carbon residential heating in the Netherlands. On average, respondents were willing to pay a premium of 33% for electricity-based heating. Policy recommendations were also provided as part of the study.

The proposed system uses compressed air to store energy, as well as for the prevention of clogging in the irrigation tubes. Two experimental systems were built and tested in China and clogging was reduced by up to 93%.

The US Navy has funded Danish research on preventing biofouling while maintaining visible light transmission on underwater solar cells. The top solution uses ultra-low concentrations of nano-sized, seawater-soluble pigments. Power generation stayed close to 100% after 13 weeks underwater.

Scientists have used hydrometallurgical and electrochemical processes to recover pure silver from solar cells. The proposed technique also utilizes a method known as electrodeposition-redox replacement, which reportedly increases the silver recovery rate.