The latest supply chain report from the Hong Kong-based technical compliance and quality assurance company covers the Southeast Asia region, providing information about 50 manufacturing sites.

German researchers are studying using an overhead solar PV system, designed to be removable and reusable, as a sunshade for young fir trees. The pilot, located at a quartz sand excavation site, will be monitored to compare growth and water consumption with an adjacent unshaded tree plot.

An Austrian team develped a model to optimize lamination parameters and to flag critical, insufficiently crosslinked and inconsistent encapsulant laminations. It could be particularly suitable for the production of double-glass solar panels.

The U.S. based developer of steel PV module frames said its products are an alternative to conventional aluminum frames. They passed several third party tests as the company readies production and evaluations by module manufacturers.

A U.S.-based team developed a vapor deposition technique to fabricate outperforming all-inorganic perovskite thin films in under 5 minutes in a continuous process. The adoption of the proposed approach may also result in higher perovskite solar cell power conversion efficiencies.

Huasun has signed two deals with Leascend Group, including a monocrystalline silicon wafer supply agreement, while GCL Technology has agreed to supply Longi Green Energy Technology with 425,000 tons of N-type granular silicon to the end of 2026.

France’s indoor organic PV specialist Dracula Technologies and Swiss-headquartered semiconductor manufacturer STMicroelectronics demonstrated a battery-free illuminometer at the Embedded World trade fair in Germany last week.

The Norwegian PV planning software company said it added the new PV degradation maps to pinpoint site locations with favorable climatic conditions.

Sinovoltaics has analyzed listed solar panel producers over the past three years using a balance sheet-based model and publicly available financial information to track finacial strength. The top-five module makers of the new ranking are Tainergy, First Solar, Eterbright, Mission Solar, and Era Solar.

Seraphim says it will build a new 10 GW solar panel factory in two phases in Guangzhou, with an investment of CNY 6 billion ($829.6 million), while JA Solar has announced plans to construct a 5 GW panel factory in Inner Mongolia.