Japan’s Marubeni and Hamada have launched Rexia Corporation to offer solar panel recycling and reuse services across the country, diverting material from landfill and giving a second life to older panels.

Enfoil is developing a CIGS thin film custom manufacturing business, targeting building-integrated PV applications, such as powering sensors or track & trace sub-systems in trucks. The company is a spinoff of Hasselt University and imec, the Belgian research institute.

PVcase, a Lithuania-based solar project software company, raised $100 million to expand the market for its platform and extend its capability.

Norsun and Midsummer have both secured financing to support their capacity expansion plans. Norway’s Norsun plans to raise its polysilicon capacity to 3 GW and Midsummer wants to build a 200 MW module facility in Sweden.

Researchers in Spain assembled an experimental solar simulator for vehicle-integrated and curved solar panels. They found that the measurements of the short-circuit current of the cells followed the ideal cosine response of the curvature with differences lower than 0.5%.

German scientists have fabricated a carbon electrode perovskite solar cell with a hole-transporting bilayer made of organic semiconductors instead of a conventional hole transport layer. They claim this approach improves the device’s fill factor and open-circuit voltage.

A US-Spanish research team studied the ecological effect of a solar photovoltaic array located on a managed grassland plot using a hydraulic and soil hydrology model and field measurements. They found minimal effect on the plants’ carbon-water cycling, which they attributed to plant photosynthetic traits changing to take advantage of the dynamic shading under the panels.

A US-Chinese research team has investigated the flow of iron, copper, aluminum, and other precious metals from source to end-use destination in the renewable energy infrastructure value chain. It found significant imbalances that can be attributed to the continuous outsourcing of metal demand for the renewable power sector to developing economies.

European scientists used a nanosecond pulsed ultraviolet laser to reduce surface defects in perovskite films for solar cell applications. The result is a significant increase in cell efficiency and stability. The new technique may be particularly suitable for roll-to-roll (R2R) production lines.

Hoshine says it will build its first solar panel factory in Jiaxing, China’s Zhejiang province.