Highlights

With the solar industry already seeing prices rise because of a shortage of panel raw material polysilicon, an explosion yesterday at the factory of a silicon metal
and silicone producer in Xinjiang could have further repercussions on supply. No casualties have been reported.

Welcome to the first day of the pv magazine Roundtable Europe event! We have a packed two-day schedule planned for you comprising four cornerstone issues that will define the industry as it cements itself as a key pillar of the continent’s energy transition: Quality, Asset Management, Sustainability and Made in Europe, and the Innovation Hub: Hydrogen, battery storage, and e-mobility.

The state government in Queensland, Australia, has announced plans to finance design work and cost-related studies for the construction of a new pumped hydro facility.

Favorable federal tax policies and state regulatory reform could help the storage sector notch even higher rates of growth.

The technology company and inverter maker has created a new unit to operate in the renewables and e-mobility sectors. Elsewhere, China’s largest e-commerce company, JD.Com, has signed an agreement with the world’s biggest wind company, GoldWind, to establish a renewables joint venture.

According to two new pieces of research, Europe is on track to reach 2.7 GW of operational hydrogen electrolyzer capacity by 2025 and most of this capacity is expected to be located in Germany. Furthermore, three European gas associations have assessed the competitiveness of the different transportation options for hydrogen and have found it depends on the distance over which hydrogen is transported, as well as on scale and end-use.

Thanks to a carbon dioxide doping technique, the solar cell interlayers exhibited conductivity around five times higher than that of a perovskite cell based on interlayers doped with oxygen. The device also showed an open-circuit voltage of 1.14 V, a short-circuit current density of 21.2 mA cm2 and a fill factor of 0.79. 

Energy communities, recognized and supported in Italy’s National Recovery and Resilience Plan, could soon increase their role in the country’s energy transition, Italian research agency ENEA told pv magazine.

A U.S. scientist has developed a computational framework that assesses how well a hypothetical agrivoltaic project would perform in achieving desired outcomes such as the volume of PV electricity produced, and energy-to-agriculture. The method considers the high-frequency decomposition of solar irradiance into multiple rays and analyzes how these rays are propagated forward in time, to assess multiple reflections and absorption for various system configurations. It also takes into account panel inclination, panel refractive indices, sizes, shapes, heights, and albedo.

RayGen Resources has secured funding to build a 3 MW/50 MWh ‘solar hydro’ power plant that could become one of the largest, lowest-cost storage projects in Australia.