Installations

The South African government is looking for independent power producers to build and operate floating or ground-mounted PV projects at selected government waterworks infrastructure or damns. The projects should be operational for 20 years.

Scientists from the United States and Brazil have developed four different ways to estimate the temperature of floating PV modules. They validated the models with temperature measurements from a floating solar plant in Brazil.

Enel Green Power says it has started working on the largest agrivoltaics plant in Italy. It will feature bifacial PV modules mounted on trackers. Olive trees will grow around the solar panel rows.

Sunmaxx says Fraunhofer ISE has confirmed the 80% efficiency of its new photovoltaic-thermal (PVT) module. It consists of 108 PERC half-cells in M10 format, with 400 W of electrical output and 1,200 W of thermal output.

Germany’s grid authority has reported that the country added 874 MW of solar in January and 746 MW in February.

The US Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) says that just 86 GW of power projects based on fossil fuels are awaiting interconnection, while 1,700 GW of solar, wind, storage remain delayed.

Swedish manufacturer Qvantum has developed a 6 kW heat pump for apartments connected to district heating systems. It uses propane (R290) as the refrigerant.

Solar is wrongly perceived by some people to be an area-intensive energy generation technology requiring much more space than conventional fossil-fuel power plants.

China reached a cumulative installed PV capacity of 314 GW by the end of February, according to new figures from the National Energy Administration (NEA).

Swiss researchers have looked at whether storage could be cheaper than curtailment in medium-voltage distribution networks with significant amounts of PV capacity. They considered storage costs, operational costs, grid constraints, electricity costs, PV generation models, and loads.