Commercial & Industrial PV

Japan’s Toshiba says it will now focus on commercial and industrial PV, as well as the development of perovskite solar panels.

For a long while, it looked as if hydrogen fuel cells would be the technology of choice for emissions-free road transport. However, truck manufacturers and freight forwarders recently turned their attention to battery-electric vehicles. This will require special charging technology and PV looks set to play an important role.

US residential solar specialist Sunnova is seeking approval from the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) for its micro-utility business model, which could potentially disrupt the state’s energy landscape. pv magazine speaks to CEO John Berger about plans to develop self-sustaining microgrids by equipping new homes and communities with solar and storage.

China’s Trina Solar has published a white paper on its latest n-type TOPCon modules, with cost calculations and figures from demonstration projects. The Chinese PV manufacturer claims better performance from its 210 mm cells than with other n-type products based on smaller, 182 mm cells.

Portugal’s cumulative PV capacity hit 2.59 GW at the end of 2022, outpacing the growth of other renewable energy sources. The country failed to meet its own installation predictions, likely because some large-scale projects awarded in the 2019 and 2020 auctions ended up missing their commissioning deadlines.

The Brazilian Association of Photovoltaic Solar Energy (ABSolar) says the country has reached 17 GW of installed solar capacity for PV projects below 5 MW in size. Over the past three months, connection requests for distributed-generation PV projects have hit 32 GW.

Japan’s largest oil company, Eneos, has opened a green hydrogen demonstration plant in Brisbane, Australia. The project is relatively small, producing just 20 kilograms of green hydrogen per day, but Eneos Senior Vice President Yuichiro Fujiyama says the company will expand it in the “near future.”

Germany deployed around 350 MW of new PV capacity in December alone. Its cumulative solar capacity reached 66.5 GW last year.

An international research group claims that raw materials and land availability do not present a real barrier for a global energy system with solar at its center. They said that forecasts for PV growth should not have their axis on utility-scale power plants and instead consider vertical PV, agrivoltaics, and floating PV as the source of future big market volumes.

Makoto Tajima, an agrivoltaics analyst for Japan’s Institute for Sustainable Energy Policies (ISEP), speaks to pv magazine about the growth of agricultural PV in Japan, as well as cost considerations and the pace of technological development.