Commercial & Industrial PV

TotalEnergies Eneos has completed a 1.8 MW floating solar array in Thailand, featuring more than 3,000 modules to generate 2,650 MWh per year under a power purchase agreement with Thai manufacturer S. Kijchai Enterprise.

In a new weekly update for pv magazine, Solcast, a DNV company, reports that October delivered record-high irradiance across much of the United States, with a high-pressure system over the Eastern and Central regions driving a sustained period of warm, dry, and clear weather. Meanwhile, contrasting conditions in Canada’s coastal provinces and extreme weather in Florida underscored this month’s diverse impacts on North American solar generation.

Researchers from the two companies have built a lightweight and flexible silicon heterojunction (HJT) PV panel that measures 563 mm x 584 mm and weighs just 218.5 g.

France installed around 3.32 GW of new PV systems in the first nine months of 2024.

France’s new feed-in tariffs (FITs) for November to January range from €0.13 ($0.141)/kWh to €0.088/kWh, depending on system size.

With hailstorms in Australia and the United States severely damaging solar arrays – including “golf-ball sized” hail at the 350 MW Fighting Jays project in Texas in March 2024 – insurers are raising premiums and reducing or canceling hail coverage. Everoze Partner Simon Mason discusses the challenges the industry faces in minimising its hail risk exposure.

Wider use of electric heat pumps to heat buildings creates a larger market for renewable energy, but also presents challenges, which can be met through building insulation and weatherization, cold climate heat pumps, thermal energy storage systems, and higher-voltage distribution grids, a report says.

Researchers have analyzed how wind speed and direction affect the cooling of a rooftop PV plant with 10,806 panels. They say that winds from behind were less effective due to the roof slope and the minimal gap between the panels and the roof, but wind from other directions could contribute to a cooling effect of up to 7 C.

Researchers in India have proposed a new set of techniques to mitigate total harmonic distortions during islanding events, which occur in distributed generation systems when there are disruptions in the power grid. Compared to conventional approaches, it reportedly achieves faster detection times by leveraging real-time data analytics and dynamically adjusting to changing grid conditions.

The International Energy Agency’s (IEA) latest report, which maps out the future evolution of clean energy manufacturing, says the combined global market for PV, wind turbines, electric cars, batteries, electrolyzers, and heat pumps will rise from $700 billion in 2023 to more than $2 trillion by 2035.