Commercial & Industrial PV

Italy deployed 2.3 GW of new solar capacity in the first half of the year, while its cumulative installed PV capacity reached 27.4 GW at the end of March, according to Italia Solare, the national solar energy association.

South Korean scientists built an air source heat pump integrated with a photovoltaic thermal unit that can reportedly achieve an average heating and cooling coefficient of performance (COP) of 3.54 and 3.31, respectively. The system is also claimed to be 44% cheaper than ground source heat pumps combined with PVT energy.

Octopus Energy has acquired Shell’s home energy business in the United Kingdom and Germany through a competitive process, involving 1.4 million household electricity customers (2.5 million metering points) and 500,000 broadband customers.

Yaskawa Solectria Solar has developed new utility-scale string inverters with capacities ranging from 175 kW to 250 kW. They are optimized for use with First Solar modules and qualify for the US domestic content bonus tax credit.

OPES Solar Mobility, a joint venture between solar module specialist OPES Solutions and a German family office, is creating manufacturing capacity with its own technology in Germany to provide specific support to the transportation industry.

Scientists in Canada have combined PV power generation with water purification based on capacitive deionization (CDI), which is claimed to have low operational cost, enhanced energy efficiency, and less water rejection than conventional purification techniques. The solar-powered system prototype is able to produce more water than a conventional CDI system on a sunny day.

In a new weekly update for pv magazine, Solcast, a DNV company, reports that Tropical Storm Hillary and its associated cloud systems led to significantly lower irradiance than usual for August, in a broad area from Baja, through Southern California, and along the Rockies to British Columbia.

A research group in China has proposed to solve the typical high working pressure issues of solar-powered sprinklers by using compressed air energy storage (CAES). According to their findings, combined PV-CAES sprinklers can easily achieve high pressure and low intensity high-quality water spraying.

CRISIL Ratings says that it expects about 20 GW of new renewable energy capacity in India in fiscal 2024 and fiscal 2025, with roughly 16 GW of solar and the remainder from wind in the current 12-month period, up 33% from the 15 GW installed in fiscal 2023.

Nevada-based World4Solar has designed HelioWing, a modular solar canopy that comes preconfigured and can be installed in just one day.