Commercial & Industrial PV

The European Parliament has approved a 24-month limit for the approval of renewable energy projects, with a requirement that national authorities complete the process within 12 months for installations in “areas conducive to renewables” and within 24 months for projects outside of these areas.

A French consortium, led by the CNR (Compagnie nationale du Rhone), is launching a pilot project to build a 900 kW solar cycling path in southern France. The initiative, set to run from 2025 to 2028, aims to assess the performance and design of the PV facility.

A range of different factors can affect the productive lifespan of residential solar inverters.

REC has developed a new series of heterojunction solar panels with efficiencies up to 22.6% and an operating temperature coefficient of -0.24% per degree Celsius.

In its latest monthly column for pv magazine, the International Solar Alliance (ISA) explains how to expand the deployment of mini-grids for electricity access, especially in less developed countries.

New research from Belgium shows agrivoltaic facilities with trackers perform significantly better than projects with fixed structures. The scientists found projects with tracking achieved an LCOE of €0.077 ($0.082)/kWh, while facilities with fixed structures were found to have an LCOE of €0.10/kWh.

All new PV plants over 1 MW in the Netherlands will have to use a real-time interface to make their facilities better communicate with the grid operator starting from next year. Utrecht-based Withthegrid, has developed an interface that is compatible with a number of brand-name inverters.

Bangladesh Jute Mills Corp. (BJMC), which manages all government-owned jute factories and industries in the South Asian country, has agreed to buy power from six different project developers under a 20-year power purchase agreement (PPA).

Scientists in Turkey have developed a new algorithm to optimize the efficiency of PV-powered water pumps. The novel technique is based on the Extended Kalman–Bucy filter, which is a predictor-corrector algorithm used extensively in control systems engineering for estimating unmeasured states of a process.

Italian researchers have looked at the potential of thermal and electrical energy storage to improve self-consumption rates in buildings when coupled with PV-powered heat pumps. They have concluded that such an approach could yield self-consumption rates of more than 80%.