Commercial & Industrial PV

Spain’s cumulative installed PV capacity surpassed 25.54 GW at the end of December 2023, on 5.59 GW of new solar installations for the full year.

The Netherlands deployed 4.82 GW of new solar capacity in 2023. The country’s cumulative installed PV capacity hit 24.4 GW at the end of December.

The new products are intended for commercial applications and and multi-dwelling buidlings. They have a size of 20 kW to 30 kW and use R290 as the refrigerant.

The French authorities have wrapped up a procurement exercise for commercial and industrial (C&I) rooftop PV projects. They allocated 362.2 MW of solar capacity to 42 developers at an average price of €0.1021 ($0.1104)/kWh.

In a new weekly update for pv magazine, Solcast, a DNV company, reports that Chile, Uruguay and Argentina saw irradiance up 5% to 15% above normal in January and February. Responsible for the surplus sunlight across South America was the ongoing Amazon drought, and circulation changes that pushed weather fronts further south of the continent than usual.

Volatility in the global PV market did not go unnoticed this week at the Solar Solutions Amsterdam trade fair. However, the prevailing impression is that the Dutch PV market is poised for stability.

The Atacama Desert in Argentina and Chile is the sunniest region on earth. Despite the excellent solar radiation resource availability and plenty of room on rooftops and on the ground, solar PV is not as widespread in either country as would have been expected based on the initial deployment of large-scale PV power plants in both countries some ten years ago.

Researchers in Australia have compared the technical and financial performances of a hydrogen battery storage system and a lithium-ion battery when coupled with rooftop PV. They evaluated two commercially available systems – LAVO and Tesla Powerwall 2 – and found that the lithium-ion battery provides better financial profits, whereas the hydrogen battery offers more battery lifespan for long duration of energy storage.

An international research team explained that, although inverter clipping is initially effective in mitigating soiling losses, these losses could become more visible with time, as solar module degradation makes clipping less frequent. They also warned that inverter undersizing alone may not be enough to mitigate soiling losses and suggested cleaning as an additional way to reduce them.

The German authorities say that around 40% of the 1.07 GW of solar capacity installed in February came from unsubsidized PV systems. The country’s cumumlative PV capacity reached 84.88 GW at the end of the month.