Commercial & Industrial PV

Daikin Applied Americas has developed an air-to-water heat pump that can produce 91.2 kW of heat and 23.58 tons of cooling. The new device can be used as a cascade system with water-to-water heat pumps, and can switch between cooling and heating modes, depending on temperature requirements.

Norwegian startup Over Easy has validated the wind resistance of its vertical PV system for rooftops by using computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations. Wind tunnel tests conducted by I.F.I. Institut für Industrieaerodynamik GmbH confirm that the system can function without ballast or fastening to the rooftop.

The mayor of Bilbao, Spain, has attributed the recent collapse of a local sports center’s roof to heavy rains and the presence of numerous solar panels, according to local news outlets.

Australia’s largest grid-connected urban microgrid has been officially commissioned with a new rooftop solar-powered system on Ikea’s store in Adelaide. It already delivers more than 70% of the store’s energy needs and provides grid support for the South Australian network.

In a new weekly update for pv magazine, Solcast, a DNV company, presents the solar irradiance data it collected for North America since early May. The province of Alberta saw close to 100 wildfires raging from the beginning of the month and solar asset operators throughout the impacted regions can expect reduced efficiency from both the irradiance impacts and increased panel soiling.

India built 2.38 GW of utility-scale PV in the first quarter of this year. It also added 801 MW of rooftop solar capacity in the first three months of 2023.

Yingli is offering six versions of its new 144-cell Panda 3.0 PRO solar modules, with power outputs ranging from 555 W to 580 W and efficiencies ranging from 21.48% to 22.45%. The panels are designed for near-shore and offshore floating solar plants.

Germany installed around 3.7 GW of new PV systems in the first four months of 2023.

In the third week of May, negative or zero hourly prices were registered in most of the European electricity markets, especially during the weekend. In the Nord Pool market, the value of -€5.67/MWh registered during an hour on Sunday May 21, is the lowest one in history. For the week as a whole, prices decreased in every market, due to the decrease in demand and gas prices, and also to a higher solar and wind energy production than that of the previous week in several markets.

Solar electricity will have to compete with biofuels in the urban mobility landscape. Biofuels, however, have a very low energy productivity per hectare, as well as high requirements for fertilizers, pesticides, and water.