Residential PV

Lithuania has decided to tighten its cybersecurity laws, banning manufacturers from countries deemed national security threats, including China, from remotely accessing management systems of solar, wind, and storage facilities. The European Solar Manufacturing Council has backed the move.

Utilites in California and nationwide are fighting rooftop solar, the major threat to their effective monopoly on the electricity market, said the California Solar and Storage Association (CALSSA).

The European Commission has released version 5.3 of its free Photovoltaic Geographical Information System (PVGIS) tool, which calculates the yield of residential solar-plus-storage systems and provides global solar radiation and PV performance data.

In a new weekly update for pv magazine, Solcast, a DNV company, reports that the upcoming Australian summer is likely to see cloudier than usual conditions, potentially reducing solar generation across key regions, especially along the East Coast.

An international research team based across Canada, China and the US have said developers must stop focusing not only resource availability, and also consider resource variability and resource extremeness, to avoid renewables “drought” at solar and wind sites.

A report from the Council of Energy, Environment and Water has analyzed nine of the ten countries with the largest rooftop solar markets to offer recommendations to other economies looking to accelerate rooftop solar deployment.

Trade body Holland Solar says the Dutch parliament has approved eliminating net metering in 2027, giving the solar sector clarity to move forward.

A UK research team used electroluminescence imaging to inspect 167 PV installations comprising a total of 5 million solar cells. Defects were categorized into into line cracks, complex cracks, edge-ribbon cracks, and potential-Induced degradation (PID).

Scientists in Switzerland have created a system-dynamics model for the adoption of PV and heat pumps in Swiss residential buildings up to 2050. They have examined several scenarios to see how the incentive for PV affects heat pump adoption and the other way around, and they have concluded that strong regulatory changes are necessary to completely decarbonize the residential sector.

A study by the University of Freiburg and the Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems finds that deploying color-matching solar modules on a building’s roof or facade further increases social acceptance of building-integrated photovoltaics (BIPV).