Residential PV

There may be a global solar boom but a drastic revision of California’s net metering program has ruptured the industry overnight and is affecting everyone from installers to financiers to makers of power electronics.

Researchers and investors say they see room for PV investments in Zanzibar, due to the energy needs of many luxury holiday resorts.

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.

Cape Town, South Africa, has opened an online portal to simplify the authorization process for solar and reduce approval waiting times.

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.

The US-based manufacturer said its new heat pump system has 5-ton capacity and a coefficient of performance of up to 3.95. It uses difluoromethane (R32) as the refrigerant and relies on DC inverter enhanced vapor injection (EVI) technology.

By agreeing to limit exports to the grid at peak generation hours, distributed energy resources like rooftop solar and energy storage can now avoid delays and costly infrastructure upgrades.