Residential PV

Japanese utility Kansai Electric Power has extended a demonstration project with Australian P2P energy pioneer Power Ledger to track renewable energy certificates and trade PV-generated electricity.

An international research team has developed a new approach for solar power forecasting that combines neural networks and pattern sequences for the first time. The performance of the new Pattern Sequence Neural Network (PSNN) was tested on an Australian data set that includes information from two years of forecasts. It can be used with different clustering and cluster-sequence extraction algorithms, and can be applied to multiple related time sequences

Solaredge wants to enable households have a higher solar self-consumption with its new product. The Israeli PV company’s solution can now be ordered in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland.

Trade body SolarPower Europe’s preliminary statistics suggest this could be the continent’s best year for PV since 2010, with capacity additions set to soar 104% year on year. Spain is leading the way with an expected 4.7 GW of new solar, followed by Germany, with 4 GW.

The draft feed-in tariff scheme should be approved by the end of the month. Payments for residential solar systems are expected to fall only 0.34% but those for utility scale solar may be reduced by 2.2%. An increase is set to be granted to projects in remote areas and also to those which rely on high-efficiency modules.

Tesla was once the unquestioned leader in the U.S. residential rooftop market with a market share of around 33 percent, but today, the company is No. 3, and its market share during the first quarter was a little more than 6 percent.

Spanish researchers are proposing a customer-driven method described as an intuitive tool for investors and engineers to assess how self-consumption from solar generation can be profitable. The method is said to take into account economic parameters such as taxes, depreciation and the cost of financing.

Solar electricity production increased by almost 9.2% in the January-September period, but installations barely changed from the first nine months of the preceding year.

A group of scientists is proposing a new metric – the value of efficiency – to calculate the maximum allowable cost to increase a cell’s efficiency and improve the levelized cost of electricity (LCOE). The researchers expect that more regional diversification may be seen at the global level in the years to come, with the proposed metric offering higher values in North America, Central and Northern Europe, Japan, Australia, and New Zealand.

Ofgem passed its long-awaited, controversial plan for network charges last week, despite earlier warnings against the move. The UK electricity market regulator’s Targeted Charging Review has provoked a backlash in the renewables sector, as many believe that the plan will damage the economics of distributed energy resources and unsubsidized onshore wind and solar development.