Consumer platform for purchasing remote solar in Lithuania
Sun Investment Group has launched a purchasing model which offers the chance to buy or rent solar panels elsewhere for those without the prospect of an installation which can generate energy directly for their home.
Solar glass company posts stellar figures – but acknowledges Covid-19 threat
Xinyi Solar reported record profits earlier this month, not surprisingly prompting bullish talk of extending its plans to expand production capacity this year and next. However, with PV demand in Europe key to its returns, the company has accepted the coronavirus epidemic may have an impact this year.
Energy communities are now allowed in France
A footnote in France’s energy legislation had been holding back the development of collective self-consumption in the country, limiting such projects to ‘experimental’ status with terms of no more than five years. The removal of this footnote at the beginning of March means that energy communities for self-consumption are now permitted across the country.
The sky’s the limit: How solar and storage can set a post-Covid-19 example
The airline industry has been among the hardest hit by the Covid-19 pandemic; carriers are in ‘freefall’ as Glen Peters, research director at the Center for International Climate and Environment Research in Oslo recently wrote, with governments mulling stimulus packages for airline bailouts. How we react to the coronavirus outbreak is crucial for society as a whole and the solar and energy storage industries can lead the charge in rewriting the status quo.
Predicting the I-V characteristics of PV systems under partial shading
Researchers in Tunisia have proposed a method of determining the characteristic I-V profile of a partially shaded PV module, and to extrapolate it into a string profile.
Forget toilet paper, Australians are panic-buying PV
Byron Bay-based solar retailer Smart Energy says it is seeing an unprecedented surge in sales and enquiries for solar and home energy storage as consumers look to shore themselves up in uncertain times.
Study of 100,000 arrays finds proactive O&M preferable
The US National Renewable Energy Laboratory examined five-year data to observe the most common system failure points and how to prevent them. Researchers considered residential, commercial and utility scale plants and found interesting results. While failures cannot be avoided completely, a key takeaway was that close monitoring and timely repair can effectively mitigate the financial effects of failures.
The US added 13.3 GW of solar in 2019, beating new wind and gas capacity
According to data released by analyst Wood Mackenzie and the Solar Energy Industries Association, the U.S. added more than 2.8 GW of residential solar last year. Cumulative operating PV capacity now tops 76 GW.
Analyst expects recovery for PV and storage supply chains
U.S.-owned analyst Wood Mackenzie expects solar demand to decline but predicts the market will recover, with the prospects for the energy transition remaining intact.
The best string configurations to avoid mismatch losses from rooftop PV shading
Researchers in Pakistan have evaluated the impact of shading on inverter set-ups to assess PV system performance. Tests were conducted on a 51 kW system featuring SMA inverter topologies but the researchers say the findings could be applied to products from other manufacturers. The results showed the number of maximum power point trackers is important but levelized cost of energy calculations are also crucial to selecting the right inverter configuration.
