Residential PV

The Italia Solare Forum event held in Rome laid bare the difficulty of securing permits for large scale projects at national and regional levels. Fast-tracking the process for big solar parks appears necessary to get Italian PV back on track.

The U.S. residential solar market – and 15 states – are at record highs according to analyst WoodMac’s ‘don’t call it a comeback’ Q3 report, driven by new market forces. The research firm held its 2019 U.S. solar forecast at 13 GW.

The China Photovoltaic Industry Association secretary-general has revealed the world’s biggest solar market is unlikely to add more than 30 GW of solar generation capacity this year after just 17.5 GW was installed to the end of October.

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.