‘Soft-connected’ floating PV for offshore scenarios
An international research team has tested a floating PV system with a “soft-connected” configuration under offshore conditions, using six modular pontoons linked by elastic bar elements to simulate mooring lines and connection ropes.
Eskom tenders 72 MW of solar
South African utility Eskom is searching for a developer to design, procure, supply, test and commission a 72 MW solar project at the site of an existing power station. The deadline for applications is Sept. 30.
NHPC accepting bids to build 1.2 GW of solar in India
NHPC Ltd, on behalf of Bundelkhand Saur Urja Ltd (BSUL), has launched a tender to select developers to build 1.2 GW of solar power plants (four × 300 MW) in northern India.
Bhutan commissions first utility-scale solar plant
The Sephu solar project currently has a capacity of 17.38 MW following completion of phase one of project works. Another 5 MW is expected to come online later this year.
Big Solar Co-op raises over GBP 1 million for UK coal mine project
Solar bond offered through impact investing platform provides community energy cooperative with funds to construct 3.5 MW project in Whiteborough, England. Big Solar Co-op plans to use European manufactured and second-life panels. The co-op expects to commission the project before the end of 2025.
Latvia switches on 94 MW of solar
Ignitis Renewables has started commercial operations at the 94 MW Vārme solar farm in western Latvia. The project is one of the country’s largest PV installations to date.
PV module fault diagnosis uses convolutional neural network
Researchers in China have created a dataset of various PV faults and normalized it to accommodate different array sizes and typologies. After testing the new approach in combination with the 1D-CNN machine learning technique under different conditions, they found an accuracy of more than 99%.
Cooling PV inverters with skived fin heat sink
Researchers in Turkey tested a novel heat sink design to cool insulated gate bipolar transistor (IGBT) arrays in solar inverters. They found that it reduced module temperatures by more than 6 C in lab experiments.
Norway deploys 49 MW of solar in H1
Norway’s solar deployment rate slowed in the first half of 2025 compared to the previous two years, as the government introduced new regulations targeting medium-sized commercial systems.
PV-powered liquid air system yields hydrogen, heating, fresh water
A global scientific team has designed a novel multigeneration system based on renewable energy and liquid air energy storage, then used soft computing techniques to optimize its operation. The optimized levelized costs of hydrogen (LCoH) were $1.52/kg and $5.22/m³.
