Modules & Upstream Manufacturing

An international research team has placed a neem oil tank on the back of solar modules for cooling purposes. The proposed solution reportedly improves PV panel performance by up to 17.8%.

Representatives from the European Solar Manufacturing Council, Ultra Low Carbon Solar Alliance, PVthin, and the Environmental Coalition on Standards have proposed changes to the carbon footprint accountability methodology, the use of green certificates, and the planned design of the Energy Label for PV products.

TU Delft researchers have proposed a new approach for solar cell manufacturing that implies gauging wafer thickness depending on the regions where the cells and modules will be deployed. They also suggested to adopt test conditions that are representative of the outdoor working condition of solar cells in an alternative to standard testing conditions.

The researcher team, from Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham university in Coimbatore, India, sandwiched macroalgae between a carbon-coated copper electrode and a titanium oxide-coated fluorine-doped tin oxide electrode. The 1 cm2 device exhibited a 1.25 mA photocurrent and 0.5 V photovoltage under UV light.

Power Panel offers a PV and thermal storage solution that combines simple, safe and easy to manage hot water with advanced thermoplastic technology and architecture.

The Silicon to Solar report, partly funded by the Australian Renewable Energy Agency, outlines ways to restore solar manufacturing to the nation with a little help from the country’s major trading partner – China.

The China Nonferrous Metals Industry Association (CNMIA) says that prices for n-type rod silicon fell 3.3% on a weekly basis to between CNY 55,000 ($7,600) and CNY 60,000 per ton this week. It reports that wafer prices also fell between 3.5% and 15.6% during the same period.

Maxeon said its new Sunpower Performance 7 panel series features a power conversion efficiency of up to 22.7% and an operating temperature coefficient of -0.29% C.

Sinovoltaics has analyzed listed solar panel producers over the past three years using a balance sheet-based model and publicly available financial information to track finacial strength. The top-five module makers of the new ranking are Tainergy, First Solar, Eterbright, Mission Solar, and Era Solar.

Researchers in China have fabricated a carbon-based perovskite solar cells that achieves almost the same efficiency as perovskite counterparts based on gold electrodes while also providing higher stability. The novel devices use a playdough-like graphite (PG) electrode that combines the deformable property of carbon paste and the solvent-free property of carbon film.