Quality

With Kuwait, Qatar and even renewables laggard Saudi Arabia following in the wake of regional clean energy pioneer the UAE, a raft of huge solar tenders is entering the Middle Eastern project pipeline. Obstacles remain to overseas project developers but significant rewards are on offer.

California-based Hanergy subsidiary Miasolé and European perovskite research institute Solliance have combined their thin film expertise to produce a 23% efficient flexible tandem device consisting of a semi-transparent perovskite cell on top of a flexible CIGS counterpart.

The inverter businesses have responded to the letter published by the UK Solar Trade Association which was critical of the former’s products and customer service record.

Scientists from the Helmholtz Zentrum Berlin research institute this morning presented a new world record efficiency for a tandem cell combining CIGS and perovskite technology at the EU PVSEC conference in Marseille. The development of an organic coating layer between the two semiconductors was key.

Quality control and problem detection and classification was brought into focus at the conference in Marseille. A packed house at a session focused on the latest fault detection techniques indicated the high level of interest in the field.

On the first day of this year’s EU PVSEC conference, veteran solar researcher Pierre J Verlinden won the Becquerel Prize for Outstanding Merits in Photovoltaics. The award recognized more than 40 years as a leading PV researcher in academia and at leading companies including Sunpower and Trina Solar. Its recipient spoke to pv magazine about what is needed from solar to stave off catastrophic climate change.

The National Solar Energy Federation of India (NSEFI) is continuing to step up its efforts to ensure the quality of large scale solar projects. The body is now looking for stakeholder input into its new best practice guidelines for PV power plant projects, as a part of its ongoing Quality Taskforce initiative.

A consortium of European research institutes has received €10.6 million in EU funding to establish pilot production of a high efficiency module concept developed by Swiss startup Insolight. The module combines high efficiency multijunction cells with a solar concentrator lens and has previously demonstrated 29% efficiency.

Mathematicians at Canada’s University of Waterloo who turned their attention to solar power have developed an algorithm they say offers better control over PV plant output. The researchers estimate the algorithm could improve the output of a 100 MW power plant by almost a million kilowatt-hours per year.

A new test design from the University of Central Florida has challenged modules with different cell technologies. The results show advantages for the heterojunction modules tested. Here we discuss the new method with its designer.