Technology

Dubai-based Floating Man is currently negotiating contracts for the deployment of a novel floating structure for offshore solar. A 900 m2 system built with the floaters could support up to 200 solar panels.

Developed by a US-Saudi research group, the novel technique employs two 45-degree inclined mirrors on the two sides of a PV module. On the back side, a spectral selective reflector enables the thermal radiation to be directed to the sky while preventing the back of a module from heating up by the scattered sunlight.

The result was certified by Fraunhofer ISE CalLab. The cell uses a top inverted PV device using an electron transport layer made of thermally evaporated buckminsterfullerene (C60) with minimized parasitic optical absorption.

Researchers at the Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics (DICP) in China have developed a 70 kW-level vanadium flow battery stack. The newly designed stack comes in 40% below current 30 kW-level stacks in terms of costs, due to its volume power density of 130 kW/m3.

Germany’s Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems (Fraunhofer ISE) says rising CO2 prices could make PV-powered heat pumps the most cost-effective choice for residential heating in the country, with heat pump uptake and district heating adoption proving more economical than replacing gas heating.

Researchers in China have designed a heat-driven thermoacoustic refrigerator/heat pump for room refrigeration. They said the system is easily combinable with PV energy and its coefficient of performance can reach up to 1.69.

An international research team built the triple-junction device with dual bulk and interface passivation technique aimed at promoting halide homogeneity at the interface between the perovskite absorber and the hole-transport-layer. The 0.049 cm2 cell achieved a remarkable open-circuit voltage of 3.33 V and was also able to retain 80% of its initial efficiency after 200 h of continuous maximum power point tracking.

Pioneer Power Solutions has announced a new lithium battery trailer for electric-vehicle charging and disaster recovery.

SAJ’s new M2 microinverters support PV panels ranging in size from 400 W to 700 W. They have a maximum output of 2,250 VA, with four maximum power point tracking (MPPT) channels. The company claims a peak efficiency of 97%.

The Chinese manufacturer said its new TSM-NEG9RC.27 and TSM-NEG18R.28 combine n-type technology with 210mm rectangular silicon wafer (210R) cell technology. Their temperature coefficient is -0.29% per C and their efficiency can reach up to 22.3% and 22.7%, respectively.