Technology and R&D

The University of Sevilla has designed a PV-powered “smart” canopy that activates a thermal conditioning system to reduce extreme heat by up to 20 C.

The port of Valencia, Spain, is assessing the performance a vertical PV wall featuring 21 solar modules, with 8.6 kW of total capacity. A successful pilot project could pave the way for a larger vertical PV system on the port’s breakwaters.

Octopus Energy has agreed to invest $89 million to scale up Kensa Group, a ground-source heat pump business, while KfW IPEX-Bank has agreed to provide $129.6 million of financing to German heat pump manufacturer Valliant.

Researchers in Taiwan are proposing a market-based incentive scheme to help property owners to move from using their roofs for illegal dwellings to rooftop solar power generation. They found these owners should be rewarded for solar power generation but also be compensated for the income loss due to the removal of illegal rentals.

A group of researchers in Egypt studied the use of partially submerged angle perforating fins (PSAPF) and solid fins (PSASF) to assess their ability to remove excess heat from floating photovoltaics under Mediterranean outdoor environments. The team found that the optimized PSAPF-FPV module achieved an LCOE of $0.068/kWh).

In its latest monthly column for pv magazine, the European Technology and Innovation Platform for Photovoltaics (ETIP PV) presents its Strategic Research and Innovation Agenda (SRIA), published in collaboration with the European Energy Research Alliance for PV (EERA-PV).

Taiwanese manufacturer Winaico has developed new 525 W TOPCon solar panels with a power conversion efficiency of 22.1% and a temperature coefficient of -0.30% per degree Celsius.

Prefabricated floating solar PV provider Sunlit Sea, based in Norway, has provided its floaters for a 60 kW floating array installed at a waterpark in Germany.

New research from India claims solar modules with 3.2 mm-thick front glass may not be strong enough to withstand storms producing big hailstones. The scientists found that a front glass of at least 4 mm should be used to avoid significant damage.

Researchers in Korea have designed applied machine learning techniques to enable users to have more control of the timing of heating and cooling in air-source heat pumps. The system is based on backpropagation, which is an algorithm designed to test for errors working back from output nodes to input nodes.