Technology and R&D

German company RENA Technologies has announced the first sales of a new tool for silicon cell manufacturing. The tool is used for etching/removal of unwanted material on one side of a solar cell, and will be integrated into the gigawatt-scale production of an unnamed manufacturer in South Asia working with TOPCon technology.

Japan’s Marubeni and Hamada have launched Rexia Corporation to offer solar panel recycling and reuse services across the country, diverting material from landfill and giving a second life to older panels.

Israeli developer Tigi Solar is deploying an industrial heat pump to support the heating system at the facility of a food industry enterprise in Israel. The heat pump has an output of 780 kW and a coefficient of performance (COP) of 4.6. It uses existing ammonia chiller waste heat as the heat source and can reportedly provide a hot water temperature of 65 C.

Engineers at Melbourne’s RMIT University have developed a rechargeable “proton battery” that has the potential to store more energy than currently available lithium-ion batteries.

Drax Group said it will expand the pumped hydro storage capacity of the Cruachan Power Station by another 600 MW to 1,044 MW. However, the project will require greater policy support.

Clever-PV has developed a manufacturer-independent energy management solution for homes. The app is free to download from app stores and can be connected to PV systems, wall boxes, heat pumps, and other smart devices. This allows users to optimize the use of self-generated solar power.

Scientists in Italy have developed a 5 kW direct-expansion solar-assisted heat pump that uses alternatively two different evaporator technologies. The cooling of the PV module unit by CO2 evaporation increases power production by 8%.

The hail storms that occurred recently in northern Italy damaged several photovoltaic systems. pv magazine Italy retrieved a report from the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam from 2019 which tried to shed light on the damage caused to solar installations by hail by analyzing the effects of a severe hailstorm that occurred in the Netherlands in 2016. According to their assessments, damages to PV modules are mostly derived from hailstones of at least 3 cm in diameter.

Researchers in China have found that the addition of serine cations to the electrode/electrolyte interface of aqueous zinc-ion battery could effectively inhibit zinc dendrite growth and enable a highly reversible zinc anode.

Researchers in Canada have found that nearly zero-energy buildings (NZEBs) with on-site solar energy generation should not exceed an energy use intensity (EUI) of 50 kWh/m2a, which they said corresponds to a maximum of 10 floors. They also ascertained that the maximum permitted EUI by net-zero energy status is 17–28 kWh/m2a.