Technology and R&D

The US National Renewable Energy Laboratory has released a free, web-based platform for automatic residential solar permit approvals.

The manufacturer said the 40/40 warranty is the longest and most comprehensive combined warranty offered in the photovoltaic industry to date. The product line is sold in most countries outside the United States and Canada under the SunPower Maxeon brand.

Canadian companies Invinity and Elemental Energy are planning to couple a 21 MW solar plant under development in Alberta with 8.4 MWh of vanadium redox flow battery storage capacity.

Developed by French start-up Ecosun, the trailer is equipped with 15 solar panels with output of 360 W and batteries with a storage capacity of 23 kWh. It can be used for construction sites, military camps and water pumping systems.

Churches use energy mostly during the day, which makes them ideal buildings to deploy solar panels. Scientists in the United Kingdom have assessed the financial viability of a rooftop PV project for Bath Abbey and found that it could become profitable after 13 years.

Chinese scientists used perovskitoids as 1D and 0D capping layer materials for the cell’s perovskite layer. These materials enabled an effective and all-around passivation of the perovskite surfaces and grain boundaries, which prevents undesired Shockley-Read-Hall recombination and material degradation. The device achieved a power conversion efficiency of 24.18%, an open-circuit voltage of 1.151 V, a short-circuit current of 25.96 mA/cm2, and fill factor of 80.91%. 

Researchers from German research institutes and companies are working on applying semiconductors based on gallium nitride (GaN) to string inverters with the aim of enabling cost and weight reduction while maintaining very high efficiency. These devices are expected to support grid operations through faster switching processes.

Spire Solar Iberia has developed a state-of-the-art XL solar simulator that is able to measure the maximum power of photovoltaic modules of any size with high precision and to identify those with low performance.

Researchers in Thailand have developed an anti-reflective and anti-soiling coating for commercial solar modules that is claimed to increase power yield by over 6%. The coating has photocatalytic properties that make the organic compounds adsorbed on the solar module surface decompose, thus preparing them to be easily washed off by rainwater.

Scientists in Korea have developed an efficient synthesis route to produce a novel co-doped anode material for rechargeable seawater batteries. They developed a one-step plasma-in-liquid process to synthesize nitrogen and sulfur co-doped carbon-based anode material, which displayed great potential for seawater batteries.