Technology and R&D

India’s energy transition will not succeed without rooftop PV and roll-out is hindered not only by a lack of household finance, but by the fact many of the nation’s flat roofs are enjoyed by residents. Germany’s international development agency has proposed a solution.

Australia’s Commodore Independent Energy Systems has evaluated how much customers save by using solar water pumps compared to diesel or mains-connected pumps.

Urban Electric Power has been accepted into EPRI’s Incubatenergy Labs program to prove the value of its new battery tech to some of the top utilities in the United States.

Scientists in the U.S. developed a new cathode design for lithium-ion batteries that they say could open up a range of different materials for further research. The group has high hopes that the discovery can quickly be brought to scale, easing some of the growing concerns around supply chains for battery materials.

The use of ultrasonic sound waves has been applied to battery recovery. Researchers from the ReLiB project at the U.K.’s Faraday Institution say the process has already proven to be 100 times faster than conventional approaches. It is also much more sustainable and less energy intensive.

Innovations in green hydrogen are developing at a fast pace. This presents new questions like where are the markets, how fast will they come, how can we ensure hydrogen is green and cost-efficient, and what needs to be considered by project developers when planning related business models? And, at the end, will there be an opportunity for market players coming from the solar sphere? Watch our final Roundtable Europe video to find out.

Proper recycling strategies for perovskite modules could ensure sustainability and improve energy payback times, according to US researchers. They claim that the best recycled perovskite cell architecture could produce an energy payback time of about one month, versus 1.3 to 2.4 years for crystalline silicon modules.

Researchers from Hong Kong have applied a novel charge-reinforced, ion-selective (CRIS) membrane to a polysulfide-iodide redox flow battery they had built in 2016. The redox flow battery showed a capacity decay rate of just 0.005% per day for 1,200 cycles, and a lifetime with over 2,000 hours’ cycling, which the academics said corresponds to approximately three months.

The NewMotion electric vehicle (EV) charging business owned by Anglo-Dutch energy giant Shell has become the first such entity to obtain a licence to provide grid balancing services in the Netherlands. Dutch grid company Tennet has licensed NewMotion to provide megawatt-scale balancing services to maintain grid frequency at 50 Hz by varying the rate at […]

Australian company ClearVue Technologies says it has a fully transparent, scalable, industry-ready solar window in production. It claims that it’s now just 18 months away from cracking 5% efficiency, thanks to a research partnership.