Technology and R&D

At Intersolar Europe, Gamesa Electric’s solar sales director, Enrique de la Cruz explained the key to ensuring high reliability and a low energy price with the company’s new central inverter offering.

The former director of Fraunhofer ISE will be officially elected at a general assembly planned for September. The ESCM wants a strong Europe to be part of the Fourth Industrial Revolution and also pay attention to sustainability.

A team of researchers from Manchester University claims to have identified the dominant process causing light-induced degradation in silicon solar cells. The process, termed “trap-assisted auger recombination”, arises from a defect in the bulk of the silicon material which lies dormant until exposed to sunlight.

The two Chinese companies will acquire 30% shares in each other’s respective wafer and silicon businesses and plan to purchase at least 75% of each other’s future output, as part of a complex mutual investment arrangement announced ahead of the SNEC PV Power Expo 2019.

At The smarter E Europe trade show, held in Munich in May, pv magazine was invited for another iteration of its Quality Roundtable events. Experts from manufacturing, project planning, finance and testing took the stage to inform the crowd on quality issues with modules, cables and inverters.

JinkoSolar today announced that it has set a new efficiency record for a monocrystalline PERC PV cell at 24.38%, and produced a module that achieved 469.3 W power in testing conducted by TÜV Rheinland. The Chinese module manufacturer also equalled a record claimed just last week by Trina Solar, of 24.58% conversion efficiency for an n-type monocrystalline cell.

While market experts suggest solid-state battery technology will not play a significant role in the storage industry until 2025, one company may be leading the race. Blue Solutions, electrical energy storage award winner at The smarter E Europe in Munich, Germany, says it has developed the only commercialized solid-state lithium battery. pv magazine caught up with the company around the European trade show to discuss its award-winning technology and unique position in the market.

A Russian research team believes that the addition of rare-earth ions into the structure of photonic nanoparticles could help to increase the efficiency of industrial solar cells to 25–30%. However, they also said that further research is necessary.

Australia’s national science agency CSIRO and Canada’s University of British Columbia have announced a memorandum of understanding aimed at accelerating clean hydrogen technologies.

At the beginning of the decade, Zhengrong Shi, at that time founder and CEO of Suntech, was one of the most influential people in solar. After the Chinese module manufacturer ran into troubles in 2013, he had to go and, thus, slipped out of the spotlight. Now he is back as founder of Sunman, a company specializing in lightweight crystalline modules using polymer composite materials instead of glass. pv magazine caught up with him at Intersolar Europe 2019.