Technology and R&D

An international team of economists says power-to-gas may already generate hydrogen at costs competitive with fossil fuel power plants in Germany and Texas, provided certain production output levels are not exceeded. If medium and small power-to-gas is competitive, large-scale should be viable by 2030.

The Saudi energy company and Chinese inverter maker and comms firm will team up to use information and communications technology to improve the performance of the former’s PV plants.

Although light on detail, Hydrogenics Corp’s announcement of an electrolyzer project win appears to signal the North American nation has swelled the number of power-to-gas schemes worldwide – and this one should be in operation next year.

Glass-glass modules are built to survive the toughest conditions and can deliver module lifetimes far exceeding the 20-30 years expected of glass-foil. The module concept is ideally positioned to catch the building bifacial wave, but only if quality concerns are addressed, warn some experts in the field.

A team of researchers at NYU have presented a new chemical reactor type that synthesizes a precursor for nylon production through electrosynthesis, rather than a thermal based reaction.

Researchers want to better understand how hydrogen atoms may improve the performance of phosphorus-doped polycrystalline silicon (poly-Si) films for passivating contact solar cells.

The module was developed by Insolight, a spin-off of Switzerland’s École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne. The panel is based on tiny solar cells usually used for spaceflight applications and the limited amount used in the module makes it close to mass production, its creators claim.

The Singapore research institute will cooperate with China’s Ruxing Technology to increase the efficiency of its monoPoly™ technology. Through this cooperation, SERIS believes its solar cell efficiency could be raised to 24%, and module power beyond 345 W.

The Energy Storage Europe conference is nearing and pv magazine is featuring the top ten developments in the field as our Energy Storage Highlights, selected by an independent jury of experts. We continue our ranking with a renewed approach to a storage technology which appeared in the 1970s.

Some 377 households and a retirement home are participating in a pilot project. In the first two weeks of this month, solar power generators sold 82% of their electricity within the neighborhood. The goal of the one-year test run is to develop a viable concept for the local marketing of solar power.