Australias battery pilot on a grand scale
Battery storage: Batteries are flavor of the month Down Under. A quick wander around the All Energy trade show floor in Melbourne in October made that instantly apparent with a big number of suppliers, both domestic and foreign, displaying battery solutions for residential and commercial customers. There is no doubt that Australia will follow hot on Germanys heels as one of the early solar+storage markets. Whether it will play out favorably to ratepayers and solar consumers alike is less clear.
Beyond Europes big three
European markets: While the U.K., Germany and France are firmly ensconced at the top of the Europes table in terms of annual installed PV capacity, significant contributions continue to be made further south. pv magazine brings the Austrian, Swiss, Portuguese and Spanish markets into focus.
Britains solar future in doubt
United Kingdom: After a few years of astonishing success, the U.K.s PV sector is in turmoil and is fighting for survival. This years Solar Energy UK, held in Birmingham last month, reflected on the latest policy changes and laid bare a crucial question: what is the immediate and long term future for solar PV in the U.K.?
Chain reaction
2015 supply side update: Paula Mints of SPV Market Research provides estimates of 2015 solar shipments, inventory, defective modules and prices, and analyzes how this ebb and flow compares to previous years.
Copper plating for PV cells
An alternative to silver paste: Copper plating is widely used both in the semiconductor industry and for bifacial and multi-junction PV cell designs. However, despite technical and cost advantages it has not been widely used for front-side metallization of standard crystalline silicon cells. Will copper plating replace silver paste for front-side metallization and, if so, when?
Dont sweat it
Inverters in hot climates: Heat, dust and humidity can be fatal for solar inverters. But as the PV industry inches deeper into the worlds sunbelt regions bringing ever greater thermal stresses to bear on components pv magazine learns that poor production will kill an inverter far quicker than any weather type can.
Fewer markets emerge
Emerging markets 2016: Ash Sharma, Senior Research Director for IHS PV Research, runs the rule over the potential solar stars of 2016, and concludes that the thirst for new markets may not be as pronounced in years past.
Fine-tuning the sun
Utility-scale monitoring: With every passing day more and more solar panels are installed at large-scale sites across the world. Each panel represents a new possibility in a cleaner energy future, but despite their durability, things can, and do, go wrong. But solars maturation has nurtured a growing monitoring sector that not only identifies and understands faults, but can offer predictive modeling to reduce risk before ground is broken.
Global demand rebound
NYSE Bloomberg Solar Energy Index: Strong China volume growth and upward guidance from some U.S. heavyweights drive index bounce back.
Growing pains & supply chains
Tracker supply chains: Reducing the costs within a far-flung global supply chain is one of the growing pains of the PV tracker industry, and luckily an exercise other industries have helped to streamline.
