Central & South America

A report by Finnish company Wärtsilä has estimated the potential impact if every dollar committed to a non-renewables energy sector recovery was instead funneled to clean power.

The municipal firefighters of Ullum have been working for about an hour-and-a-half to extinguish a fire in the inverters of the Ullum photovoltaic park, owned by Argentinian energy company Genneia.

A new algorithm identifies five kinds of faults in PV systems, while also detecting when faults have been resolved to prevent false detections. It is based on the least significant difference test, which is a set of individual t-tests comparing the means of two or more pre-determined groups.

It has already been a complicated year in terms of private investments in Mexico’s energy sector. And for solar, a lack of policy certainty and a government supportive of the fossil fuels industry are serving to further muddy the waters for projects already in development, while putting the brakes on any new plans.

The state of São Paulo’s energy supplier is seeking proposals for four floating solar projects, ranging in size from 1 MW to 30 MW.

Scientists at the University of New South Wales have developed a model to determine the levelized cost of hydrogen (LCOH) by also considering historical weather data at specific locations. According to them, powering electrolyzers with off-grid solar offers the advantage of avoiding the expense of a grid connection and exposure to the risk of delays in both the physical connection and the approval process.

Rising volumes of solar capacity are to be welcomed but, as panelists at a session of today’s SolarPower Europe event discussed, the technology must be kept ethical and responsible. That means industry working together; new, harmonized, mandatory and voluntary policy instruments; and a focus on quantifiable, life cycle-based investor criteria.

According to Brazilian solar association ABSolar, there are currently more than 300,000 distributed generation PV systems connected to the country’s grid.

The government has published new rules for distributed generation which will come into force on November 6.

Researchers are seeking to understand the extent to which sudden spikes in irradiance can affect solar power plants. The preliminary findings indicate large scale PV projects are not immune to such events, especially when the spikes last longer than a minute.