Germany

The pilot project is aimed at powering small electric aircraft. It is located in the southeast of England and was developed with 33 modules from Q-Cells.

Scientists in Germany designed a poly-Si on oxide (POLO) interdigitated back-contact (IBC) solar cell integrating photon crystals and found this architecture has the potential to reach a power conversion efficiency of over 28%, which would be 1% higher than the current practical limit set by the scientific community. They also found that by improving passivation, the efficiency may be raised up to 29.1%.

The list of planned gigawatt-scale battery cell manufacturing plants in Europe has grown, with Anglo-Korean battery maker Eurocell announcing plans for a gigafab in Western Europe to start manufacturing at scale within 12 months.

The stadium of German football club SC Freiburg will host a 2.4MW rooftop solar array that will be built with heterojunction modules provided by Swiss manufacturer Meyer Burger.

TOPCon solar modules will gain more market share if their average efficiency, already higher than that of PERC panels, continues to improve, according to Stefan Glunz, PV research chief at Germany’s Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems ISE. In an upcoming pv magazine webinar on the potential of TOPCon tech, Glunz will show how to reduce costs and increase efficiency.

Germany’s Sunfarming is testing the new project design in cooperation with research centers Jülich and the Fraunhofer ISE.

Through a conventional coloring technique for crystalline solar modules, scientists in Germany were able to manufacture a colorized small perovskite solar module in white marble optic displays that maintains up to 88.5% of the efficiency it had before coloring. The device was built with five cells interconnected in series and has a total area of 9cm².

Researchers at Germany’s Fraunhofer ISE have estimated the costs for both alkaline (AEL) and proton exchange membrane (PEM) electrolyzers and have found that AEL systems have bigger margins for cost reduction. According to their calculations, the costs of a large scale AEL electrolyzer with a capacity of 100MW should drop from €663/kW in 2020 to €444 in 2030.

In 2002, the Fraunhofer ISE patented the HERIC circuit for highly efficient inverters. Since then, the institute says, it has recorded out-of-court settlements in seven patent infringement lawsuits against companies from China, Taiwan and Germany.

Perovskite-silicon tandem cells offer one of the surest pathways to much higher solar efficiencies, one that has moved close to commercialization in the past few years. Much of the work getting to this stage has naturally focused on developing a viable perovskite top cell. Optimizations to the silicon layer underneath, however, will also be important to the overall device function and efficiency. Scientists in Germany examined five different silicon cell concepts similar to those in mass production today, finding that with a few optimizations these could reach efficiencies up to 30.4%.