Germany

A set of amendments to Germany’s law that offer a rebate program for sustainable heating has come into effect on January 1st. The new rules grant rebates of up to 40% to help homeowners to buy and install heat pumps.

Jochen Rentsch, head of department at Fraunhofer ISE, speaks to pv magazine about recent progress in TOPCon module development, including new efficiency records by JinkoSolar and Jolywood. Production costs are falling as more Tier 1 companies shift from PERC to TOPCon, and multi-gigawatt production is already a reality. Could the TOPCon solar cell segment reach a tipping point for efficiency in 2023?

Germany’s newly installed PV capacity for November consisted of 596 MW of subsidized systems and 73 MW of installations built without public support. In the first 11 months of 2022, the country added around 6.8 GW of new solar capacity.

Germany’s Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy and a group of heat pump manufacturers have started a project to replace gas and oil heating systems in multi-family homes with propane heat pumps featuring low-charge propane (R290) as the refrigerant.

A German court has issued a preliminary injunction ordering Trina Solar to stop selling its Honey and Vertex X solar modules in Germany, as they allegedly infringe upon the patented passivation technologies of Hanwha Q Cells.

Germany’s latest solar auction allocated 104 MW of solar for buildings and noise barriers on motorways. The tender volume was 202 MW which went partly unsubscribed. The volume-weighted average award value fell slightly to €0.0874 ($0.093)/kWh.

A group of researchers from Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin (HZB) has achieved a new world efficiency record for a silicon-perovskite tandem solar cell, with a certified efficiency of 32.5%.

EODev will start delivering hydrogen generators by the end of 2024 to countries in the West and the Middle East, with a focus on regions with public incentive policies. German companies, meanwhile, have agreed to convert a gas pipeline network into a hydrogen pipeline network.

PV module prices have finally stabilized and a slight downward trend has even started to set in. Whether this will continue depends mainly on how demand shapes up over the next few months. The softening of prices reflects a gradual build-up of inventories which need to be drawn down again this year, if possible – even if it means slashing prices. But for other PV-system components, the situation is quite different, writes Martin Schachinger of solar wholesaler pvXchange.

German electric car manufacturer Sono Motors says it has failed to raise enough money from investors and is now trying to save its business by selling its Sion solar electric vehicles at a discounted price.