Germany

Developed by Germany’s Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems ISE and ASYS Automatisierungssysteme GmbH, the new machine is claimed to increase the print process throughput by a factor of 1.5.

Scientists in Germany have developed two kinds of solar cells based on n-type doped electron-collecting poly-Si on oxide (POLO) junctions with aluminum-alloyed p+ contacts. Both devices are claimed to be possible upgrades of PERC technologies. The best-performant cell is an IBC device showing a power conversion efficiency of 23.71%, an open-circuit voltage of 711.5mV, a short-circuit current of 41.3mA/cm2, and a fill factor of 80.9%.

A report published by Irena hints the world’s politicians will have to get to work immediately to avoid another generation of fossil fuel-fired hydrogen, ammonia, and methanol plants being set up to run into the second half of the century.

The company’s German customers can buy, together with the modules, CO₂ certificates so that the products are completely neutral. According to the manufacturer, the additional costs are about €11 per module.

The German battery manufacturer said this week its residential storage systems were automatically switched to a regulated stand-by mode in Germany. The background to the remote shutdown is three reports of explosions in houses in which Senec products were installed.

German renewable energy producer Trianel plans to buy solar power from residential PV systems via mini power purchase agreements, starting from the second quarter. It will then sell the electricity to the energy futures market.

The London-based analyst has published a series of clean tech predictions for the year which also highlighted the rising proportion of sub-5MW solar projects in the global market, and cheaper clean energy financing costs even as panel prices continue to rise.

The Korean manufacturer and the German research center were able to improve the performance of their jointly developed tandem solar cell by almost one percentage point.

A German research group has used spectroscopic methods based on terahertz or microwave radiation and has discovered that they might help with more precise assessments of the characteristics and performance of solar cells. Their proposed approach purportedly enables the evaluation of maximum possible efficiency levels for emerging materials such as perovskites in solar cells.

In other news, Belgian company Tree Energy Solutions (TES) is accelerating plans to develop the German port of Wilhelmshaven into a “world-scale” hub for importing green gas, and German engineering company MAN Energy Solutions will invest up to €500 million in its hydrogen-focused subsidiary H-TEC Systems.