United States

The Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act would ban all imports from China’s Xinjiang region, unless the US government determines that products were not made with forced labor. The region supplies about 50% of the world’s polysilicon, which is an essential material in solar PV.

This year, residential solar reached several milestones in the United States, as extreme weather events have driven customer interest in home energy storage systems.

The transaction, for which Shell did not reveal the purchase price, will see the energy company pick up a U.S. project development pipeline which reportedly runs to more than 18 GW of solar generation and energy storage capacity across 26 states.

With Scottish company Smarter Grid Solutions having already seen its software deployed in the U.K., a pilot project in New York State has been a resounding success for a grid solution the NREL has predicted could unlock swathes of network capacity without the need for new power lines.

A U.S.-Israeli consortium is developing synchroinverters – inverters that mimic a synchronous generator and are able to actively respond to the grid’s frequency changes while stabilizing the voltage. The new devices are expected to do this simultaneously and provide grid stability services in less than 16.67 milliseconds.

As solar and storage technologies are deployed on the U.S. grid in record numbers, there’s no time like the present to take steps to prevent solar and storage from cyberattacks.

In 2022, the United States is projected to massively increase its solar and wind generating capacity, extending a nearly two-decade march toward a cleaner grid.

SEIA responds that a new round of tariffs will hamper U.S. solar development and forestall this administration’s vision of becoming a world leader in clean energy.

Two different technological developments were announced this week for concentrated solar power technology. In Australia, a consortium led by Vast Solar filed a patent for a new tank design for thermal energy storage systems. And in the United States, Heliogen announced the rollout of robots to install and clean projects.

Scientists in the United States developed a computer simulator that can calculate the conversion efficiency of different solar cell materials and configurations – helping to guide research and optimization of new cell designs. The simulator is available to researchers as an open-source tool to save time and spot the best opportunities for optimization of any given approach.