Energy

As off-grid solar systems expand to serve remote and underserved communities worldwide, digitalization has become a crucial need for efficient project development, implementation, and long-term sustainability. A new report from IEA PVPS Task 18 systematically explores digital tools across the entire off-grid energy project value chain, providing much-needed guidance for practitioners looking to optimize their operations.

Scientists from Spain have developed a daylight electroluminescence method that uses other strings to supply current to the inspected string. It was simulated and then tested in two 50 MW PV plants. Comparative assessment against lab-electroluminescence resulted in acceptable diagnostic performance.

Experts from Fonte Solar, Huawei, and Greener have exchanged solar-plus-storage tips, insights, and case studies at the invitation of pv magazine. In a panel at Intersolar South America 2025, they highlighted the need to understand consumption profiles and customer needs, as well as the technology’s limitations and potential.

Researchers in Singapore have accelerated the weathering of PV backsheets and investigated their flame spread behavior at different intervals. After 6 weeks, they found that weathered PV backsheets show 46% faster flame spread than unwearthered ones. They have also highlighted that current safety standards fail to account for long-term degradation.

The Estonian home and commercial storage systems come in low- and high-voltage models. The high-voltage option can scale to ten modules, for 100.8 kWh, and a six-module, low-voltage version to 45 kWh.

A team of scientists in the United States has combined both spatial and temporal attention mechanisms to develop a new approach for PV inverter fault detection. Training the new method on a dataset created in MATLAB/Simulink, the group has compared it to a series of other data-driven and statistical-based methods and has found accuracy reached 97.35%.

Turning challenges into opportunities as the U.S. solar and storage sectors enter a phase of major policy and market realignment.

The National Renewable Energy Laboratory’s tool helps public and private energy buyers, like colleges, utilities, local governments, industrial buyers and more, explore off-site electricity options with cost-informed insights tailored to their specific goals.

The Chinese company said its new microinverter supports four independent MPPT inputs with DC input currents up to 18 A.

LG Electronics and Octopus Energy plan to launch a joint solution in Europe integrating LG’s high-efficiency heat pumps with Octopus’s AI-driven Kraken platform to accelerate sustainable heating adoption.