Japan

Japan’s Toshiba says it will now focus on commercial and industrial PV, as well as the development of perovskite solar panels.

Makoto Tajima, an agrivoltaics analyst for Japan’s Institute for Sustainable Energy Policies (ISEP), speaks to pv magazine about the growth of agricultural PV in Japan, as well as cost considerations and the pace of technological development.

Mibet, a Chinese mounting system supplier, has completed what it claims is the biggest agrivoltaic installation in Japan. The solar modules for the 4 MW project in Fukushima prefecture were installed on Mibet’s agrivoltaic mounting system.

The Japanese solar market reached a cumulative installed PV capacity of 78.4 GW at the end of 2021, according to a new report from IEA-PVPS. Japanese analyst Izumi Kaizuka told pv magazine that the country could annually install up 6 GW of new solar in both 2022 and 2023.

The Tokyo municipal authorities are working on new regulations to make solar installations mandatory for new homes with total rooftop areas of more than 20 square meters, and for buildings with rooftops smaller than 2,000 square meters.

Toshiba has revealed that it has improved the power conversion efficiency of a transparent cuprous oxide solar cell to 9.5%, from the 8.4% mark it reached in December 2021. It enlarged the cell and suppressed carrier recombination at the edge of the cuprous oxide (Cu2O) generation layer, which usually causes generation efficiency degradation.

Japan’s latest procurement exercise was open to PV projects above 250 kW in size. The lowest price came in at JPY 9.7 ($0.066)/kWh and the allocated capacity was just 26.2 MW, out of 225 MW tendered.

Japanese scientists built a near-invisible solar cell based on indium tin oxide (ITO) and tungsten disulfide (WS2) as a transparent electrode and a photoactive layer, respectively. The cell has the potential to achieve a transparency of 79%.

Japan’s latest procurement exercise was open to PV projects above 250 kW in size. The ceiling price was set at JPY 10 ($0.074)/kWh.

The Japanese authorities will provide a maximum rebate of JPY 303,500 ($2,350)/kW for solar projects ranging in size from 10 kW to 50 kW. Projects above 50 kW will be assigned a rebate of JPY 205,900/kW.