photovoltaic

This article of the Women in Solar+ Europe series brings together experts and leaders featured throughout 2025 to reflect on why leadership must be redefined for today’s realities. Their insights highlight inclusion not as an add-on, but as the very heart of effective, future-ready leadership.

China will scrap value-added tax export rebates for PV products from April 1, 2026, while cutting battery rebates ahead of a full phaseout, raising export costs for manufacturers and potentially pulling shipments forward into early 2026.

Effective since January 1, 2026, the Solar Accelerated Transition Action Programme (Solar ATAP) aims to build on Malaysia’s previous net metering program’s efforts to maximize the use of rooftops for solar generation by incentivizing consumers to export excess generation to the grid. The capacity limit has been set at 100% of the consumer’s maximum demand, or 1 MW.

By 2050, sodium-ion batteries with fast learning rates could deliver storage at 11–14 €/MWh – cheaper than lithium-ion at 16–22 €/MWh – while also offering higher energy-to-power ratios and high cycle durability, a new research finds.

New UNSW research found that about 20% of solar modules in large PV plants degrade much faster than expected. They recommend holistic strategies such as robust materials, advanced designs, and proactive monitoring to decouple degradation pathways and prevent cascading failures.

China’s antitrust regulator has halted an industry-led effort to reduce polysilicon capacity and coordinate pricing, ordering full rectification of actions that contributed to rising market prices. Futures fell sharply after the intervention.

Polysilicon prices in China rose sharply this week as reduced output, higher costs, and strong downstream demand pushed transactions above CNY 60,000 ($8,590) per metric ton (MT). Module prices, however, remained stable, supported by firm procurement and tight wafer supply.

A Husqvarna researcher developed a fast, interpretable PV hotspot-detection method using IR thermography and Lab* color-space features instead of heavy neural networks, achieving up to 95.2% accuracy with shallow classifiers. The lightweight system works in real time on drones or edge devices and could save 17,620 kWh and 8.9 tons of CO₂ annually by improving fault detection in solar panels.

Aurora Energy Research’s latest report says Europe requires €600 billion ($700.2 billion) of investment by the end of the decade, increasing to €1.5 trillion by the middle of the century, to support the expansion of the continent’s renewable energy.

In a new weekly update for pv magazine, OPIS, a Dow Jones company, provides a quick look at the main price trends in the global PV industry.