Renewable Energy

New research from Belgium shows agrivoltaic facilities with trackers perform significantly better than projects with fixed structures. The scientists found projects with tracking achieved an LCOE of €0.077 ($0.082)/kWh, while facilities with fixed structures were found to have an LCOE of €0.10/kWh.

Karnataka Renewable Energy Development Ltd. (KREDL) is seeking a consultant to assess the feasibility of a planned 500 MW solar park in the Indian state of Karnataka.

Samsung claims its new product is able provide domestic hot water of up to 75 C when the outdoor temperature is between -10 C and 35 C. It relies on an enlarged heat exchanger that the company claims is capable of transferring more heat compared to a conventional outdoor unit.

All new PV plants over 1 MW in the Netherlands will have to use a real-time interface to make their facilities better communicate with the grid operator starting from next year. Utrecht-based Withthegrid, has developed an interface that is compatible with a number of brand-name inverters.

Bangladesh Jute Mills Corp. (BJMC), which manages all government-owned jute factories and industries in the South Asian country, has agreed to buy power from six different project developers under a 20-year power purchase agreement (PPA).

Israel has announced plans to deploy 2 GW of grid-connected renewables. It will allow for additional renewable plants to be built without causing grid congestion, based on specific parameters.

Scientists in Turkey have developed a new algorithm to optimize the efficiency of PV-powered water pumps. The novel technique is based on the Extended Kalman–Bucy filter, which is a predictor-corrector algorithm used extensively in control systems engineering for estimating unmeasured states of a process.

Italian researchers have looked at the potential of thermal and electrical energy storage to improve self-consumption rates in buildings when coupled with PV-powered heat pumps. They have concluded that such an approach could yield self-consumption rates of more than 80%.

Toshiba has developed a 2,200 V silicon carbide (SiC) MOSFET for inverters and energy storage systems, in order to help inverter manufacturers to reduce the size and weight of their products.

In a new weekly update for pv magazine, Solcast, a DNV company, presents the solar irradiance data it collected for Europe in August. The UK saw on average 110% of normal August irradiance, with values exceeding this in the north. Spain and Portugal received 10-20% more than normal, due to reduced cloud.