Renewable Energy

China deployed 18.74 GW of new PV systems in July alone and may now cross the 500 GW threshold by the end of this month.

A group of Australian researchers say they have confirmed the benefits of combining rooftop solar installations with ‘green’ roofs with new research showing the combination increased solar generation by as much as 107% during peak periods.

Prefabricated solar that integrates single-axis tracking technology has been deployed in Australia for the first time with United Kingdom-headquartered Cambridge Energy announcing a 2.3 MW system has been successfully installed at a mine site in Western Australia.

The hub could potentially remove more than 1 million metric tons of carbon dioxide every year, or the equivalent of eliminating 220,000 gasoline vehicles on the road annually.

Extensive load-shedding, lack of grid capacity, failing coal-fired power stations, lack of progress in clean power procurement, and even vandalism have prompted various South African government departments to take renewables generation into their own hands, seemingly without any overarching plan, as Bryan Groenendaal reports.

In a new weekly update for pv magazine, Solcast, a DNV company, presents the solar irradiance data it collected for Asia in July. The data show that Super Typhoon Doksuri and the associated cloudiness could not bring monthly irradiance below the long-term averages for most of the continent.

Italian scientists have developed a flexible indoor perovskite solar cell with 32.5% efficiency. Their design uses a PET substrate combined with a tetrabutylammonium bromide layer over the perovskite absorber. This additional layer effectively reduces defect density and enhances the stability of the underlying 3D perovskite structure.

Recycling is of significant importance in a circular economy, yet some challenges have to be faced when recycling PV modules. The novel Hot Knife method to separate the crystalline silicon photovoltaic module front glass from the backsheet contributes only a few permill to the life cycle related potential environmental impacts of PV electricity.

US-based researchers have developed RoboMapper, an automated platform to accelerate the discovery of wide-bandgap metal halide perovskite alloys for next-generation solar cells.

Indian scientists have suggested building pumped-hydro storage systems connected to solar plants using mines as the lower reservoir and nearby rivers as the upper reservoir. They claim that the proposed combination may reach a levelized cost of energy of $0.2693/kWh.