Residential

The Japanese car manufacturing giant has announced the imminent launch of an all-in-one home energy solution, including solar panels, a battery and an energy management system.

The BIPV product is only on the homes of its employees (including its executives) right now, but Tesla predicts that it will begin producing Solar Roof tiles from the Buffalo gigafactory by year end.

Sleeker aesthetics, more user-friendly software, digitalization and full home energy management solutions strike the right notes on day one of Intersolar Europe, placing homeowners at the heart of the conversation.

Roughly 6.85 GW of solar panels were shipped in Japan in the fiscal year to the end of March 2017, from about 5.56 GW in the preceding year, according to new statistics from the Japan Photovoltaic Energy Association (JPEA).

Deliveries of PV cells and modules hit 1.7 GW in the three months to the end of December, down from 1.8 GW in the July-September period, according to the Japan Photovoltaic Energy Association (JPEA).

The French governenment announced that 361 projects were selected in the first 150 MW round of the 1.35 GW tender for rooftop PV. The next tender round will be held in July.

If approved, the new net-metering scheme would come into force by the end of this year. Power surplus woul be sold to the grid at a rate of RUB 1 ($0.0174)/kWh.

Video interview: Dirk Uwe Sauer, Professor of storage system technologies at RWTH Aachen, speaks about the future of batteries at the Energy Storage Europe 2017

Slovakia has seen small amounts of PV installed over the past three years. In 2016, however, the market showed the first signs of a recovery led by the residential segment. The country reached 545 MW of installed PV power at the end of 2016.

The Enphase IQ microinverter is around 30% lighter than previous iterations and will serve to usher in Enphase Energized AC Modules to the U.S. residential solar sector.