Rooftop PV

US-based Maxar Technologies used satellite imagery imagery with resolution of 31 cm to 15.5 cm to identify rooftop PV systems in southern Germany. The company claims its new approach was able to identify 97.8% of the solar arrays with high confidence.

APsystems has developed an AC-coupled residential battery charger, offering the ability to connect up to four batteries in parallel, for up to 20 kWh of storage capacity.

In the last week of September, European electricity market prices rose from the previous week. For a majority of prices the weekly average was above €100/MWh and, in several markets, some hourly prices were above €200/MWh. The rise in gas prices, the decrease in wind energy production and higher demand favored this behavior. Brent futures continued to rise, reaching their highest level since November 2022 on September 27.

In a new weekly update for pv magazine, Solcast, a DNV company, reports that North and South America are set to experience an annular eclipse on October 14, which means that some regions could lose a significant portion of their daily solar energy production. The path of the eclipse tracks across the southwestern United States, from Oregon to Texas, before continuing through Mexico, Central America and ending in Brazil, though impacts will be seen across all of the contiguous US and the top of South America.

Munich-based startup 42watt will expand its fee-based services to simplify building energy efficiency renovations for homeowners and enter new market segments after raising an undisclosed amount of seed funding.

Solarstone, an Estonian producer of building-integrated photovoltaic (BIPV) solar roofs, has opened a 60 MW manufacturing facility in Viljandi, Estonia, to produce a broader range of design and performance specifications.

Scientists in India utilized solar geometry to create a novel energy estimation model that reportedly accurately predicts both the front and back irradiance of bifacial PV modules. The model achieved correlation coefficients of 1.04 and 1.40 for the front and rear side, respectively.

Researchers in Switzerland have found that the most effective way for governments to nudge homeowners into installing rooftop solar PV sytems hinges on individuals being told how much money they’ve lost by not getting it sooner.

Moroccan researchers have investigated the potential energy savings of PV systems integrated with biomaterial-based walls in rural areas. They say that solar-powered earth homes could achieve a levelized cost of electricity (LCOE) of $0.218/kWh.

Scientists in Australia have proposed to use a a propeller pico-hydropower turbine to recover the energy used for pumping water in a solar-powered commercial building. They have found that the mini hydro system is a relatively low-cost solution, able to recover approximately 10% of the energy used for pumping seawater.