rooftop solar

Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems (ISE) says Germany could deploy up to 500 GW of agrivoltaic capacity, based on a nationwide assessment of all agricultural land types and site suitability criteria.

The Netherlands-based solar façade panel and mounting system provider has added a new terracotta rooftop module to its product range. It also announced it is expanding it sales network and boosting its manufacturing capacity after raising €5.5 million in financing.

Around one-quarter of all new rooftop PV systems installed in Spain in 2024 included battery storage, underscoring continual growth in distributed energy, despite a decline in total installed storage capacity.

SolarPower Europe has underscored the role of domestic mounting system manufacturers in driving PV deployment across Europe, while calling for the adoption of international customs codes, stricter quality standards, and the inclusion of fixed-tilt racking systems in national resilience technology lists under the EU Net-Zero Industry Act (NZIA).

French engineer André Buhart has published the plans and open-source software to create a DIY “solar energy router” to manage PV overproduction. Depending on the configuration, the device can direct excess photovoltaic energy to water heaters, pool motors, or underfloor heating, among others.

New research on the PV markets of the four countries forming the so-called Visegrad Group has confirmed that solar prosumers are driven primarily by economic interests rather than environmental concerns. The scientists coined the concept of “energy self-defense” to define all those behaviors that push homeowners to resort to PV in attempt to address price shocks.

Scientists in Iran have developed a novel framework to optimize the capacity of PV and battery storage in smart homes, using a two-stage stochastic programming model. They considered the uncertainties in the grid, market price, and PV output, while also looking at different operation cases.

Turkey has installed about 7.6 GW of new solar capacity over the past year, driven largely by rising electricity prices and expanding uptake of net metering by commercial and industrial (C&I) consumers, Solar3GW President Yusuf Bahadir Turhan tells pv magazine.

Norway has introduced fiscal incentives for commercial and industrial (C&I) energy communities, exempting solar power sharing within a single industrial site from electricity taxes and grid fees.

An international research group has investigated how PV-powered heat pumps and district heating could be combined to heat a multi-apartment building in Sweden and have found that, of the three combinations they evaluated, relying on heat pumps as the primary heat source was the “most beneficial solution” in terms of operating costs and environmental impact.