science

Nuclear plants generated a record amount of power in 2024, surpassing record set in 2006, but industry optimism is not backed by economic data or investment, says the World Nuclear Industry Status Report 2025.

A Japanese research team has evaluated the affordability of photovoltaic-battery systems featuring heat-pump water heaters and air conditioning units across nine regions of Japan. They analyzed three price policies and two loan types, identifiying a tradeoff between net demand and cost according to the capacity of the solar-plus-storage system.

A new collaborative study between six universities, including three in Australia, has demonstrated how caesium bromide can significantly improve the efficiency of crystalline silicon solar cells.

The efficiency result was confirmed by the U.S. National Renewable Energy Laboratory. The module was fabricated with 13.4%-efficient kesterite cells designed with high film porosity and uniformity.

Scientists in Hungary have built a prototype of a thermal distillation device, supported by PV power. The PV panels use an IoT component that self-cleans when dust is detected and cools itself when the temperatures are too high. The system achieved a daily freshwater yield of 6.1 L/m2⋅day.

A research team from the U.S. National Renewable Energy Laboratory has analyzed n-type modules deployed in a 3 MW commercial PV project in an effort to assess the high degradation rate reported by the plant owner. The scientists found that ultraviolet-induced degradation (UVID) was a major factor affecting the facility’s performance.

Scientists in China have investigated the hydrodynamic performance of a novel modular floating photovoltaic system. They did so using a novel hybrid approach, which integrates viscous-flow effects from computational fluid dynamics into a potential-flow solver. They analyzed the new system with varying numbers of panels, either in a single chain or a parallel configuration.

Scientists in Belgium have investigated how perovskite absorbers used in solar cell degrade under three different stress test types and have found that the interface between the perovskite layer and the electron transport layer suffers from weak thermomechanical stability, which creates the conditions for performance losses.

Researchers in Spain investigated effective separation of encapsulants from PV glass with a focus on melting behavior and resistance to the hot knife-method of delamination. The results indicated that thermoplastic polyolefin encapsulants were the easiest to remove from the PV glass.

Researchers in China have investigated four strategies that minimize TOPCon solar cell surface recombination centers and improve light trapping performance. They identified alkali polishing with micro-texturing as the most suitable technique to improve TOPCon cell open-circuit voltage and fill factor and the overall device performance.