solar modules

Japan’s Marubeni and Hamada have launched Rexia Corporation to offer solar panel recycling and reuse services across the country, diverting material from landfill and giving a second life to older panels.

Scientists in India have proposed a new classification of energy sources that is intended for the adoption and definition of emerging technologies, which they said conventional taxonomies fail to achieve.

Israeli developer Tigi Solar is deploying an industrial heat pump to support the heating system at the facility of a food industry enterprise in Israel. The heat pump has an output of 780 kW and a coefficient of performance (COP) of 4.6. It uses existing ammonia chiller waste heat as the heat source and can reportedly provide a hot water temperature of 65 C.

France’s new feed-in tariffs (FITs) for the second quarter range from €0.2395 ($0.2653)/kWh for installations below 3 kW in size to €0.1268/kWh for arrays ranging in capacity from 100 kW to 500 kW.

Botswana Power Corp. has launched a tender for the development, financing, construction, operation and maintenance of three solar power projects in Maun, Lobatse and Ghanzi.

Clever-PV has developed a manufacturer-independent energy management solution for homes. The app is free to download from app stores and can be connected to PV systems, wall boxes, heat pumps, and other smart devices. This allows users to optimize the use of self-generated solar power.

The hail storms that occurred recently in northern Italy damaged several photovoltaic systems. pv magazine Italy retrieved a report from the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam from 2019 which tried to shed light on the damage caused to solar installations by hail by analyzing the effects of a severe hailstorm that occurred in the Netherlands in 2016. According to their assessments, damages to PV modules are mostly derived from hailstones of at least 3 cm in diameter.

Researchers in Canada have found that nearly zero-energy buildings (NZEBs) with on-site solar energy generation should not exceed an energy use intensity (EUI) of 50 kWh/m2a, which they said corresponds to a maximum of 10 floors. They also ascertained that the maximum permitted EUI by net-zero energy status is 17–28 kWh/m2a.

Indian developers have completed 11 solar parks, aggregating to 8.521 GW, and have partially completed seven solar parks, totaling 3.985 GW, under the Indian Ministry of New and Renewable Energy’s scheme for the development of solar parks.

India deployed 6.8 GW of solar in the first half of 2023. The rooftop solar segment had 2,294 MW of capacity additions, which is higher than the total rooftop PV installations recorded in 2022.