Solar Power

Despite a slow start and a downturn in venture capital and private equity funding, total funding saw a significant rise, including the largest amount of projects acquired in a single year to date and the largest amount of securitization financing ever in a year.

Italian researchers have engineered a hole extraction layer with water-splitting additives to reduce the impact of moisture in perovskite PV devices. They claim that the method ensured a power conversion efficiency of more than 9% in perovskite cells stored for a month in a water-saturated atmosphere.

Switzerland’s Smartvolt has developed a special mounting system that facilitates the quick deployment of small ground-mounted PV systems at the base of ​​wind turbines.

Proxy generation power purchase agreements, which were first used with wind projects, manage weather-related risks by settling energy transfers based on a proxy generation index, rather than on actual metered generation. Operational risk shifts from buyer to seller.

The Netherlands Authority for Consumers & Markets has established that the first-come, first-served principle applied by grid operators is the correct approach to manage current grid congestion. The decision was taken to resolve a legal dispute between Liander and an agricultural entrepreneur that was denied grid access for a PV project.

A Slovenian research team has analyzed the behavior of a full-size cell PV module and several 1/6 cell panels under partial shading and has come to the obvious conclusion that the cell cut panels suffer fewer energy losses. They also found, however, that the orientation of the cells connected in series should be aligned as much as possible with the shade shape to lower the losses and to minimize reverse cell voltage.

Renewable energy production increased by 31% and now represents 18.6% of the country’s electricity mix. Its cumulative PV capacity increased from 3,887 MW at the end of 2019 to 4,788 MW at the end of December.

Australian Vanadium is pushing ahead with plans to develop a vanadium redox flow battery for the Australian residential market, via its VSUN Energy subsidiary.

A new paper from scientists in China and Canada examines the recent progress in the development of perovskite-silicon tandem cells, finding a technology that’s poised for rapid commercialization, with a few research challenges still to overcome. These are primarily related to ensuring the perovskite layer can match the lifetime of the silicon cell underneath.

Power purchase agreements will be allowed between renewable energy producers owning plants with a capacity of more than 1 MW and electricity consumers. Local utility Kepco, however, will keep serving as an intermediary.