Solar PV

The project, set to be commissioned this year, will sell power to an unspecified industrial client under a power purchase agreement.

The president of the Caribbean island has announced several ground-mounted PV plants will be tendered, along with 60 MW of thermal power generation capacity. The projects are part of a plan to provide the nation with universal access to electricity during Jovenel Moïse’s five-year term in office.

The manufacturer says its new device is the highest-powered string inverter available. The Solis-255K-EHV, three-phase product has a reported efficiency of 99% – and a European efficiency of 98.8%.

Recovering silicon of the quality required for reuse in panels is at the heart of mitigating device carbon footprints. R&D efforts should be ramped up now, says an international research group, so the technology is in place when huge volumes of modules begin to need replacing.

The module is available in five versions with power output ranging from 310 W to 330 W and efficiencies between 20.22 and 21.53%. The Chinese manufacturer claims the BIPV panel has an oustanding flexibility with minimum curve radius of 25 cm.

State utility SA Water is partnering with an environmental organization to ‘re-vegetate’ almost a ton of native seedlings under a large scale solar arrays. Beneath the ground-mounted PV projects, native vegetation should return to the formerly agricultural land, and the resulting scrub is expected to protect panels from soiling.

Finnish company ICS has developed a foil which it claims can significantly increase the yield of solar panels, when applied to the edges of a PV module. Germany’s Fraunhofer ISE has confirmed that the increase in performance for conventional solar modules with the solar film is ranging from 5% to 10%.

State-owned power company China Three Gorges is reportedly ready to offer up to €600 million for 13 solar assets owned by X-Elio in Spain while Germany’s ib vogt is up for sale, according to Reuters.

The Chinese manufacturer has claimed a world record for a large-size, contact-passivated solar cell. The result, certified by Germany’s Institute for Solar Energy Research in Hamelin, betters the company’s previous record by almost 0.6%.

Two new pass/fail protocols are said to be able to separate cells which present high hot-spot possibility, show high current leakage and demonstrate intermediate behavior. The sorting technique relies on a manual solar simulator, an infrared camera and a tool to measure isolation.