Technology

In its latest monthly column for pv magazine, the International Solar Energy Society (ISES) promotes the biennial Solar World Congress (SWC), which took place in Fortaleza-Brazil in November 2025, a few days before the COP30. The SWC scientific program has traditionally been dominated by presentations on solar radiation and solar thermal applications, but this year, photovoltaics was the focus of most of the presentations. This reflects the massive adoption of PV all over the globe, which, at the current pace, will dominate the electricity mix by the end of the decade.

Only months after inaugurating the world’s largest sand battery – a 1 MW/100 MWh thermal storage system – Polar Night has committed to building a project twice its size.

A research team in Spain has built what it claims to be the world’s most efficient perovskite solar cell using MXenes or any other type of 2D-materials. The device relies on a Mxene interlayer that suppresses non-radiative recombination and improved charge extraction at the interface between the perovskite absorber and the electron transport layer.

Scientists in China have proposed a novel scheduling framework for microgrids based on hybrid PV and a small modular nuclear reactors. The framework uses multi-objective distributionally robust optimization with a real-time reinforcement learning mechanism and is reportedly able to reduce operational costs by 18.7%.

The Japanese technology company is offering three types of space-grade compound solar cell designs for satellites and spacecraft.

After last year’s slowdown, investment in China’s sodium-ion battery sector is rebounding in 2025, and one of the biggest projects yet has now entered the development pipeline.

The phasing out of net-metering for solar installations is incentivizing a growing number of citizens to install residential battery storage systems in the Netherlands. Analysts are predicting the upward trend will accelerate in the coming years.

Scientists in China have developed an optimized energy management strategy for a wind-PV hybrid heat pump system that uses both thermal and electric energy storage. Using different seasonal interaction management strategies, they simulated four operational cases.

UNSW researchers have investigated the impact of electron irradiation on PERC and TOPCon solar cell performance and have identified bulk lifetime degradation as main power loss cause. Their work stresses the need for increasing radiation tolerance in commercial space silicon solar cells.

Scientists in Ghana have developed a device that combines a conventional solar PV-powered steam cooker with sand-based thermal energy storage. The system can achieve a thermal efficiency of 38.9% and has a payback period of 4.5 years.