FOTOTHERM

Scientists in the United States and India are investigating the impacts of soiling on PV installations in the Indian state of Gujarat. The group, which found that soiling losses for the state could add up to $12 million per year, is looking for low-cost ways to monitor and reduce the impacts of soiling on modules in the field. Image: Marai Kikai For dry and dusty regions in particular, soiling is a menace to PV performance. Soiling from dust and particulate matter buildup on a module’s surface is estimated to reduce a PV installation’s output by as much as 40% if left unchecked. And while effective solutions do exist, in the form of anti-soiling coatings for module glass and various module cleaning solutions, the whole PV industry can still benefit from a deeper understanding of the mechanisms at work in soiling. Scientists from Duke University in the United States, working alongside the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), recently conducted a field study to bring clarity to some of ...

Although perovskites are a promising alternative to the silicon used to make most of today's solar cells, new manufacturing processes are needed to make them practical for commercial production. To help fill this gap, researchers have developed a new precision spray-coating method that enables more complex perovskite solar cell designs and could be scaled up for mass production. Perovskites are promising for next-generation solar cells because they absorb light and convert it to energy with better efficiency and potentially lower production costs than silicon. Perovskites can even be sprayed onto glass to create energy-producing windows. "Our work demonstrates a process to deposit perovskite layer by layer with controllable thicknesses and rates of deposition for each layer," said research team leader Pongsakorn Kanjanaboos from the School of Materials Science and Innovation, Faculty of Science, Mahidol University in Thailand. "This new method enables stacked d...

The Chinese manufacturer has debuted two models in the new bifacial, double-glass series to join the scramble for a slice of the 500 W-plus market and to stake its claim to have the 182mm, M10 wafer adopted as the industry standard. Chinese solar wafer and panel manufacturer  Longi Solar  today launched its latest ultra-high power product: the  Hi-MO5  PV module. The company has opted to base the product on the 182mm 2  M10 wafer which it aims to make the  industry standard . There are two models of the new bifacial panel, with Longi claiming power output of  540 W  from the 72-cell product and 495 W from the 66-cell offering. The manufacturer said the panels were made with its innovative ‘smart welding’ technique to secure interconnection between cells, improving efficiency 0.3% compared to standard multiple-busbar products and reducing cell tensile force 20%. The double-glass, framed Hi-MO5 is strong enough for any terrain and cl...

Image: RES Group (www.res-group.com) French rail network operator SNCF Voyageurs will be the off-taker of almost 40 MWp from solar parks that UK-based RES Group will build in France. Through its subsidiary SNCF Energie, the French firm has signed a power purchase agreement (PPA) with RES, which will see the latter build and operate the photovoltaic (PV) parks from 2021. The contract has a term of 15 to 20 years, RES said on Thursday. The UK group will install the solar farms in the Alpes de Haute-Provence and Provence-Alpes-Cote d'Azur departments of southern France and will bring them online between 2021 and 2023. The combined output of the plants is expected to be around 60 GWh per year and their production should cover 2% of the required for SNCF Voyageurs’ entire rail train traffic power consumption. The UK group will install the solar farms in the Alpes de Haute-Provence and Provence-Alpes-Cote d'Azur departments of southern France and will br...

The Polish PV market is booming. Poland even turned out to be a solar surprise in 2019 and ranked 5th among the EU countries with the largest PV capacities that were connected to the grid in 2019 The positive development continues. According to PSE data and as of 1/05/2020, the installed capacity from solar farms was 1832.7 MW. This means that 137.35 MW arrived in April and 4.58 MW was installed daily. This is an increase of 181.42 percent year on year. However, throughout April 2020, the increase in photovoltaic plant capacity was 8.1 percent compared to March 2020. PSE data includes all PV installations reported to distribution companies, connected to both medium and low voltage networks. Act on renewable energy sources or the development of photovoltaics in Poland in 2019, the entry into force of the amendment to the Act on renewable energy sources, which introduced a number of significant changes in the support system for electricity generated from PV installations, pro...