Manufacturing

Australia’s Tindo Solar has unveiled a new solar panel based on M10 wafers for residential and business rooftop systems. The new addition to the company’s Karra range has a rated power of 410 W at 20.6% module efficiency and 23.1% cell efficiency.

Hitachi Energy’s new production facility in India will manufacture solutions that support stable electrical networks and reduce energy consumption.

A new India Energy Storage Alliance (IESA) report projects electric vehicle sales to grow by as much as 49% per year to 17 million units by 2030, with electric two-wheelers accounting for almost 88% of total demand.

Waaree, a Mumbai-headquartered solar manufacturer, has obtained government approval for 4.75 GW of annual PV module capacity. It is also the only manufacturer to secure approval for 650 Wp modules in government-backed projects.

Jakson’s Helia series of 600 Wp mono PERC solar modules are now eligible for use in government installations and projects set up under government schemes and programs.

Haryana-headquartered Saatvik Solar has appointed Photovoltaic Solar to handle retail distribution of its PV panels in the Indian market.

Sales growth in India’s electric vehicle market will moderate to 75% per year over the next three years, as supply constraints drive up prices of key raw materials for batteries. 

A new report form analysts at IHS Markit notes that the market for module-level power electronics (MLPE) grew by 33% between 2019 and 2021, with around one-third of new residential solar installations now taking advantage of MLPE’s promise of improved safety, energy yield and fault detection. And with smaller, distributed generation systems expected to represent 43% of global PV installations between now and 2025, the opportunity for MLPE will only get larger.

In a study that began in 2016, US scientists purchased 834 PV modules, representing seven manufacturers and 13 module types, and installed them in various climate conditions to observe their performance over time. The results show that, while plenty of opportunities still exist to extend module lifetimes and reduce performance loss in the field, reductions in the manufacturing cost of PV have not come with an increase in their degradation rate.

Laser contact opening (LCO), a standard process in PERC cell production, has seen little market development in the past few years. Stiff competition from equipment suppliers in Asia, combined with the fact that most new n-type manufacturing doesn’t make use of LCO, has kept the level of interest here quite low. However, as the PV research community increases its focus on reducing silver consumption, new approaches to cell contacting and metallization provide impetus for a second look at laser processing.