Manufacturing

An order issued in late June instructed US customs agents to detain solar shipments containing silica-based products sourced from a Chinese firm and its subsidiaries. Three solar players may already have been impacted.

An Indian-Malaysian research group has investigated the effectiveness of several passive cooling techniques for solar panels, including the placement of plants around the modules or coir pith underneath them, both of which, surprisingly, offered good performance in terms of temperature reduction and power yield.

The switch from fossil fuels and nuclear will bring a jobs dividend thanks to the greater labor-intensity of renewables plants, according to a paper published by Finland’s LUT. However, the jobs dividend is unlikely to be evenly spread around the world, with Europe set to be a big winner.

Supersola has developed a 315 W, half-cut monocrystalline PV module. It costs €699 and can be coupled with other two panels to form a 1 kW residential PV system.

Bauer Solartechnik GmbH has released its new 400 W and 405 W BS-M10 PV panel series for rooftop projects.

Scientists in Italy have created a hybrid thermoelectric photovoltaic (HTEPV) system based on a thermoelectric generator and a wide-gap perovskite solar cell. The device is able to recover waste heat from the PV unit and produce additional power. According to its creators, this configuration needs large gap cells as these are less sensitive to temperature in terms of efficiency.

The clean energy arm of Reliance Industries Limited will invest US$ 50 million in MIT-incubated Ambri. As part of the transaction the two companies will also partner to develop and manufacture liquid metal batteries in India.

Mónica LiraCantú leads a research group investigating nanostructured materials for photovoltaic energy at the Catalan Institute of Nanoscience and Nanotechnology (ICN2). Recently, her group led a project that looked deep into the crystalline structure of a perovskite solar cell, revealing new information about the formation of defects in the material and how they could be engineered to improve both efficiency and stability. pv magazine caught up with the Barcelona-based scientist to discuss the state of the art in perovskite solar cells and remaining challenges on the road to commercialization.

Auto glass producer Asahi India Glass and polyfilm maker Vishakha Group have teamed up to set up India’s largest solar glass plant in Gujarat. The factory is initially planned to have a capacity equivalent to 3 GW of solar installation per annum. 

German researchers developed a lattice arrangement of three different layers of ferroelectric crystals that created a powerful photovoltaic effect.