Technology

India needs to adopt renewable energy and electric vehicles in a big way to meet the twin goals of energy security and climate protection.

Finnish clean-energy company Fortum has achieved the Lithium-ion battery recycling rate of over 80%—as against the current 50%—with a low-CO2 hydrometallurgical recycling process.

To enhance the effectiveness of settlement mechanism, the National Solar Energy Federation of India (NSEFI) has asked the Maharashtra Electricity Regulatory Commission (MERC) to allow aggregation of generation schedule based on independent power producer or quality coordinating agency and considering the same for calculation of deviation. Removal of the rescheduling charges and dual payment mechanism are among other changes sought.

Some manufacturers have started to bring self-learning algorithms and artificial intelligence into their monitoring systems and have indicated this in our market overview. In this way, they seek to reduce the personnel costs of O&M service providers. Although humans still have the upper hand in many processes, artificial intelligence is on the rise.

The high efficiency series can be used in multiple application scenarios like utility-scale ground-mount and distributed PV projects. An increase in the output of modules from 370W to 415W will help reduce the balance-of-system cost by 4.5% to 8.5%, and reduce levelized cost of electricity (LCoE) by 2.5% to 4.6%.

Amtronics CC has paid U.S. firm Quantum Materials Corp an initial $500,000 as part of an agreement securing the right to manufacture quantum dots and thin-film quantum dot solar cells based on QMC technology for commercial supply in India. Construction has already started on a manufacturing facility in Assam, which will produce solar cells via a continuous, rapid-feed, flexographic-based printing process.

Under this MoU, Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) would transfer the technology to Tata Chemicals so that it may manufacture lithium-ion cells of varying capacity, size, energy density and power density—catering to a wide spectrum of power storage requirements.

The Ministry of New and Renewable Energy has addressed complaints by solar developers about a lack of power evacuation infrastructure by changing its solar park guidelines. Under the new rules, though, developers are likely to incur higher costs.

GE Renewable Energy will implement, in the state of Rajasthan, an advanced grid management project that will provide real-time data monitoring to better understand current and future energy usage and enable transmission of renewable energy based on demand.