On the floor at SPI – touchless snow removal, perovskite tandem cells, gapless solar modules, more!
pv magazine USA is at Solar Power International in Salt Lake City, Utah this week and showing off some hardware from the floor. And most impressive is that innovation is still happening in solar modules, but also in many other complementary technologies.
Single-axis solar tracking for the next 30%
NEXTracker has refined its successful NX Horizon single axis tracker into the rugged two-in-portrait NX Gemini. The new design opens up land once considered too rough to be developed to generate near comparable amounts of electricity, while easing land use stresses.
Small solar is getting bigger, cheaper and more efficient
LBNL’s annual Tracking the Sun report, comparing 2017 to 2018, saw module efficiency rise almost 10%, system prices decrease 5-7%, median system size increases, and significant variability in all of those data points across the 1.6 million systems surveyed.
Hardware: Q Cell and Solaria all black, Sunfolding’s summer body, NY sheep services, more!
Hardware, get your fresh hardware! SunPower is releasing energy storage, solar module pricing looks flat, and make sure to shake pv magazine hands as we walk the floor at Solar Power International in Salt Lake City next week!
Solar power installation techniques – don’t do this! (w/pictures)
Solar installation inspection results of 100 sites in Rhode Island found 50% of large-scale projects had issues, while 83% of small projects had them – with 30% and 26% of those systems having “critical” issues, respectively.
Michigan utility seeks 775 MW of wind and – maybe – solar power
DTE Energy has issued a request for proposals for 775 MW of renewable energy to be built in state, and turned on sometime between the beginning of 2021 and the end of 2023.
Fitch sees a decade of corporate wind and solar power procurement growth
Growth in U.S. solar and wind generation capacity will average 7.9% and 3.9%, respectively, between 2022 and 2028 according to Fitch Solutions, who projects almost 120 GW of solar power to be deployed in that period. Corporate clean energy buyers are to be a large part of the trend, and to accelerate deployments during the period.
MISO seeks to make solar a dispatchable, intermittent resource
MISO is seeking input as it transitions solar power to being more highly integrated into its energy forecast modeling. This is happening as the volume of solar is booming, and follows on the grid operator’s success with wind power.
How solar power operations and maintenance costs fell 50%
Robb Wilson of sPower has seen the field evolve along with technology, and shared some of the institutional knowledge he has gained over the years.
Hardware brief: Sonnen gets smarter, tariffs biting harder, Vikram Solar’s new modules, more!
Only a couple of weeks until Solar Power International when we get to see the hardware in person – but for now, you get us! Kern Solar Structures galvanizes their steel well, a delta between 275 and 310 watt modules, and Solis is launching a utility scale inverter in the USA.
