Hardware brief: Solar panel cleaning robots, Humless’ 5kWh battery, IronRidge’s minimalist racking, more!
Intersolar is in a few weeks, so get your hardware press release out to USA-Editors@pv-magazine.com. In the meantime, modules are holding under 20¢/W, and “large wafers” are coming in a year or three!
Innovation shines at pv magazine awards ceremony in Abu Dhabi
The winners of the 2019 pv magazine awards have been recognized in a ceremony alongside the World Future Energy Summit. The victors spoke of the importance of innovation in the industry.
Dan Shugar, NEXTracker CEO, riffs on tracker innovation, bifacial panels and getting acquired by Flex
While trackers for solar panels might seem a bit mundane, once you stumble into CEO Dan Shugar’s reality distortion field, trackers become kind of sexy.
Repowering solar power plants for need and greed
Alencon’s silicon carbide-based SPOT allows for repowering solar power plants that need to replace 600V inverters with newer 1000V/1500V gear, or for those that wish to maximize electricity generation at ageing and imperfect facilities with creative engineering techniques.
Why don’t early-stage VCs invest in solar any more?
How will solar startups innovate in the 2020s? Where are the disruptive PV technologies?
Enphase prepping commercial inverters and a small-scale, off-grid solar-plus-storage box
Enphase also showed off a 640-watt, two-module commercial inverter and a solar-plus-storage package for two solar modules at its analyst day.
Deeper analysis of bifacial solar panel data – including greater cooling and how DC to AC ratios affect clipping
Soltec single axis tracker research shows greater production in a two-in-portrait configuration versus a single module by just over 2%, driven mostly by lower module temperatures as well hardware design adjustments.
All I want for Christmas is a solar power plus Enphase Ensemble battery backup
Enphase has released training materials and a pre-order page for its home energy storage product – the Ensemble. Here we review the hardware specs and the installation directions.
Hardware – energy storage – brief: Sunverge+LG, SMA+Dynapower, Cybertruck (Updated), more!
Since we got a lot of energy storage links this week, we decided to throw a whole bunch in at once! As well, we see that polysilicon modules are still edging downward in price, Green Rhino has a portable solar+storage system, the EIA showing that most energy storage installed in the USA is lithium ion, and a bit more!
‘Economic Curtailment’ – what it is and how to embrace it
In this op-ed for pv magazine, Morgan Putnam outlines a five-step process for renewable developers, environmental advocacy organizations and state agencies to embrace economic curtailment.
