Modules & Upstream Manufacturing

The financing round was led by GitLab CEO Sid Sijbrandij and cryptocurrency expert James Fickel. Proceeds will be used to expand R&D, develop prototypes and add staff.

Making wafers larger as a cost optimization strategy is not an entirely new idea. But it has quickly gained ground this year among all of the leading manufacturers, turning the market on its head.pv magazine takes a look at how we got to this point.

“Determining how many years a solar panel will last can take, well, years.”

Executive jobs and job moves in solar, storage, cleantech, utilities and energy transition finance.

Also in the brief: Panasonic’s new solar modules

Few doubt that aluminum frames will be a part of the solar module for some time to come. And with PV manufacturing continuing to scale, the carbon footprint of this versatile metal may prove a sustainability challenge.

In pv magazine’s second roundtable session, Advanced technologies, the U.S. storage market came under the spotlight – in particular, the lessons that can be learned from solar as the market moves towards greater maturity. Also under discussion was the trend among PV manufacturers to producing ever larger cells and modules in the continuous drive to bring down LCOE. But is big necessarily better?

JA Solar has agreed to sell three solar farms to China Power Investment Corporation, while Tongwei announced lower prices on a number of cells. Eight leading players are calling for the standardization of PV products with 210 mm wafers.

The Chinese photovoltaic manufacturer said the recent invalidation procedure for its patent at the Chinese Patent Office’s examination and invalidity department is only an administrative examination procedure that only examines whether or not the authorized Chinese patent complies with patent law requirements.

A British-German research team claims that organic PV technologies may become mature enough to compete with crystalline silicon and thin-film products not only in BIPV, but also in power generation in the electricity market. In order to get there, however, organic PV products will have to achieve higher efficiencies.