Technology

The International Energy Agency’s Photovoltaic Power Systems Programme (IEA-PVPS) says dust, pollution, and debris on solar panels reduce output by 4% to 7% worldwide, costing the industry billions of euros annually and making tailored mitigation increasingly urgent.

Researchers in the United States have created a droop control strategy for grid-forming inverters that purportedly improves power system frequency stability. By using an exponential active power–frequency relationship, the novel technique optimizes the use of available headroom, reduces frequency deviations, and enhances overall grid resilience.

A Chinese-US research group claims to have achieved a power conversion efficiency of over 50% in an n-type single-junction solar cell by inhibiting light conversion to heat at extremely low temperatures. The result was achieved at temperatures of 30-50 Kelvin, which are a few tens of degrees above absolute zero.

Residential solar company Sunrun is operating the first vehicle-to-grid program in the United States, running a distributed energy power plant via coordinated energy dispatch from Ford Lightning truck owners.

After studying low- and moderate-income solar adoption for years, Lawrence Berkely Laboratory drilled down on three cities and captured why solar equity requires looking beyond numbers alone.

Nuclear plants generated a record amount of power in 2024, surpassing record set in 2006, but industry optimism is not backed by economic data or investment, says the World Nuclear Industry Status Report 2025.

Researchers in the United States have found microscopic pinholes in perovskites are responsible for the breakdown of such solar cells when under reverse bias conditions. They say the findings should push scientists and engineers to prioritize the production of pinhole-free films to make perovskites more robust and stable.

A research team based in China and the United States has developed electroactive polymer zwitterions to modify zinc oxide interlayers in organic solar cells. Their work was found to passivate defects in organic solar cells, helping to improve device performance and stability.

A research team from the U.S. National Renewable Energy Laboratory has analyzed n-type modules deployed in a 3 MW commercial PV project in an effort to assess the high degradation rate reported by the plant owner. The scientists found that ultraviolet-induced degradation (UVID) was a major factor affecting the facility’s performance.

Three US manufacturers actively working to commercialize their respective perovskite-silicon tandem technologies make the case for tandem modules. CubicPV, Caelux and Swift Solar argue a commercial future for perovskites is inevitable, and they tell pv magazine the current policy environment could work in the technology’s favor.