Technology and R&D

There is a solid business case to combine PV plants with electrolyzers, as generation costs are low enough to competitively produce hydrogen as a fuel, says Bjørn Simonsen of NEL Hydrogen. He will speak at pv magazine’s Future PV event at SPI in Las Vegas.

In another breakthrough for the material so many solar advocates hope will replace traditional silicon in module production, a group of scientists in China and the United States have produced the first monocrystalline perovskite cell, which could accelerate its acceptance as a silicon replacement.

A collaborative project between the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratories and researchers from two Swiss centers has tested a range of multi junction cells in tandem configuration, and achieved efficiencies of up to 35.9%.

The gallium arsenide PV maker will collaborate with Audi on thin-film solar research, with plans to exhibit a PV-integrated Audi prototype vehicle by the end of this year.

The new 5 MW line in Silicon Valley will produce cells and modules under a new IBC technology from the company that makes the most powerful commercially available silicon solar products.

Belgian research institute Imec has achieved a conversion efficiency of 23.9% on a perovskite/silicon tandem module measuring 4 square centimeters. This efficiency level, according to Imec, represents the first time such a stacked configuration has outperformed a standalone silicon solar cell.

In this guest post for pv magazine USA, Enphase co-Founder and VP of Products and Strategic Initiatives Raghu Belur looks at the future of residential solar inverters versus AC modules, drawing parallels from the personal computing industry.

The BIPV product is only on the homes of its employees (including its executives) right now, but Tesla predicts that it will begin producing Solar Roof tiles from the Buffalo gigafactory by year end.

A team of scientists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Energy Initiative has developed a flexible, transparent solar cell, using low-cost organic materials and graphene. The researchers say this cell could turn virtually any surface into a source of power generation.

Richard Matsui, Founder of kWh Analytics, speaks with Varun Sivaram, the Philip D. Reed Fellow for Science and Technology at the Council on Foreign Relations and a professor at Georgetown University.