The inventors of PERC solar PV technology were awarded the 2023 Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering this week, in recognition of the transformative role that the technology has played in raising the efficiency and lowering the cost of solar PV and making it a cornerstone of the renewable energy transition across the globe.
The recent swathe of announcements from US policymakers – coupled with growing geopolitical unrest regarding Chinese manufacturing dominance and the role of solar PV from an energy security standpoint – has the potential to redefine PV technology, manufacturing and component supply chains in a way that the industry has never seen before, writes Finlay Colville, head of research at PV Tech.
Australian solar equipment manufacturer 5B has been appointed to supply its Maverick module technology to a 95MW hybrid power station in Western Australia.
With silicon material and wafer prices on the rise, the impact is being felt further downstream amid warnings module prices could continue increasing this month.
2022 saw the arrival of DAS Solar as one of the PV industry’s rising stars, the five-year-old company attracting strategic investment from, among others, China Merchants Venture Capital, Three Gorges Capital and Yongfu Shares.
Amid potential supply chain bottlenecks as China increases its PV manufacturing dominance, companies in markets such as the US, India and Europe are looking to leverage new policy support to scale up domestic production. Jules Scully charts the industry’s efforts to onshore solar module manufacturing.
The future of solar module deployment may be rooted in mass, rapid deployment rather than precisely tilted, steel-mounted and spaced-out panels extending over acres of land. So says Australian company 5B, which manufactures accordion-style folding solar arrays that arrive at a project site flat-packed and ready to be deployed.
