Delhi-headquartered renewable energy firm Hero Future Energies has completed India’s first largescale solar and wind energy hybrid project in the state of Karnataka. The project at Kavithal, Raichur District,
which included an existing 50MW wind farm, now has a neighbouring 28.8MW solar PV site to form a hybrid system.
Despite the growing popularity of floating solar installations, relatively little is known about their environmental impacts on water bodies. Ian Jones and Alona Armstrong are leading a research progamme to understand more about how the environmental benefits of floating PV can be harnessed and the downsides minimised
Banks will be unable to fully finance solar on the scale envisaged in the transition to a low-carbon economy. Vicky Münzer-Jones and Stacey Giunta look at the role of solar bonds in bringing much needed capital to the sector.
BIPV systems do not follow many of the rules associated with conventional or ground-mounted PV arrays. Johannes Eisenlohr of Fraunhofer ISE examines some of the technical solutions being developed to simulate BIPV design and thus make it more affordable.
Potential-induced degradation (PID) is still one of the main reasons for unpredictable power losses in PV power plants. Volker Naumann, Nadine Schüler and Christian Hagendorf of Fraunhofer CSP and Freiberg Instruments present an approach for quick on-site PID testing of mounted PV modules, allowing PID diagnosis and prognosis of PID-related yield losses
Islands around the world provide ideal conditions for trialling new approaches to energy provision. David Pratt reports on some of the work going on globally to bring the benefits of cutting-edge renewable energy, storage and smart grid technologies to the world’s geographically isolated communities.
In the previous issue of PV Tech Power, quality assurance was considered as a key measure in maximising PV power plant performance and ensuring safety. Building on this train of thought, Thomas Sauer and Georg Fischer from EXXERGY examine insurance as a risk mitigation measure, based on analysis of more than 3,600 insurance claim cases.
The optimal and profitable operation of solar assets is become increasingly challenging as portfolio sizes increase. Stijn Stevens and Michael Matthes explore how device-level energy
forecasting is helping prioritise O&M activities across dispersed fleets.
PV CellTech has become the upstream PV industry’s foremost annual event. This year, a key topic for discussion was whether n-type silicon would trump p-type as manufacturers look to drive up efficiencies, as
well as the inevitable debate over the relative fortunes of multi and mono technologies. Tom Kenning reports from the event.
Two factors have coincided to stimulate the recent spur in interest for hybrid tandem PV technology based on crystalline silicon – the fact that balance-of-system (BOS) costs are increasingly dominating turnkey system costs, which strengthens the effect of high efficiency in reducing Wp costs, and the discovery of perovskite solar cells as a promising low-cost wide-band-gap partner for crystalline silicon (c-Si). This paper presents the progress and analysis of four-terminal (4T) perovskite/c-Si tandem technology at ECN part of TNO, with perovskite technology development carried out within the Solliance research organization.
