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.
PV manufacturing capacity expansion announcements in the first quarter of 2018 continued to mirror those of the previous two years, highlighting the recent trend of the last quarter and the first quarter of each year (since the end of 2015) being the most active. The quarter being discussed also represents a revival in thin-film expansion plans, the return of PV module assembly outpacing solar cell announcements and the return of India and the US as major destinations for new capacity plans.
As the PV industry strives to reach terawatt scale, addressing the last remaining cost centres of the crystalline silicon value chain will play a critical role in ensuring that the industry can continue to achieve lower systems costs, and provide the extremely low levelized cost of electricity (LCOE) required to drive the adoption of this form of energy. Wafer manufacturing remains the single largest cost driver in industrial cell production. While incremental improvements, such as diamond wire (DW) sawing, have helped to lower silicon consumption, wafer manufacturing has lacked the significant step change necessary for achieving dramatic cost reduction.
