O&M | Operations and maintenance has traditionally been thought of as something that happens after a PV power plant has been built and connected. But as Emanuele Tacchino writes, planning for the successful operation of a project, particularly a new PV market, begins long before construction.
Market update | At the end of 2016 China published a long-awaited plan that will determine the course of PV deployment for the next five years. China solar industry expert Frank Haugwitz unpicks the plan and assesses the country’s chances of surpassing 100GW of capacity this year.
Finance | The emerging solar markets of Southeast Asia each present their own unique set of conditions from a financing perspective. Reporting back from the Solar Finance & Investment Southeast Asia conference in Thailand at the end of 2016, Tom Kenning looks at how a promising solar region is bringing in the investors.
System integration | Taiwan has set itself a target of 20GW of PV by 2025, but standing in the way of that are acute land shortages and some extreme weather conditions. Tom Kenning reports on the creative technological and construction solutions being found to address Taiwan’s unique challenges.
Operations & maintenance | Proposals by Chinese authorities to scale back the subsidies available for grid-tied PV will require new efforts to maximise the performance of power plants. Karl Hong Wan of the GCL Design & Research Institute explores some of the innovations in O&M practices that will help China’s solar industry cope with decreasing financial support.
Who’d be solar market forecaster? Shifting sands in the two largest global markets coupled with a patchwork of emerging demand, that could as easily deliver several gigawatts as they could nothing at all, make the job a tricky one. A swell of registered projects in China in H1 slowed progress in H2 and there are signs of more of the same in 2017. Beijing based consultant Frank Haugwitz takes a deep dive (p.18) into China’s 13th five-year plan including the real meaning behind its decreased PV targets and the benching of efforts to promote distributed generation.
This PV Tech Power special report is a unique industry resource exploring the trends shaping the fortunes of PV in Sub-Saharan Africa, a region that harbours some of the world’s most promising emerging solar markets.
This paper presents an in-depth analysis of state-of-the-art p-type monocrystalline Czochralski-grown silicon passivated emitter and rear cells (PERCs) fabricated in a near-industrial manner. PERC solar cells feature a homogeneous emitter on the front side, and an Al2O3 passivation layer and local contacts on the rear side.
Even though it is now more than five years since potential-induced degradation (PID) began to proliferate, and despite the fact that solutions are under development, it is currently still the most discussed mode of degradation associated with cracking in PV modules.
Conventional ribbons used for interconnecting solar cells in PV modules act like mirrors, causing a large proportion of incident light to be lost. Experimental results indicate that only around 5% of the perpendicular
incident light on the connections can be reused; as a result, this area contributes very little, if at all, to the current generation.
