Data | The collection of inaccurate data at any point in the life cycle of a solar plant will undermine almost every aspect of the investment accounting. Mark Skidmore, Samantha Doshi, Matthia Heinze and Christos Monokroussos from TÜV Rheinland discuss the importance of precision data gathering in mitigating risk for builders, operators and financiers
Quality | The speed of solar deployment in India has raised concerns that quality maybe sacrificed for expediency. As Tom Kenning reports, although there are warning signs of a potential quality problem, efforts are underway to nip it in the bud.
Risk mitigation | The EU-funded Solar Bankability Project has developed a framework for managing the potential legal, technical and economic risks associated with PV projects. Here, members of the team behind the project set out some of the key tools and guidelines that have been devised to ensure ongoing quality management over the entire lifecycle of a PV power plant.
This edition’s bifacial focus looks at cell types and module configurations, IEC standards to improve labelling and system design under varying climatic conditions.
As an important component of utility-scale PV, we cover a range of energy storage news, analysis and technical briefings.
We also take a look at module failure detection, the role of robotics, executing commercial scale projects, a summary of the core arguments involved in the US ITC section 201 vote and much more.
It’s always nice when someone tells you directly that you can’t do something to set out and prove them wrong. Photovoltaics International, its sister title PV-Tech.org and their publisher Solar Media were told in the early phases of planning the inaugural PV CellTech conference, that pulling together a string of CTOs and R&D heads from the some of the biggest firms in the cell processing supply chain would not be possible. Following the event’s second outing in March 2017, we have now done it twice.
The first appearance of a shingled solar cell interconnection pattern (see Fig. 1) dates back to 1956 with a US patent filed by Dickson [1] for Hoffman Electronics Corporation, which is just two years after the first publication of a silicon solar cell by Chapin et al. [2]. In the years that followed, further patents were filed containing concepts of shingling solar cells serving various module designs and applications – for example, Nielsen [3] for Nokia Bell Labs, Myer [4] for Hughes Aircraft Company, Baron [5] for Trw Inc, Gochermann and Soll [6] for Daimler-Benz Aerospace AG, Yang et al.
Understanding power losses in technical systems is vital to improve products in every industry and photovoltaic modules present no exception. Losses in solar modules are caused by optical and electrical effects or are determined by simple module geometry through inactive areas.
In the Chinese PV market, multi crystalline silicon firmly holds a large market share compared with monocrystalline silicon, entirely as a result of the development of the Chinese PV industry.
In recent years, potential-induced degradation (PID) has been recognized as a serious reliability issue for large PV systems, potentially causing efficiency losses of more than 90%, and even failures [1–4]. Such large decreases in efficiency may require the modules in the system to be replaced after just a few years’ operation. This has motivated a substantial research effort in the PV community, leading to a better understanding of the phenomenon, as well as to a range of mitigation strategies. A recent publication by Luo et al. gives a comprehensive overview of this research [5].
Although capacity expansion announcements in January remained subdued and followed the low level of activity seen in the second half of 2016, February proved to be the third busiest month since 2014 and the strongest February in more than three years. March did not maintain that momentum but still posted strong figures, the second highest March figures in more than three years.
