Accurate forecasting is becoming increasingly important as PV penetration grows. Jan Remund of Meteotest looks at some of the recent developments in forecasting science and the work going on to improve this vital aspect of solar’s interaction with the grid.
It was a turbulent year for solar finance in 2015 with big successes, more innovation and a few nasty surprises too. Mercom Capital’s Raj Prabhu takes a forensic look at solar finance in the last 12 months and the clues offered for the year ahead.
Solar’s widely heralded shift to self-consumption models has failed to happen to any meaningful degree. But as it remains PV’s only viable future business model, it’s time to get the project back on track, writes Gaëtan Masson.
As the economics of solar improve, merchant projects are already in place in Chile and various parts of the US. However, as lawyers from Chadbourne explain, financing them is
not a straightforward business.
An eight-page special report on the growth of solar in the MENA region, focusing on market opportunities, policy, technology, and operations and maintenance.
This issue of PV Tech Power explores how the solar industry can capitalise on the momentum from December’s Paris climate agreement, and the policy and finance levers it must pull to cement its place as a major global energy source. We also feature a series of articles focusing on Japan, whose future growth as a solar end market looks less certain than it has in recent years as it encounters political headwinds. We also feature the usual in-depth offering of technical briefings, with module handling, large-scale storage deployment and PV forecasting among the key themes in this edition.
The solar industry is going through the final stages of correcting its supply–demand imbalance, with the decision-making on technology choice for the next generation of GW-scale factory expansions becoming a key strategic issue for leading manufacturers. In contrast to previous capacity expansion phases – where new entrants largely copied known process flows and technology types – the next round of technology additions is seeing a broader range of influences, indicative of a new type of technology roadmap unfolding for the industry as a whole.
The backsheet is the first barrier for ensuring the reliability and durability of PV modules for 25+ years. To reduce cost, backsheets with a variety of compositions and constructions have been developed and introduced in PV modules. For PV module manufacturers, a major challenge is choosing a low-cost backsheet that can maintain the current levels of high reliability and durability performance. In the work reported in this paper, the properties of several backsheets of various compositions and constructions were compared.
This paper demonstrates that the future of the lowest-cost electricity generation from PV is not all about increasing cell and module efficiencies and minimizing cost/Wp, but rather squeezing the best out of a system using a few simple tricks, such as bifaciality, tracking and ground reflection improvements, to achieve the lowest cost/kWh.
A critical failure mechanism for PV modules is the degradation in performance as a result of exposure to temperature and humidity. In the case of flexible PV modules, moisture-induced damage becomes a greater concern, since the moisture resistance of barriers and polymer packaging is expected to be lower than that for conventional glass–glass PV products. The work presented here is aimed at establishing, through the use of accelerated testing, the field lifetime of flexible PV modules with regard to moisture-induced degradation.
