“Solar cells prefer to operate in a refrigerator,” says UNSW Professor Martin Green. His global research team is now identifying viable ways to cool down solar PV modules while amping up energy production to an unprecedented level.

Plummeting costs, industry maturity, and the ever-increasing penetration of global renewables are expanding the use cases for battery storage technology. Over the past year and a half, storage projects are increasing significantly in both scope and capacity.

Since 2017, several European governments have announced bans on sales of conventional gasoline and diesel vehicles. Countries like France and the United Kingdom have set bans to come into force by 2040, while Norway has set a more ambitious goal of 2025. Raquel Soat, Research Analyst at Navigant, looks at how policy might affect European electric vehicle markets over the coming years.

The push towards higher-efficiency technologies drives innovation right across the supply chain. Long proven in the electronics industry, an electrically conductive adhesive (ECA) is now being deployed in heterojunction production, facilitated by new equipment.

There is a sense in the PV cell and module market at the mid stage of 2019 that the push towards high-efficiency cell architectures is accelerating. This makes the case for half-cut cells in a module more compelling, and the quality of the cut edge vital – argue laser process suppliers.

Solar pioneer Philip Wolfe lists the world’s largest solar parks. In these articles, a ‘solar park’ is defined as a group of co-located solar power plants.

Apricum’s Florian Mayr, partner and Head of the Energy Storage and Green Mobility Practices, Stephanie Adam, senior consultant, and Jesselyn Malimata, explore the true impact of e-mobility on stationary energy storage markets and applications.

By 2030, according to the United Nations nearly half of the world’s population will be living in water-stressed areas if no preventive actions are taken. Water reuse technologies and measures to reduce water usage can only serve as temporary relief for the upcoming water crisis. Jiajun Cen, CTO at Desolenator, lays out the case for solar powered desalination as a solution.

Vehicle-to-grid (V2G) is the technology that enables bidirectional charging – where an electric vehicle (EV) can both charge from and discharge into the grid. With V2G, EVs can play the same role as static batteries in managing local loads and participating in energy market value streams. Alexander Lewis-Jones, head of electric vehicles research at Delta-ee looks at the opportunities this technology provides, and remaining challenges to wider adoption.

Some manufacturers have started to bring self-learning algorithms and artificial intelligence into their monitoring systems and have indicated this in our market overview. In this way, they seek to reduce the personnel costs of O&M service providers. Although humans still have the upper hand in many processes, artificial intelligence is on the rise.