GIZ, Germany’s development agency, has partnered with India‘s Ministry of New and Renewable Energy to follow up on its successful “kW-to-kWh” study, which has become a quality benchmark for MNRE’s projects in India. PI Berlin acted as lead consultant on the project, and Asier Ukar, senior consultant and managing director of PI Berlin S.L., shares some of the key conclusions.

AC Energy has revealed plans to invest in solar projects throughout Asia, including Bangladesh, by forming a joint venture with Germany’s ib vogt GmbH.

The US manufacturer has expanded the battery capacity options for its SunVault Storage product, up to 26 kWh and 52 kWh configurations.

India installed 14GW of new PV in 2021. This year, utility-scale developers are pushing to import modules and build inventory for 2022 installations, before a basic customs duty goes into effect in May, with a 40% duty for module imports and 25% for cells. PV module distributors are also expected to build their inventories to save on duties and have enough supply for the C&I segment in 2022. After assessing the country’s current demand, project pipeline, and module availability, IHS Markit’s Dharmendra Kumar forecasts 18GW to be added in 2022.

The NX Horizon-XTR tracker can be used with all types of modules and is claimed to be an ideal solution for sloping, uneven, and demanding terrain.

“We’re not talking about incremental improvement, this is a really giant leap,” Hysata CEO Paul Barrett told pv magazine Australia. Hysata is commercializing a breakthrough made at the University of Wollongong which effectively, Barrett says, invented a “brand new category of electrolyzer,” vastly improving efficiency.

OnSight Technology has developed a tele-operated vehicle to clean solar arrays. It is equipped with a radiometric thermal imaging camera and an optical zoom camera backed by artificial intelligence. It has a range of 12 hours and a speed of 1.6 km per hour.

Called GC PowerNest, the battery has a storage capacity of 5kWh and a voltage of 51.2V. It is scalable in an eight-stack configuration, thus reaching a capacity of up to 40kWh.

The Agua+S project under development in the Spanish region of Andalucia is aimed at combining a desalination plant, a pumping station network, and an onshore, floating photovoltaic plant in a single project design. According to its developers this is the first time that these three facilities have been combined together in a fully reproducible design that could be replicated in any river basin that has a reservoir and is close to the coast, to produce fresh water for both irrigation and human consumption.

New modeling suggests that the reduction in albedo caused by large-scale solar plants could double rainfall in the Red Sea coastal plain of Saudi Arabia.