Technology and R&D

The past 12 months have been a turbulent time for PV manufacturing. Rapid and impressive developments in technology have been accompanied by price increases up and down the supply chain, and energy shortages weighed on production in the second half of the year. Chinese n-type module manufacturer Jolywood is now pressing ahead with ambitious expansion plans despite the disruption. pv magazine publisher Eckhart K. Gouras and editor Mark Hutchins recently caught up with Cathy Huang, European sales director at Jolywood, to discuss the company’s plans to bring n-type TOPCon technology into mainstream production.

Researchers from the University of New South Wales (UNSW) predict that growth to 60TW of photovoltaics needed to rapidly reduce emissions to ‘net zero’ and limit global warming to <2 °C could require up to 486 Mt of aluminium by 2050. A key concern for this large aluminium demand is its large global warming potential.

The hype surrounding green hydrogen is real, but does the cost-reduction outlook for its production technologies live up to it? Christian Roselund looks at the technology, transportation, application and enabling policies behind the promising green energy carrier.

Harwell Campus will provide a testbed for energy storage technologies coming from three U.K.-based innovative businesses, bringing their solutions one step closer to the market.

Compiled by an international research group, the best practices were collected from all available guidelines published by national agencies, regulatory bodies, and trade associations.

TOPCon solar cells are on their way to fully compete with PERC solar products, according to recent research from Germany’s Fraunhofer ISE. Efficiency gains for the TOPCon concept, however, are necessary to help it capture more market share, as production costs remain higher than those for PERC tech. A series of cost-driven strategies to make TOPCon modules advance were outlined in the study.

At Intersolar North America in California, Canada-based Discover Battery has launched the Helios energy storage system, an LFP battery designed to operate in remote conditions.

The USA-headquartered green hydrogen generator developer has entered into an R&D partnership with IIT Madras Research Park (IITMRP) to improve the performance and lower the cost of its polymer electrolyte membrane (PEM) electrolyzers.

A British-Indian research group has developed an active cooling technique that is claimed to improve a PV system’s yield by around 0.5%. The system could be used in residential solar arrays and the water heated by the PV modules may be fed into a solar water heating system.

A Japanese group has developed a storage system with potential applications in residential storage, electric vehicles, drones and Internet-of-Things devices.