S2A's #GreenLuxHome Will Feature the World's Only Patented Graphene Solar Panel From FreeVolt
The first electrically self-sustaining, custom luxury homes from S2A will be powered by the only graphene solar panel in existence globally, changing the game with unprecedented energy production, durability, immunity to climate, and overall service life.
Dye Sensitized Solar Cells Is the Future of Solar
The dye sensitized solar cell can produce electricity under low light conditions, including indoor lighting. Due to the structural design and different color dyes, the cell features colors and transparency.
Printed Solar Cells - Electric partnership powers energy innovation
Created by University of Newcastle Physicist, Professor Paul Dastoor, organic printed solar cells are electronic inks printed onto sub-millimetre thin plastic sheets using conventional printers.
New Testing Facility Launches: Is the Future of Utility-Scale Solar Projects in Bifacial?
The new facility will serve as the test ground for analyzing and validating field data to determine optimal system output utilizing bifacial modules with tracking technology under a range of variables and conditions.
AC Solar Modules
Integrating the module and the inverter is a natural evolution. In the PC industry, silicon semiconductor components have been continuously integrated to reduce manufacturing cost, reduce complexity, and simplify the customer experience.
This weird $9 trick increases solar panel efficiency 5-17%
John Fitzgerald Weaver for electrek: Instead of perfectly spacing those 60 out - with small, defined areas between the cells - the company has allowed the solar cells borders to overlap each other while increasing the cell count to 68.
Solar panels: Nanotechnology gives green energy a green color
American Institute of Physics via Science Daily: Researchers have created green solar panels using soft imprint lithography to print an array of nanocylinders that scatter green light
SolarWorld collapses as Europe's solar industry eclipsed by China
Christoph Steitz for Reuters: Europe's embattled solar power industry has been dealt a fresh blow, with cut-price competition from China driving Germany's SolarWorld into insolvency.
New process for manufacturing PV cells means cheaper solar power
Phys.org: A major roadblock to the mass use of solar energy are photovoltaic (PV) solar cells. This is because the cost, inefficiency and negative environmental impact that the manufacturing of these cells outweighs any potential savings provided by the resulting solar energy. If, however, cost could be were minimised, then solar power would be more able to compete with traditional fossil fuel-based methods for generating energy.
To overcome this hurdle, the EU-funded SOLNOWAT project has developed an innovative dry process for manufacturing PV solar cells.
PV cells are typically created via a wet chemical process that etches away layers of silicon from a crystalline wafer, leaving behind the solar cell. The SOLNOWAT process replaces the expensive and inefficient wet chemical process with the use of atmospheric pressure dry etching technology – a process that cuts costs and speeds up production. Because less silicon is removed during dry etching, the resulting cells are darker, making them very efficient at absorbing light. In fact, they are so efficient that they have been classified as having zero global warming potential. Cont'd...
Chinese solar company opening local module factory in September
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Victor A. Patton for Sacramento Business Journal: A solar module factory expected to bring more than 200 jobs to Sacramento is slated to begin production in mid-September at McClellan Business Park. It will be the first U.S. factory for Nanjing, China-based solar cell and module manufacturer China Sunergy Co, who on Thursday announced its subsidiary Sunergy America has agreed to lease a 140,000-square-foot manufacturing building — previously a plant where J.C. Penney made window coverings.
Simon Szeto, a Sunergy advisor, said the company will bring around 20 management staff from overseas and will hire other employees locally. The work being done at the factory will include putting together the modules. Each module includes a solar cell, an aluminum frame, tempered glass, cables and a junction box. The completed products, which can be placed on a ground mount or rooftop, will be sold commercially in the U.S, Szeto said. Cont'd...
SolarCity pushing industry to 40% increase in useful lifetime of solar power installations
John Fitzgerald Weaver for Electrek: In a new report released by SolarCity, we are seeing that solar power systems have a usable lifetime of at least 35 years – 40% longer than the market expects. The key finding of the report is that power degradation (annual efficiency loss) of solar panels supplied to SolarCity is as much as 35% lower than for a comparable industry-wide selection of non-SolarCity panels, which are typically expected to last for 25 years. SolarCity feels it is the implementation of a stringent and industry-leading “Total Quality Program” that has driven this.
SolarCity is in the unique position of being one of the largest deployers of solar panels – from multiple manufacturers – in the world, and with their tens of thousands of systems connected to a central database they know realtime performance. In the study here, SolarCity looked at greater than 11,000 panels to determine their data points and come to their conclusion that their solar panels are performing well beyond expected industry standards. Cont'd.. .
First Solar Achieves Yet Another Cell Conversion Efficiency World Record
Thin film record 22.1 percent research cell continues performance advancement trend
Thin film perovskite solar cell passes the efficiency test
Matthew Gunther for Chemistry World: Perovskite solar cells may one day rival silicon-based technologies, but their performance outside the laboratory has been a constant source of contention in the past year. Now, an international team of scientists has manufactured the first thin film perovskite solar cell with a reported efficiency that has beenofficially recognised by an accredited national test laboratory.1
Since their development in 2012, the performance of light-harvesting metal–organo halide structures has seemingly improved at a staggering rate, with their efficiency increasing by six percentage points in just two years – the same increase took multi-crystalline solar cells over two decades.
But their stability has been brought into question, with some international test centres taking issue with perovskite solar cells that are so unstable that they may degrade spontaneously in air, making it hard for them to assess their performance.
It’s a state of affairs that Michael Grätzel from the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland has had trouble dealing with. ‘Conspicuously, you could see that from the very beginning there was very scarce information on the stability of these devices,’ comments Grätzel. ‘I have raised that issue many times – one would think that now everybody does stability work after this alarm was sounded, but not so.' Cont'd...
Cloaking Principle Could Boost Solar Cell Performance
Invisibility cloaking may be a long way from reality, but the principle could help improve the performance of solar cells in the near term.
In a series of simulations, researchers at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology have demonstrated how cloaks made of metamaterials or freeform surfaces could eliminate shadows cast by energy-harvesting components onto the active surfaces of solar cells.
Contact fingers, which extract electric current, cover up to one-tenth of the surface area of a solar cell. By guiding light around these features, more of the sun's energy could be captured by the solar cell.
"Our model experiments have shown that the cloak layer makes the contact fingers nearly completely invisible," said doctoral student Martin Schumann. Cont'd...
SolarCity claims highest efficiency solar panel
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Tristan Edist for the Business Spectator: SolarCity, the largest retailer of solar systems in the US (over 30% market share) and partly owned by Tesla’s Elon Musk, has announced it will produce the most efficient solar module available on the market at 22.04% conversion efficiency. SolarCity is claiming it has therefore managed to pip SunPower who have been the longstanding holder of the most efficient conventional silicon solar module on the market.
However in a subsequent discussion with Greentech Media, Peter Rive’s Chief Technology Officer conceded the majority of the panels coming off its pilot 100MW manufacturing line were hitting 21.8%. In 2017 the company will be then moving production to a new 1 gigawatt per annum capacity plant in Buffalo which can sometimes encounter challenges with achieving stable quality levels during production start-up.
SunPower claims 21.5% efficiency for its X-Series panel although often manufacturers will have some variance in performance of panels and make claims based on conservative estimates of performance. Greentech Media quotes an anonymous Sunpower source saying that 22% efficient panels are already coming off its production lines. In addition the company is targeting achieving 23% conversion efficiency from panels it will manufacture from its fifth fabrication line, scheduled for start-up in 2017.
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Featured Product
STI Norland - First dual-row tracker in the market
Developed in 2017, the STI-H250™ is consists of two linked torsion beams that rotate simultaneously following the sun's path. They are moved by just one motor, cutting supply and maintenance costs. STI-H250™ dual-row tracker includes backtracking mode to avoid shadowing between adjacent rows and stow function to protect the tracker in extreme wind conditions. For cleaning, vehicles can pass between trackers and each row can be placed in a different position.
