Commercial & Industrial PV

Mazda Australia’s car part distribution centre in Melbourne has been fitted with a 900kW rooftop solar installation which is contributing to the centre, owned by Fraser Property Australia, now being 100% powered by carbon neutral energy.

The Genap Energy Cover uses HyET Solar Powerfoil thin-film solar modules, rated at 12.0% efficiency, for agricultural water storage and reservoirs, with an initial focus on the greenhouse and horticulture markets in the Netherlands. Genap said a 12kWp test setup had a generation density of 60W/m2, rising to 120W/m2 within a year, with an eventual target of 165W/m2.

Photovoltaics can wipe out 4.25 billion tonnes of carbon emissions every year this decade, according to the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Even so, the actions announced so far remain way short of what is needed, with capital flows to fossil fuels still greater than the cash directed toward combating climate change.

With a PV panel surface area of 309.83m2, the solar tree is officially certified by Guinness World Records (GWR) as the largest solar tree in the world.

In the fourth quarter of 2021 alone, solar developers added 3.2GW of new PV installations in India.

Mine sites across Western Australia are decarbonising after Zenith Energy and modular solar pioneer 5B signed an Ecosystem Framework Agreement-Deployment, which will see 5Bs rapidly deployable Maverick solar systems installed along with battery energy storage systems at multiple mine sties.

A Spanish consortium is equipping one of Madrid’s largest metro and bus stations with a hybrid system that combines PV, geothermal pumps, and vanadium redox flow batteries to provide cooling and heating.

With senators having called for plantation-wide solar powered pumping projects, funded by public money, the country’s National Irrigation Administration has agreed and said it wants to embrace floating solar facilities too.

The merits of pre-assembled and modular solar solutions have been showcased by independent power provider Nomadic Energy which this week revealed it had taken less than 21 days to complete a 2MW install at Northern Star Resources’ Carosue Dam gold mining operation near Kalgoorlie in Western Australia.

Scientists in Australia have developed an optimisation framework for building-integrated photovoltaics that allows the selection of design variables according to user preferences. Their model considers PV-related features such as tilt angle, window-to-wall ratio (WWR), PV placement, and PV product type, as well as objective functions and constraints such as the net present value and the payback period.