Commercial & Industrial PV

PV modules are being sold with ever longer warranties, but when modules underperform or fail, making claims on those warranties is rarely straightforward. So are the warranties worth the paper they’re written on? Where does this leave installers? And how can this liability be mitigated?

Officeworks jumped on the bandwagon of businesses in Australia committing to 100% renewable electricity in the next five years. Both Bunnings and Officeworks announced their plans in the last week, sparking calls for Target and Kmart, which are also in the Wesfarmers portfolio, to follow suit.

230 Northern Territory businesses have already received their vouchers for Australia’s most generous energy storage subsidity, the NT’s Home and Business Battery Scheme. The scheme, which is still open for applications until November 30, offers grants of $6,00 to homeowners and business owners to install solar and battery storage, or complement an existing solar system with a battery.

South African scientists have used a PV system to keep tomatoes in cold storage. They linked an air-cooling system and evaporative cooling tech to a 3.5 kW array and 12 batteries and tested it for 28 days in September.

The winners of the Clean Energy Council’s 2020 solar design and installation awards announced today have been applauded as stunning examples of the innovative solutions being deployed in the commercial rooftop solar sector (C&I) as more businesses look to reap the benefits of solar.

Victorian utility North East Water have constructed a mini-solar farm over the carpark of their Wodonga headquarters. The 132 kW system is expected to provide half of the building’s energy use, with 330 modules generating 500kW per day in addition to the headquarter’s existing rooftop PV array.

Australia’s largest free-range chicken farm switched on one of the biggest solar plus energy storage system’s of any commercial farm in the country this week. With 1.4 MW of rooftop solar combining with 2.28 MWh of energy storage via 5 Tesla lithium-ion batteries, the farm is excited to save enormous amounts on its energy bill and its emissions. Winner, winner!

Earlier this year, Singapore surpassed its 2020 target for 350 MW of installed PV, and has set itself a more ambitious goal of 2 GW for the coming decade. pv magazine recently spoke with Thomas Reindl, deputy CEO of the Solar Energy Research Institute of Singapore (SERIS) – and also the lead author of a 2020 update to the institute’s PV Roadmap for Singapore report – to catch up on the latest developments in the city-state’s PV market.

Freedom Foods Group’s Shepparton site solar+storage array in Victoria has produced more than 3 GWh of clean energy in its first nine months of operation.  The array is the first project in Australia to employ Fimer’s largest string inverters – the PVS-175. The project is claimed to be one of the largest single rooftop solar power installations in Australia.

A report by Finnish company Wärtsilä has estimated the potential impact if every dollar committed to a non-renewables energy sector recovery was instead funnelled to clean power.