Utility Scale PV

An international research team studied the solar PV impact of emissions from a coal-fired power plant in the Atacama Desert, Chile finding that after five months of exposure, the deposited dust on co-located PV panels reached a maximum of 1.63 mg/cm2 with a 23 % reduction in photocurrent. The accumulation at the co-located plant was 3 times greater than nearby PV sites with similar coastal climate conditions.

The 2025-26 Federal Budget has committed $2 billion to the Clean Energy Finance Corporation to invest in solar and other renewable power, storage, energy efficiency, and low emissions technology, saying it will unlock a further $8 billion in investments.

Construction of New Zealand-headquartered Meridian Energy’s 120 MW Ruakākā Solar Farm is set to begin in August 2025, following the project reaching a final $206 million investment decision.

Australian think tank Climate Energy Finance (CEF) says global energy markets are being reshaped by solar’s disruption, which is happening at speed, turbocharged by battery energy storage system firming.

Researchers at Thailand’s Vidyasirimedhi Institute of Science and Technology demonstrated a novel hydrogel that has high cooling effect on silicon PV panels.

Aotearoa New Zealand utility-scale solar developer Kiwi Solar has announced its 13 MW Ardmore Solar Farm near South Auckland is now live, after a 5.5 month construction period.

Scientists utilising data gathered at the Northern Territory’s Desert Knowledge Australia Solar Centre have created a novel probabilistic model for five-minutes ahead PV power forecasting. The method combines a convolutional neural network with bidirectional long short-term memory, attention mechanism, and natural gradient boosting.

BloombergNEF reports the world installed nearly 600 GW of solar power in 2024, closely aligning with projections that annual global solar installations will surpass 1 TW within the next few years. Although projections for 2025 currently fall short of that pace, early forecasts often underestimate actual deployment.

New Zealand’s Electricity Authority Te Mana Hiko has reported the country’s solar generation reached an all-time high in March of 128 MW but say that’s likely to be surpassed when three new large-scale farms come online during 2025.

Australia’s solar rollout continues to reach new heights with a combined total of 4.7 GW of small- and large-scale PV installed across the country in 2024 but shifts in the rooftop market suggests diversification of services will be key for the nation’s installer community going forward.