Modules & Upstream Manufacturing

With manufacturing ramping up year by year and policies already looking to get ahead of the large volumes of end-of-life products, the landscape for lithium-ion battery recycling is rapidly changing. pv magazine recently spoke with Mari Lundström, associate professor of chemical and metallurgical engineering at Aalto University, to find out what is needed on the research side for the effective recycling of batteries.

Developed by a Vietnamese-Korean research group, the complex PV device was built with a bottom bifacial crystalline silicon perovskite-filtered heterojunction sub-cell that is able to absorb all solar spectra in the short-wavelength range.

Developed by Chinese researchers, the novel design methodology consists of utilising metal brackets as mounting structures, conventional solar panels, and a grooved glass plate placed between the solar panels. According to its creators, it ensures a farmer’s average income increases by 5.14 times, including the solar power generation business. A system built with this approach should cost around €715 (AU$1145) per kW installed.

German researchers developed a lattice arrangement of three different layers of ferroelectric crystals that created a powerful photovoltaic effect.

Sydney-based MSquare Energy says it has ambitions of becoming Australia’s largest solar panel manufacturer. It is entering the market at a pivotal moment when Australia’s panel manufacturing industry is pushing to compete on equal footing with global leaders.

The Swiss group has acquired an integrated solar roof system solution from an unidentified German engineering service provider for this purpose. The aim is grow this sector from a niche market.

The U.S.-based manufacturer is planning a vertically integrated thin-film solar module manufacturing facility in India. The factory will likely be built in Tamil Nadu and become operational in the second half of 2023.

Potential price rises of 14% for the solar home systems that are driving access to electricity in the world’s under-served regions could signal further arrested progress towards the UN goal of universal access by 2030.

It’s a breakthrough so staggeringly simple the patent office needed convincing it counted as an invention. In what Professor Thomas Nann jokingly told pv magazine Australia basically equates to adding dishwashing liquid and oil to water, he and two of his former PhD students have unlocked the potential of water-based electrolytes for batteries, promising a solution that is cheaper, easier to manufacture and non-toxic. The startup plans to initially use the formula in supercapacitors before exploring it in conjunction with redox flow batteries.


A gigafactory, as the name indicates, is a facility that aims to produce Li-ion cells at a gigawatt-hours scale of total capacity, so they can then be used in electric vehicles or stationary storage applications. The global production capacity of Li-ion cells is expected to reach 740 GWh by the end of 2021 – almost a threefold increase from 2017 – and Europe will account for 8% of the total. João Coelho, an analyst at Delta-EE, looks at how Europe plans to catch up.