Modules & Upstream Manufacturing

Australian solar technology startup SunDrive has announced “a breakthrough” in mass production compatible heterojunction technology after recording an efficiency result of 26.07% with a silver-free, commercial-size silicon solar PV cell.

“We’re not talking about incremental improvement, this is a really giant leap,” Hysata CEO Paul Barrett told pv magazine Australia. Hysata is commercialising a breakthrough made at the University of Wollongong which effectively, Barrett says, invented a “brand new category of electrolyser” vastly improving efficiency. “This is a 20% gain. This is really a seminal moment for the hydrogen industry.”

German luxury carmaker Mercedes-Benz has made public its plans partner with Primobius, a 50:50 joint venture between West Australian company Neometals and Germany’s SMS Group. Mercedes has said its intention is to build a 2,500 tonne per year lithium-ion battery recycling plant in southern Germany with Primobius as its technology partner.

Scientists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have developed a system that can be operated at a voltage of around 12V, with a 95% recovery rate for lost power after cleaning. The waterless system can be operated automatically via an electric motor.

Federal Labor has promised to allocate $22 million to help establish the Lansdown Eco-Industrial Precinct being developed in northern Queensland if it wins the election in May.

OnSight Technology has developed a tele-operated vehicle to clean solar arrays. It is equipped with a radiometric thermal imaging camera and an optical zoom camera backed by artificial intelligence. It has a range of 12 hours and a speed of 1.6 km per hour.

A Swedish research group has developed a device combining CIGS thin-film solar modules and an alkaline electrolyser based on a trimetallic cathodic catalyst made of nickel, molybdenum, and vanadium (NiMoV) and an anode made of nickel oxide (NiO). The electrolyser achieved an average solar-to-hydrogen (STH) efficiency of 8.5% for stable operations during 100 hours.

Chinese PV technology manufacturer Trina Solar has unveiled a new solar module for residential and commercial applications, choosing the Australian market for the global launch of its latest rooftop panel.

The Korean manufacturer and the German research centre were able to improve the performance of their jointly developed tandem solar cell by almost one percentage point.

The London-based analyst has published a series of clean tech predictions for the year which also highlighted the rising proportion of sub-5MW solar projects in the global market, and cheaper clean energy financing costs even as panel prices continue to rise.