Manufacturing

Having supplied more than 450 MW of residential solar systems in 2020, Chinese inverter giant Sungrow is confident that 2021 will be the year it cracks the utility scale segment. It is also set to introduce a new battery for the distributed market segment, says Sungrow Australia country manager Joe Zhou.

SMA Australia had a bumper year in 2020, despite increasing competition and Covid-19, and partly because of the West Murray crisis. What’s next?

Photovoltaic inverter manufacturer Ingeteam has further cemented its place in the Australian solar energy market with the Spanish company announcing it has now supplied more than 2 GW of inverters across the nation.

As Christmas lights twinkled their last, South Australia’s electricity grid spent a whole day basking in sunshine and turning towards brisk summer breezes. Renewables ruled — a taste of future feasting on clean energy.

Since establishing its Australian subsidiary in 2012 JinkoSolar has substantially expanded its rooftop presence and, notably, its big-time contribution to the National Electricity Market.

A white paper published earlier in December by PV Evolution Labs investigates the formation of performance damaging cracks in PV cells, based on mechanical stress testing of more than 40 commercially available PV modules. While the lab warns that susceptibility to cracking will change according to the specific bill of materials making up each module, certain technologies are shown to perform better than others.

Perovskite developer Oxford PV has set a new world record for perovskite-silicon tandem cell efficiency at 29.52%, edging out the previous record set less than a year ago by Helmholtz Zentrum Berlin. The new record has been certified by the U.S. National Renewable Energy Laboratory.

The Chinese leader has revealed some details of his nation’s commitment to go carbon neutral by 2060. That solar and wind power promise could even prove to be a conservative estimate, according to the nation’s solar industry.

For the first time in years, the Australian Centre for Advanced Photovoltaics (APAC) has received a major grant. The Australian Renewable Energy Agency has funded APAC to the tune of $19 million with the goal of reasserting Australia’s place at the forefront of solar technology and accelerating the competitiveness of renewable energy.

Guarantees and warranties may be thought to deliver peace of mind, but when underperformance on rooftop systems is detected, diagnosing and demonstrating failures is no simple task. pv magazine’s Virtual Insight on Quality event in November tackled this issue from all angles – and what it means for Australia’s burgeoning rooftop segment.