Manufacturing

After celebrating Sunovate’s first demo project, pv magazine Australia sat down with Co-Founder and Managing Director Cesira Leigh to talk all things Sunovate, how the rising Aussie solar PV innovator came to be, and where it’s going.

The latest development on the module front sees manufacturers adopting larger wafer sizes in order to reach the industry’s raised expectations for power output. Older “M2” wafers have been the standard in recent years but now appear to be on the way out. Several theories about optimal size are gaining ground, but the future direction of the standard is still far from clear.

On the first day of this year’s EU PVSEC conference, Adelaide-based veteran solar researcher Pierre J Verlinden won the Becquerel Prize for Outstanding Merits in Photovoltaics. The award recognized more than 40 years as a leading PV researcher in academia and at leading companies including Sunpower and Trina Solar. Its recipient, now a board member of Australian solar technology provider BT Imaging, spoke to pv magazine about what is needed from solar to stave off catastrophic climate change.

The GCL System chief executive made comments that fly in the face of an expected solar gold rush in China that analysts predict will start this month. Though rising overseas demand will address overcapacity fears, according to Luo, the soundbite is sure to chill PV boardrooms across the world’s biggest solar market.

An Australian thermal energy storage company has reached in principle agreements to pilot thermal batteries in the telecommunication and eco-housing industries.

Plans to develop a 18 GWh lithium-ion battery factory in northern Queensland have received a major boost with the appointment of National Australia Bank as financial adviser. With the feasibility study nearing completion, project proponents expect the development application to be submitted to Townsville City Council over the coming months.

The STA has warned Italian company Fimer, which is set to acquire Swiss company ABB’s inverter business, it will have to honor customer service commitments made to its British members, and voiced fears related to historic quality issues with ABB inverters.

“The Sapphire” is one of the first passive houses in New South Wales (NSW). Located in the Blue Mountains’ village of Foulconbridge, “The Sapphire” is a carbon zero house utilising an SMA Energy System consisting of a Sunny Boy solar inverter and a Sunny Boy Storage battery inverter providing clean solar power.

The Distributed Energy Resource (DER) laboratory “DER-Lab” will provide an environment for safe testing of new technologies including monitoring and communication devices, smart controllers, aggregation (e.g. Virtual Power Plant), market participation software and other innovative new products.

A consortium of European research institutes has received €10.6 million in EU funding to establish pilot production of a high efficiency module concept developed by Swiss startup Insolight. The module combines high efficiency multijunction cells with a solar concentrator lens and has previously demonstrated 29% efficiency.