Manufacturing

An order issued in late June instructed customs agents to detain solar shipments containing silica-based products sourced from a Chinese firm and its subsidiaries. Three solar players may already have been impacted.

Three PhD students from Melbourne are moving their research into recycling lithium-ion batteries from the labs into pitch meetings, vying to become one of the first companies in Australia to recover the metals and minerals from spent batteries. Their method, they say, is simpler, less toxic and more cost competitive than those widely used.

The new factory should begin production within six months and serve the company’s cell and module assembly factories in Malaysia, as well as the module assembly facility in the United States.

LG Energy Solution has agreed to take 100% of the cobalt and nickel from the proposed Sconi Project in Queensland. The company says the deal will give it an “upper hand” in EV battery production and improve its ESG competitiveness.

Australian giant AGL Energy plans to build what will be the world’s largest ‘grid-forming’ battery in South Australia, deploying technology so novel that it yet to be clearly regulated in Australia. “Trialling something like this on the grid at this scale hasn’t been done before anywhere in the world,” Josh Birmingham, Director of Large-Scale & Project Solutions at SMA Australia, told pv magazine Australia.

Australian giant AGL Energy will soon own the world’s largest ‘grid forming’ battery, with construction on its 250 MW/250 MWh big battery to begin later this year at Torrens Island, just north of Adelaide in South Australia. The battery will be delivered by Finnish technology company Wärtsilä with inverters supplied by German company SMA Solar Technology.

Researchers in China have developed a smart solar window tech based on a photovoltachromic device that is able to achieve a high pristine transmittance and to be self-adaptable to control indoor brightness and temperature. The device was assembled via a full solution process in an architecture incorporating glass, a fluorine-doped tin oxide (FTO) layer, a perovskite-based PV cell, an electrochromic gel, another FTO layer, and glass.

Mónica LiraCantú leads a research group investigating nanostructured materials for photovoltaic energy at the Catalan Institute of Nanoscience and Nanotechnology (ICN2). Recently, her group led a project that looked deep into the crystalline structure of a perovskite solar cell, revealing new information about the formation of defects in the material and how they could be engineered to improve both efficiency and stability. pv magazine caught up with the Barcelona-based scientist to discuss the state of the art in perovskite solar cells and remaining challenges on the road to commercialisation.

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.