Technology

An international consortium led by Israel’s Al-Zahrawi Society has launched the Regace project to develop agrivoltaic solutions for greenhouses. It will investigate the performance of a new tracking system across locations and climates and use carbon dioxide enrichment to improve crop yield.

Renewable energy developer Vast Solar will progress plans to deliver Australia’s first commercial-scale concentrated solar power plant after securing financial backing from the federal government to build a 30 MW/288 MWh facility near Port Augusta in South Australia.

Enerpoly produces low-cost, low-maintenance zinc-ion battery storage systems for durations of two to 10 hours. The Swedish battery specialist now plans to develop prototypes of a residential plug-in storage system with rechargeable zinc batteries in Europe, under an EU-funded collaborative project with Austrian startup EET.

Finnish researchers have proposed the use of solar, wind, and storage to provide desalinated seawater to restore forests. Their model predicts that an additional 10.7 TW of PV would be needed to actually do this by 2100, leading to a cumulative carbon dioxide sequestration potential of 730 gigatonnes.

A surge of community battery trials in Australia is seeking to make better use of the country’s vast distributed solar resource. But the results so far have battered expectations. pv magazine Australia’s Natalie Filatoff and Bella Peacock explore the motivations, challenges, and outlook for sharing and monetising solar rooftop riches.

Ionblox says it will use $32 million of series B funding to support the buildout of a novel silicon anode electric vehicle battery.

The Bern University of Applied Sciences in Switzerland has published the initial results of a survey on the durability and performance of residential PV inverters and power optimisers over a 15-year period. They found that more than 65% of the inverters did not present yield-relevant faults by their 15th year of operation.

Modular solar array manufacturer 5B will work with researchers from the University of Sydney to optimise the design of large-scale solar farms in a bid to minimise temperature-induced panel efficiency losses. The research project secured funding support in the latest round of the Australian Research Council’s Linkage Project Grants program.

Malaysian researchers have developed a system that can absorb heat from PV modules and transmit it to a nanofluid, in order to transform it into thermal energy and use it for different applications. The panels have an overall efficiency of 89%.

A research team at the Australian National University have claimed an efficiency of 30.3% for a tandem solar cell made by mechanically stacking a perovskite cell and a silicon cell. The achievement meets the first of three 2030 “stretch goals” set by the Australian government.