Technology

PV modules are being sold with ever longer warranties, but when modules underperform or fail, making claims on those warranties is rarely straightforward. So are the warranties worth the paper they’re written on? Where does this leave installers? And how can this liability be mitigated?

The Northern Territory is advancing projects that will help it achieve 50% penetration of renewables into its energy supply by 2030. First up, the procurement of a 30 MW battery to boost reliability of the Darwin-Katherine grid.

Australian electricity wires are awash with sunshine, such that network operators have threatened to up the drawbridge on further rooftop connections, while limiting rooftop PV exports to the grid. But data streams hold the key to unlocking surprising existing capacity, stabilising voltage, and living the Aussie dream.

Queensland transmission network service provider Powerlink has announced an “industry-first partnership”with Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology as it looks to improve planning and decision-making for its energy network.

The South Australian government has followed up the launch of its Hydrogen Export Prospectus last week with a straight drive on the front foot, $37 million in funding for export infrastructure upgrades in support of the a $240 million green hydrogen and green ammonia project which will make South Australia a global leader.

An International Energy Agency report led up by Rolf Frischknecht from Treeze in Switzerland and under the joint project management of the University of New South Wales’ José Bilbao has measured the lifecycle emissions of both residential solar PV with battery storage and gas-generated grid electricity. The results are not particularly surprising, only the Morrison Government’s ongoing obduracy is.

In a new paper published in the journal of Renewable and Sustainable Energy, renowned PV scientist Pierre Verlinden examines the solar industry’s trajectory towards the 70 TW of installed capacity that will be needed by 2050, as the best choice for meeting climate targets set out in the 2015 Paris agreement. Silver consumption and recycling, according to Verlinden, will be the biggest challenges in the years to come, as well as ensuring balanced growth and avoiding a major installation rush in the years close to 2050.

South African scientists have used a PV system to keep tomatoes in cold storage. They linked an air-cooling system and evaporative cooling tech to a 3.5 kW array and 12 batteries and tested it for 28 days in September.

The centralised nature of policymaking in Beijing would enable component standardisation to ease the transition from EV to stationary energy storage use, according to Greenpeace East Asia.

Earlier this year, Singapore surpassed its 2020 target for 350 MW of installed PV, and has set itself a more ambitious goal of 2 GW for the coming decade. pv magazine recently spoke with Thomas Reindl, deputy CEO of the Solar Energy Research Institute of Singapore (SERIS) – and also the lead author of a 2020 update to the institute’s PV Roadmap for Singapore report – to catch up on the latest developments in the city-state’s PV market.