Technology

Rooftop solar systems are cheaper then centralised ground mounted systems for remote Indigenous communities in the Northern Territory, a new report funded by ARENA and APVI has found. The report, however, did not examine the question of community benefit in its scope – something Alan Langworthy, who has long worked in energy in the NT, told pv magazine Australia is absolutely vital.

A group of 35 French agricultural entrepreneurs decided to change their agricultural practices to adapt to the low quality of their groundwater and chose agrivoltaics as a way to compensate for crop yield losses.

Australian company AspiraDAC, which uses solar powered Direct Air Capture (DAC) technology to remove carbon from the atmosphere, has been selected to be part of the first round of purchases from Frontier, a program backed by Facebook and Google’s parent companies, Meta and Alphabet.

Queensland regional airline Skytrans Airlines and engineering firm Stralis Aircraft plan to develop and trial a hydrogen electric propulsion aircraft by 2026.

Researchers in the Netherlands investigated the potential for integrating power electronics in solar cells in the form of diodes, transistors, capacitors, and inductors. They believe that this kind of PV cell may initially find applications in PV-powered Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices and later, as the economy of scale kicks in, in large-scale applications.

A research group led by Chinese manufacturer JinkoSolar has developed a tandem perovskite-silicon cell with a subcell based on TOPCon tech. The group succeeded in reducing voltage losses in the silicon sub-cell by minimising the shunting probability during device fabrication.

India’s Sanvaru is expanding its lithium battery production capacity to 400 MWh per year by setting up a new factory in the Indian state of Uttarakhand. Its devices are used for stationary and EV storage.

A team of Australian scientists has declared the prospect of buildings, particularly those with glass facades, becoming close to self-powering is a step closer to realisation after developing a 15.5% efficient semi-transparent solar cell which allows more than 20% of visible light through.

Stanford University scientists have built an optical concentrator that purportedly harvests more than 90% of the light that hits its surface.

The Australian Energy Market Operator has declared approximately $12.7 billion of investment in new transmission lines should begin “as urgently as possible” to accelerate the transition to renewable energy and energy storage, replace exiting coal-fired power plants, and deliver a more efficient and effective grid in eastern and south-eastern Australia.