Research

New research shows the importance of considering power plant dispatchability in PV project planning. An international team of scientists claim assessing a project’s levelised cost of energy could be misleading, especially with variable and sometimes negative electricity prices.

The research group led by Professor Martin Green has published Version 65 of the solar cell efficiency tables. There are 17 new results reported in the new version.

Western Australia’s state-owned regional energy provider Horizon Power has officially launched the trial of a vanadium flow battery in the state’s north as it investigates how to integrate long-duration energy storage into its network, microgrids, and other off-grid power systems.

Scientists in Egypt have created an anti-soiling coating for solar panels by mixing ethanol, deionized water, ammonium hydroxide and tetraethyl orthosilicate. They tested a coated panel outdoors for ten months and found that the panel showed a 64.7% higher current compared to reference modules without coating.

A team from the University of New South Wales School of Photovoltaic and Renewable Energy Engineering has reinvented the design of screen-printed contacts to reduce costs and silver consumption, without sacrificing the efficiency of tunnel oxide passivated contact solar cells.

A Chinese-Italian research team has analysed the influence of different tilt angles on the thermal failure of the photovoltaic facades or roofs in fire conditions, finding that when the tilt angle exceeds 30 degrees, the time to failure increased significantly.

A study on the potential benefits of co-locating solar energy generation and sheep grazing shows those that graze in the shade of solar panels may produce better quality wool than those on traditional agricultural properties.

Researchers at the Australian National University are part of the international team that has built an all-perovskite tandem solar cell based on a wide-bandgap top perovskite cell with a 20.5% efficiency. The 1 cm2 scale tandem device achieved the highest efficiency yet reported for all-perovskite solar cells of this size.

Researchers have analysed how wind speed and direction affect the cooling of a rooftop PV plant with 10,806 panels. They said that winds from behind were less effective due to the roof slope and the minimal gap between the panels and the roof, but wind from other directions could contribute to a cooling effect of up to 7 C.

Australia’s main electricity grid is predicted to increase its solar, wind, and energy storage capacity by more than 150 GW by 2043 according to new projections published by energy market consultancy and research group Cornwall Insight.