Research

Australia’s first hybrid solar and renewable hydrogen microgrid has officially launched as green hydrogen production began at Horizon Power’s demonstration plant in the coastal community of Denham in Western Australia’s Gascoyne region.

Construction has begun on a 50 MW/50 MWh battery near the outback city of Broken Hill which will be equipped with advanced inverter technology designed to improve system strength in regional New South Wales and support increased levels of renewable energy generation in the area.

Chinese researchers have assessed the impact of residential rooftop PV arrays on energy use and surrounding air temperatures during extreme heatwaves. They found that panels with higher conversion efficiencies achieved the best results.

Researchers led by Germany’s TÜV Rheinland have created a database of technical risks and mitigation measures for PV installations. Their broad overview of quantification methods has shown that further standardization is required.

A new scientific paper takes a closer look at the record-breaking efficiency that Australia’s Sundrive announced for a silver-free heterojunction cell in September 2021, as certified by Germany’s Institute for Solar Energy Research.

A five-year Sandia Labs study on solar module degradation shows that 13 out of 23 tested module types have effective lifetimes exceeding 30 years.

ARENA has awarded global technology company Calix $947,035 (USD 612,509) to help fund an eleven-month study into the feasibility of deploying the company’s proprietary Zero Emissions Steel Technology (ZESTY) at a demonstration plant – something both Calix and ARENA are touting as a pathway to green steel manufacturing using hydrogen in Australia.

NREL and Berkeley Lab have proposed efficiency and stability best practices for solar water-splitting to make hydrogen, while a team of researchers from Malaysia and Pakistan have revealed their findings on the feasibility of hydrogen-based incineration.

An Israeli scientist has proposed a way to achieve uninterrupted PV power on the moon without using energy storage. The proposal involves the installation of PV panels around a 360-degree latitudinal ring close to one of the moon’s poles. There would be no inter-array shading, and static vertical PV arrays and arrays mounted on single-axis vertical trackers could be viable mounting structures.

US scientists recently put different bifacial solar cells and modules through a series of tests at elevated temperature, humidity, voltage and mechanical stress levels. The tests revealed a range of light-induced and potential-induced degradation mechanisms that modules will likely suffer in the field.