Research

Thin-film cadmium telluride panels may have a US$0.02 to US$0.04 per watt carbon cost advantage over traditional polysilicon, said the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in an analysis of embodied carbon, embodied energy, and energy payback.

Winter has proven no feat for the sunshine state, which is home to basically all of Australia’s best performing PV assets, senior Rystad analyst David Dixon finds.

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.

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.

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.

Researchers from the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, have found that nanoscopic refractory metal layers like tungsten could improve dendrite growth tolerance in electrolytes of solid-state Li-ion batteries. The team collaborated with researchers from Carnegie Mellon University.

The Black Summer bushfires devastated parts of the Eurobodalla region in New South Wales. Then earlier this year, the area was hit by floods. As climate change threatens to bring more severe and frequent extreme weather events, how can we help future-proof such communities?