Technology and R&D

Transported 900 metres along the Seine, a 78 kW temporary photovoltaic power plant has been docked at the Athletes’ Village to provide renewable electricity to meet the demands of the Olympic and Paralympic Place in Paris.

Researchers at Queensland’s James Cook University have developed a process to synthesise graphene from tangerine peel oil, which they then used to recover silver from waste PV material.

The Swiss Army knife qualities of lithium-ion batteries have helped scale the technology. Now their ubiquitous nature means they are ideally placed to help electricity system operators balance the grid, argues Gerard Reid, co-founder and partner of Alexa Capital.

Victoria-based solar panel recycling company Lotus Energy has signed an agreement with Canadian silicon anode developer Neo Battery Materials with aims to supply future North American electric vehicle and energy storage needs.

After the end of the Paris Olympic and Paralympic Games, the 15 solar power plants installed on the roofs of buildings in the athletes’ village will be integrated into a collective self-consumption operation once the future residents of the district have taken possession of the premises.

Access to rooftop solar in Western Australia has received a boost with state-owned energy provider Horizon Power expanding the reach of an internet-connected energy management project that promises to help balance energy flows on regional microgrids.

Scientists in Europe have created an after-market cooling solution that can be fitted to existing standard PV modules. The system is based on a water chamber placed at the backside of the module and can reportedly provide a net electrical energy gain of more than 9%.

A team of researchers from the University of New South Wales is confident it can get silicon solar cells to a power conversion efficiency above 30% by integrating a process that splits particles of light, or photons, into two smaller energy chunks.

As bifacial modules proliferate, estimations of albedo are becoming more important and with developers not prepared to install weather stations to assess solar resource, a popular option has become third-party, on-site measurements over periods as short as a day. Is this an acceptable compromise between costly on-site measuring and less accurate satellite data? Everoze’s Stefan Mau discusses the potential benefits and limitations of this approach.

Multiple factors affect lifespan of a residential battery energy storage system. We examine the life of batteries in Part 3 of our series.