News

Plans to establish Australia’s first commercial-scale solar ingot and wafer manufacturing plant near Townsville in north Queensland are advancing with developer Stellar PV providing an early glimpse of the proposed 2 GW-capacity facility.

The Chinese manufacturer has unveiled its new TOPCon bifacial TNC3.0 module. The 1,500 V, IP68-rated panel offers over 85% bifaciality, a 0.26%/C temperature coefficient, and a 30-year warranty guaranteeing 88.85% output.

Designed for power ratings of 29.9 kW and 50 kW with scalable capacity up to 216,9 kWh, the new system is aimed at businesses seeking flexible energy storage solutions without the complexity of installation.

A new Perspectives research study on the future of the global PV supply chain outlines how module prices, performance, and lifetimes could evolve over the next 25 years. The work reflects a collaboration among leading solar research institutions worldwide. One of the study’s authors, the director of the Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems, told pv magazine that solar module and cell efficiencies could exceed 35% by 2050, with panel prices expected to drop by a factor of two.

Plans to develop a 90 MW solar farm and a six-hour battery energy storage system to help power the Western Australian town of Broome have joined the queue for federal environmental assessment.

New UNSW research found that about 20% of solar modules in large PV plants degrade much faster than expected. The researchers recommend holistic strategies such as robust materials, advanced designs, and proactive monitoring to decouple degradation pathways and prevent cascading failures.

Line Hydrogen has breathed new life into a 7.6 MW green hydrogen project planned for Tasmania with the signing of an equipment supply deal with Chinese manufacturer Jiangsu Guofu Hydrogen Energy Equipment Co.

JinkoSolar has signed a strategic cooperation agreement with XtalPi, an “AI for Science” platform company, to pursue high-throughput R&D on perovskite-crystalline-silicon tandem solar cells using an AI platform and quantum-physics-based models.

Solar farms in New South Wales led the way for Australia’s utility scale PV energy output in December, generating 1,052 GWh of renewable electricity to drive all Australian large-scale PV and wind generation up 19% on the same time last year.

The number of motorists opting to buy an electric vehicle in Australia continues to rise with new-car sales data showing almost 157,000 EVs were purchased in 2025 with total sales increasing by 38% compared to the previous year.