North America

Dustin Mulvaney is a solar industry veteran. Associate professor at the Department of Environmental Studies, San José State University, in the United States, he recently published a new book this April, Solar Power, Innovation, Sustainability, Environmental Justice, which looks at creating a “more sustainable and just solar industry for the future.” A part of this is the creation of a new global sustainability module standard. He spoke with pv magazine as part of the launch of our new UP initiative.

Australia’s national science agency CSIRO and Canada’s University of British Columbia have announced a memorandum of understanding aimed at accelerating clean hydrogen technologies.

The combination of solar plus storage is super-charging the deployment of batteries across the country, and IHS Markit says that the United States will become the largest market for grid-tied energy storage this year.

It’s unclear exactly what the interest is in the California super-capacitor maker, but it could be more about the process than the product.

The high efficiency PV maker may be hot on the tail of its golden goose, with demand outweighing supply for the company’s new A-Series and P-Series modules. And now that reetooling is over, it’s time to sell.

The first million took 40 years, the second million took two years and the third million will arrive two years from now.

The volume of U.S. electricity generated by renewable energy is set to surpass the level sourced from coal for the first time this month and the trend is expected to continue in May, according to Department of Energy data.

California utility PG&E has tested levels of residential solar power up to 100% penetration, and how to mitigate the effects of voltage and thermal overload via smart inverters and traditional transformer and circuit upgrades — with smart inverters shown to allow for up to 100% penetration at cost-effective pricing.

The EV, energy storage and solar company deployed only 47 MW of solar during Q1, as Tesla moves away from traditional sales methods towards web-based sales for its products.

Let me be clear: as a developer of utility-scale projects, we are very bullish on bifacial. We see bifacial as the next major evolution in solar module technology. Even if bifacial modules trade at a slight premium for the time being, many manufacturers tell us they intend to make even their monofacial panels with bifacial cells. Once they move their production lines over to bifacial, there won’t be a huge marginal cost difference and the prices will equilibrate – as a result, the module market norm will increasingly evolve to bifacial cell and module technology.