2022

Mario Draghi’s administration has replaced market-driven electricity prices for the rest of the year and replaced them with tariffs based on historical averages. With solar plant operators among those affected, the European trade body for PV is not amused.

Through the procurement exercise, the state-owned power provider wants to build eight solar plants across Argentina’s northern province of Jujuy.

According to Shen Rong, Vice President of GoodWe, the global PV market could see new installations exceeding 240GW in 2022 on the back of easing supply chain issues. In an interview with pv magazine he lays out the current challenges and opportunities this year’s solar market is likely to see, as well as discussing the PV inverter manufacturers R&D and manufacturing plans.

The Italian inverter maker claims to have been impacted by the post-pandemic supply constraints. The proceedings are being managed in full business continuity without any interruption of operational activity, said the legal firm hired by Fimer to implement a debt restructuring process.

In 2002, the Fraunhofer ISE patented the HERIC circuit for highly efficient inverters. Since then, the institute says, it has recorded out-of-court settlements in seven patent infringement lawsuits against companies from China, Taiwan and Germany.

Utility Nova Scotia Power wanted to impose a monthly charge on net-metered solar system owners which the Canadian Renewable Energy Association said could have doubled the payback period for household and commercial arrays.

Spain’s National Confederation of Installers has released a technical paper about the advantages of coupling rooftop PV with heat pumps. It says that the payback time for a solar-powered heat pump can range between two and five years.

Perovskite-silicon tandem cells offer one of the surest pathways to much higher solar efficiencies, one that has moved close to commercialization in the past few years. Much of the work getting to this stage has naturally focused on developing a viable perovskite top cell. Optimizations to the silicon layer underneath, however, will also be important to the overall device function and efficiency. Scientists in Germany examined five different silicon cell concepts similar to those in mass production today, finding that with a few optimizations these could reach efficiencies up to 30.4%.

The Spanish energy company is building a huge hydropower complex across three water reservoirs in northern Portugal. The project will rely on 880 MW of pumped-hydro storage and is expected to become fully operational in 2024.

Seaborg Technologies, a Danish manufacturer of molten salt nuclear reactors, has turned a technology that was originally developed for nuclear power into a large-scale storage solution for wind and solar. It has developed a storage system that uses renewable energy to heat salt with electrical heaters, based on two-tank molten salt storage designs developed for concentrated solar power plants.