2024

Onerous permits, a deficit of skilled workers, unclear information and expensive retrofitting costs are some of the difficulties that heritage-listed homeowners and building owners in the United Kingdom face when transitioning toward low-carbon heating and energy efficiency technologies, according to a recent government report.

With global irradiance above average in Australia, Southeast Asia and Europe, and stable in the United States, solar data provider Solargis says stakeholders should focus on the stability of power grids, while navigating solar financing complexities in developing economies and supply chain capacities in 2024.

India added about 6.5 GW of new utility-scale solar capacity in 2023. Capacity additions from rooftop installations hit 3 GW, according to JMK Research.

The US Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) and its research partners say that various types of tree pollen can reduce solar panel efficiency by more than 15%. Unlike the immediate improvements assumed to follow heavy rain, recovery of performance post-pollen season is gradual. Post-rain manual cleaning can boost performance by 5% to 11%.

Scientists have used remote sensing to analyze the effect solar farms have across 116 sites worldwide. They found that the cooling effect is higher during the daytime, with albedo decreasing by 0.016 for most facilities.

Smart Railway Technology’s new PV2Rail inverters are designed to feed directly into 16.7 Hertz (Hz) railway power grids.

US-based Ecoflow has developed Delta Pro Ultra, a whole-house battery generator with up to one month of power backup. With a single-unit capacity of 6 kWh, 7.2 kW of output, and 5.6 kW of solar input, the system can work with multiple energy sources for many scenarios.

Researchers in China have developed an optimized version of the whale optimization algorithm that reportedly indentifies the optimal area ratio of rooftop PV systems and solar collectors used in combination with air source heat pumps. They demonstrated that the installation area of photovoltaic modules and collectors affects both the power side and the thermal side.

JSW Energy says it will expand its renewables footprint in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu with an investment of $1.44 billion, including 1 GW of pumped storage and 1 GW of wind power.

A record 921 MW of PV was installed across Australian rooftops in the fourth quarter of 2023, taking new rooftop solar capacity to about 3.17 GW for all of last year.