The Jamaica Public Service Company (JPSCO) has announced the start of construction on a new hybrid storage facility set to provide spinning reserve power to the country’s grid. The project, according to JPSCO, is the first of its kind in the Caribbean and will be completed by April 2019.

U.K.-based developer, Hive Energy announced that its first project in Turkey – the 10 MW Adiyaman solar park – has begun feeding power into the country’s grid.

Scientists led by the University of Braunschweig have developed a new type of solar concentrator, which can concentrate light from any direction onto a small area, such as a solar panel. The researchers say that funnels can be tuned to different light wavelengths and stacked, allowing for conversion of the entire light spectrum into electricity.

German equipment supplier, Schmid Group has announced the successful delivery and installation of three of its Everflow energy storage systems to a leading PV cell manufacturer in China. These are the first storage systems delivered to China by Schmid, and will be used in combination with large-scale PV projects.

A team led by Chonnam National University in South Korea has developed a new perovskite solar cell composition, which it says could lead the way to the production of “highly efficient and air stable perovskite solar cells”.

Japanese electronics giant Sharp has signed an agreement for the construction of a 48 MW (DC) PV plant, to be located in Thua Thien Hue province in Northern Vietnam.

Polysilicon and wafer manufacturer ranking: PV demand reached record levels in 2017, with global installations surpassing 100 GW for the first time ever. Few in the industry expected deployments to hit this level, piling the pressure on to the supply chain. Armed with polysilicon and wafer manufacturer ranking data supplied by IHS Markit, pv magazine delves into the past year’s upstream landscape.

Scientists led by Brown University have developed perovskite solar cells, which replace the toxic lead common to many of these material structures with titanium. The researchers say that with further optimization, the material could eventually be ideal for use as a tandem cell layer.

A new report from the Asia Europe Clean Energy Associates (AECEA) expects solar to overtake wind energy in 2018 as China’s third largest source of power generation. AECEA is calling 2018 a ‘transition year’ for PV in China, as new regulations reshape the market, which is still expected to reach 250 GW installed capacity by the end of 2020.

Trina Solar has set a new record of 25.04% total area efficiency for an n-type interdigitated back contact (IBC) solar cell. The record has been independently verified by Japan Electric Safety and Environmental Technology Laboratory.