Luxembourg-based Ardagh Group is installing solar PV at several of its packaging manufacturing sites in the United Kingdom and Europe. The latest is a 1.75 MW rooftop system installed at a glass packaging facility in Irvine, Scotland.

Sinovoltaics analyzed publicly traded inverter producers using a balance sheet-based model and publicly available financial information to track finacial strength over the past three years. The top-five in the latest ranking are Hoymiles Power Electronics, Enphase, Kstar, Eaton, and Goodwe.

A team from Germany’s Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems has reduced silver consumption in the fabrication of PERC solar cells by screen-printing ultra-fine metallization lines measuring just 14 μm. The resulting solar cell offered remarkable efficiency levels, which were confirmed by Fraunhofer ISE CalLab.

Arctech says it plans to open a 3 GW tracker factory in Saudi Arabia. The tracker manufacturer says the facility in Jeddah will be designed to reach up to 10 GW of capacity.

German and Swedish researchers calculated the supply of materials to produce perovskite tandem PV at a multi-terawatt-scale, flagging the difficult supply of gold, indium and cesium, well as a need to streamline production of certain materials used for hole-transport layers. “In essence, we might be able to go post-fossil fuels, but we can’t go post-minerals,” the research’s corresponding author, Lukas Wagner, told pv magazine.

Dutch module manufacturer Solarge has raised €3 million venture capital from new and existing investors to expand its recently opened facility where it produces lightweight, low carbon, panels for commercial and industrial rooftops.

China’s National Energy Administration (NEA) says the nation installed more than 47 GW of solar in the first three months of this year.

The latest supply chain report from the Hong Kong-based technical compliance and quality assurance company covers the Southeast Asia region, providing information about 50 manufacturing sites.

German researchers are studying using an overhead solar PV system, designed to be removable and reusable, as a sunshade for young fir trees. The pilot, located at a quartz sand excavation site, will be monitored to compare growth and water consumption with an adjacent unshaded tree plot.

An Austrian team develped a model to optimize lamination parameters and to flag critical, insufficiently crosslinked and inconsistent encapsulant laminations. It could be particularly suitable for the production of double-glass solar panels.