Residential PV

Western Australia leads the world in successfully implementing renewables-based generation for far-flung customers. Boundary Power has been widely recognized for its innovations and is ready to repeat its successes with standalone power systems across Australia and the Asia-Pacific.

A new Lazard report has highlighted worries about price stability and product availability, as demand for battery products continues to increase.

Proposed by Turkish scientists, the system design consists of combining rooftop PV with a ground source heat pump in a greenhouse used for tomato, cucumber and lettuce cultivation. The solar array operates under net metering and grid electricity is used when PV generation is unable to cover demand. According to their findings, the system payback time ranges from 2.6 to 7 years.

In a new report, experts from the International Energy Agency Photovoltaic Power System Programme (IEA-PVPS) have assessed the economical and environmental benefits of repairing and reusing or replacing solar modules that are not complying with a 30-year expected lifetime. They found that reusing offers the best environmental impact in all cases, while the profitability of this option is currently guaranteed only by rooftop PV under certain conditions. As for large-scale solar, module replacement remains the most competitive option.

The payback time in Germany for new solar systems below 10 kW is increasing. According to EUPD Research, it could be almost 22 years by as early as 2023.

Australian real estate developer Cbus Property has revealed plans to clad a commercial office tower in Melbourne with a “solar skin” capable of generating 20% of the project’s base building electricity requirements.

The Sun Horizon consortium has started to collect performance data on two pilot projects that combine heat pumps with solar systems using hybrid panels on homes in Riga, Latvia. The solution features a heat pump for space heating and domestic hot water and PVT panels to produce power for heating and domestic appliances, with excess power fed to the grid.

The town of Marble Bar in Western Australia’s remote East Pilbara region is famed for at one time recording 100 consecutive days of temperatures exceeding 37 C. So it’s no wonder the town’s residents have excess solar and nowhere to put it. That is, until now, thanks to the installation of a battery energy storage system beside the town’s centralized solar farm.

Norwegian researchers have sought to assess the theoretical technical feasibility of a country-level energy system based exclusively on distributed solar, electric vehicles, and vehicle-to-grid technologies. They applied the model to sunny Spain and found that 3.45 billion m² of PV systems would be necessary to build a 100% self-reliant energy system.

The country’s cumulative capacity reached 7.6 GW at the end of October.