Magazine Archive 05 - 2023 | The journey to 100 GW

Coal-dependent Indonesia has huge solar potential but progress toward a net zero economy has been sluggish, explain Daniel Kurniawan and Fabby Tumiwa from the Institute for Essential Services Reform (IESR), an Indonesian thinktank.

Solar trade shows are now back in force, with Switzerland, France, and Italy hosting events in March. While Italy and Switzerland see solar as a centerpiece of their future energy systems, France continues to bet on nuclear, as pv magazine Publisher Eckhart K. Gouras discovered.

Japanese policymakers are now looking at rooftop solar panels as land is scarce in the country and agrivoltaics, building-integrated PV (BIPV), and floating solar are still in their infancy, reports Mark Hutchins.

A combination of protectionist measures, attractive profit margins, and domestic content incentives has revitalized Turkey’s solar manufacturing industry. Jonathan Gifford asks whether the resurgent sector can become a player on the world stage.

The first batch of entries is in. Here, we highlight a few of the contenders being passed on to our expert jurors in the modules, manufacturing, inverters, and battery energy storage system categories. The winners will be chosen at the end of the year, and if you missed the first entry window, don’t panic! There will be another chance to submit award applications in September.

ROSI (Return of Silicon) Solar won the pv magazine Award for manufacturing last year for recovering high-value materials from PV module waste. As the company brings its first recycling plant online in France, Mark Hutchins caught up with Hsin-Hsin Fan, commercial engineer for ROSI, to get an update on its solar recycling operations.

Cost is king in the cutthroat world of PV cell and module production but performance still counts. When reviewing module data from across the industry, as compiled by Exawatt, an electrification consultancy, some intriguing trends emerge.

M10 Solar Equipment, a German joint venture, may have shown Europe’s solar manufacturers how to scale their gigafactories by using Siemens’ plant simulation software to ramp up production of its innovative shingled-matrix solar cell production equipment, explains Tobias Wachtmann, director of global glass and solar for Siemens.

The perovskite solar race is heating up, with a cue of manufacturers forming to test products at the US Department of Energy’s (DoE) PV commercialization facilities, and academics on both sides of The Pond announcing new advances in recent months, reports Valerie Thompson.

A new generation of flexible, lightweight modules is entering the market. With back contact technology offering its own form of design flexibility and robustness, the new products could crack a hard-to-address market segment, as Jonathan Gifford explains.