Magazine Archive 06-2019

Information and communications technology giant Huawei is on a mission to build a fully connected world. Operating in more than 170 countries and regions to serve more than three billion people globally, the company is well on its way. In this exclusive interview, pv magazine meets with Tony Xu, President of the Smart PV Business Unit at Huawei, to discuss the technological breakthroughs, trends, and policies that have the company driving solar PV into the era of digitalization.

With PV’s cost declines, the growing question is: where to put it all, particularly in densely populated areas. Ingenuity to the rescue – a technology that took its first steps in 2007 is entering full market maturity. And its potential is rather impressive.

With half-cut, bifacial, shingle cell, and heterojunction designs being deployed at the scale of hundreds of megawatts, it is an exciting time to be in solar cell and module technology.

ACWA Power has an installed capacity of more than 1 GW of PV projects across MENA, Southern Africa, and Southeast Asia, and was awarded the landmark Sakaka Project – Saudi Arabia’s first utility-scale PV project – which it began to construct in November 2018. pv magazine caught up with Paddy Padmanathan, CEO of the Saudi-based energy giant to discuss the Middle East’s growing solar markets.

pv magazine was alerted to the existence of a PV power plant where the galvanized steel posts of the mounting frames were found to be heavily corroded after just a few years. There is a risk of the module racks failing during the 20 year operating period. The problem is not unique to this plant, but the good news is that there’s a simple solution.

Technology made in China competes with conventional plasma-based equipment to deposit the aluminum oxide layers at the heart of passivated emitter and rear contact (PERC) cells.

Light-induced initial degradation in PERC modules is currently a subject of intense discussion, but tests at PI Berlin have shown that the problem is solvable. Founder and CEO Paul Grunow explains the effects, the approach, and the results.

Giso Hahn is a professor at the University of Konstanz and one of the leading experts on light-induced degradation in solar modules. His research group developed countermeasures against the effect on standard monocrystalline technology years ago. Now it is time to address PERC.

The influence of the University of New South Wales (UNSW) School of Photovoltaics and Renewable Energy Engineering spreads over the horizon like rays of sunlight through a coal haze. Its researchers are confidently working towards the time when terawatts of solar PV power people’s aspirations from Uttar Pradesh to Perth and Pennsylvania.