PV plant

The Chinese manufacturer said the result was confirmed by Germany’s TÜV Rheinland. The achievement beats the company’s previous record of 21.65%, set last month.

The Italian developer has announced most of its 37-strong Italian workforce will be laid off without spelling out why.

Tariffs ranged from €0.0470 to €0.0620 as the solar power price rose from the last national procurement round, which settled at €0.0459-0.0520 in October for an average €0.0490/kWh. Some 501 MW of generation capacity was allocated in the latest exercise.

The minister of environment and energy transition has told parliament two auctions for large scale solar will be held this year, with a new procurement round now planned. The minister revealed energy storage may play a part in the capacity tenders.

Fire safety engineering researchers have demonstrated increasing the gap between the modules of commercial PV arrays and flat roof surfaces is a decisive factor in reducing fire risks. Experiments have identified a critical gap height below which flame spread rate increases significantly.

The Dutch water management agency plans to install solar panels along both sides of the A37 highway in Drenthe province, as well as on the median strip, to cover 300 hectares in total. The project is part of a plan to build projects on state land, as the domestic PV industry continues to search for alternative surfaces on which to deploy solar.

With around 300 MW of newly installed capacity in the final quarter of 2019, Poland has maintained its promise to reach 1.3 GW of solar by the end of December. New PV additions reached more than 800 MW last year.

The country’s Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy (MOTIE) has provided new market share figures for the domestic PV sector that contradict recent media claims that Chinese manufacturers have been aggressively ramping up their local presence at the expense of Korean module makers. The government has also confirmed plans to prioritize PV projects made with low-carbon, high-efficiency modules.

With the country’s first procurement exercise for bigger projects, the Togolese government intends to develop solar parks with a combined generation capacity of up to 80 MW. The tender is being held under the umbrella of the World Bank’s Scaling Solar initiative.

Researchers from Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah University of Science and Technology have created flexible solar cells made of crystalline silicon. They claim to have stretched a crystalline silicon cell’s surface by around 95% while maintaining conversion efficiency of around 19%.