A trio of technology leaders in Europe — the Austrian Institute of Technology, Fraunhofer ISE in Germany, and Forster Industrietechnik in Switzerland — is working to develop a solar canopy system for highways in order to tap into the vast, under-utilized road network for clean electricity generation.
Fraunhofer ISE is conducting a three-year research program designed to test how solar panels can be integrated with heavy duty trucks.
Fraunhofer ISE says solar panels could provide up to 500 GW of electricity in coming years. It calls for an integrated approach to expand solar in new and nontraditional locations.
Fraunhofer ISE has created a laminated solar roof for cars that can match the color of the vehicle, making the solar cells nearly invisible.
Fraunhofer ISE is leading experiments that combine solar power with aquaculture along the Mekong River in southern Vietnam. Many shrimp and fish farms cover their operations with greenhouse-like structures to keep contaminants out of the water. Fruahofer is turning those greenhouses into solar energy farms in a process known as SHRIMPS, a catchy acronym that stands for the convoluted and overly complex title “Solar-Aquaculture Habitats as Resource Efficient and Integrated Multilayer Production Systems.”
Frauhofer ISE’s experimental agrophotovoltaic farm in Germany was 186% more efficient during the hot, dry summer of 2018 than the land would have been if it was devoted solely to agriculture or solar panels alone.
Incorporating solar generation in commercial building materials may finally become a mainstream practice, with both solar windows and solar panels used to create net-zero buildings. Evolving regulations in leading jurisdictions like California and Germany are driving the building integrated photovoltaics (BIPV) with adoption deadlines as early as next year.
An R&D team at Fraunhofer ISE has unveiled a new solar cell stringing machine that can boost cell performance 2% by using electrically conductive adhesives to fix solar cells to a foil substrate in a shingled pattern. The process reduces the number of manufacturing steps that soldering a connective ribbon would require, and imparts more efficient cell performance in several incremental ways.
A novel combination of high-grade spacecraft solar cell material and advanced light-concentrating lenses has yielded solar panels with a record 29% efficiency that may become available for general rooftop use by 2022. The crux in the commercialization of the planar optical micro-tracking technology will be cost-controlling manufacturing process, which is the current stage of study for Insolight, the cell developer.
Alta Devices’ record-setting solar cell has just begun a one-year test by NASA in the latest Materials International Space Station Experiment (MISSE-X) flight investigation, launched in November on board the NG CRS-10 mission. NASA is testing Alta Devices solar technology at the Space Station in order to evaluate the technology for future NASA low-Earth orbit missions, including powering CubeSats, a trending, small, inexpensive satellite design.
