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.
If you were to walk into a solar store and purchase some of their best-selling PV panels, it is likely that their solar irradiance-to-electricity conversion efficiency would be around 17%. This is the typical efficiency (Fraunhofer ISE Photovoltaics Report, 2017) of the top-selling PV product, a multi-crystalline silicon panel. This means that for a typical panel, 17% of all incident solar energy is converted directly to usable electricity. This is quite impressive for a device that has no moving parts and can generate power at the location where the electricity is required (no transmission losses). It is no wonder that PV is already one of the cheapest power technologies available.
Originally published on the ECOreport. The electricity produced by current PV solar installations is not adequate for Germany’s targeted energy transformation. Photovoltaic power will have to go through a ten-fold increase over the next 15 years. This may be possible using a high performance alternative that uses Laser-Fired Contact (LFC) technology. Ralf … [continued]
A megalithic ‘Supergrid’ connecting Northern Africa with Europe could help both regions reach near-100% renewable energy share. This is the primary conclusion from a new report published by Fraunhofer ISE, which was worked on by five separate Fraunhofer institutes, each using their individual expertise to examine the idea of a … [continued]
Originally published on Sustainnovate. By Henry Lindon A new solar conversion efficiency world record for concentrator photovoltaic (CPV) solar modules has been achieved by researchers at Fraunhofer ISE, 2014 Zayed Future Energy Prize winner in the nonprofit category. The new the world record conversion efficiency for a CPV module of … [continued]
China has overtaken Germany in 2015 in terms of solar PV capacity, according to data from China’s Photovoltaic Industry Association. Reported by China’s state-run media outlet, Xinhua News, the China Photovoltaic Industry Association (CPIA) reported that China added 15 GW of solar PV capacity during 2015, a 40% increase on … [continued]
