Germany

SMA has unveiled a new and improved version of its Sunny Boy-US line of inverters, part of the company’s Power+ residential solar offering. The new Sunny Boy will offer the latest technology and include enhanced safety features to comply with current industry regulations.

A new report from analysts at Wood Mackenzie forecasts 6.6 GWh of residential energy storage to be installed across Europe by 2024. The economics of the technology are at a tipping point, increasingly reaching grid parity in European markets. With rising electricity demand and falling battery system costs, the trend will further spread across the continent and fuel an uptick in demand.

For the second half of the year, the German inverter producer expects a significant increase in revenues and earnings, mainly due to high order intake. It also confirmed its forecast for the full fiscal year, despite declining sales and sales in the first six months of 2019.

The Swiss battery maker Leclanché will build a 35.6 MW / 44.2 MWh solar-plus-storage power plant, which will provide with clean power state-owned St.Kitts electric utility Skelec over a 20-year period. The new facility will be able to cover around a fourth of the archipelago’s total electricity demand.

Chinese thin film producer Hanergy has set a new record of 24.85% module efficiency for silicon heterojunction technology. The record was achieved at the company’s research & development center in Chengdu, China, and has been confirmed by the Institute for Solar Energy Research in Hamelin, Germany.

Earlier this week, the French government published a list of winning projects for the sixth round of its tender for large-scale solar. There were a few changes from the preceding round, with French companies such as Urbasolar, Engie and Total consolidating their positions. However, even though a higher number of projects were submitted, prices increased slightly in the end. In a short conversation with pv magazine, Xavier Daval — a representative of SER, the French renewable energy association — explained the reasons for this.

Perovskite solar cell developer, Oxford PV is to become a merchant heterojunction with perovskite top cell manufacturer with orders placed with Meyer Burger that will provide an initial 250MW of cell capacity that will enter production by the end of 2020.

The researchers have developed a new manufacturing process by using an ultra-thin absorbing layer made of 205-nanometer-thick gallium arsenide (GaAs) and a nanostructured back mirror.

The costs of residential solar-plus-storage have already dropped or will only take a few years to drop to nation-wide grid averages across key European markets, according to Wood Mackenzie.

New textile-based solar cells developed by Fraunhofer researchers, semitrailers could soon be producing the electricity needed to power cooling systems or other onboard equipment. In short, textile-based solar cells could soon be adding a whole new dimension to photovoltaics, complementing the use of conventional silicon-based solar cells.

A German player has become the owner of a distributed solar pipeline in El Salvador, laying the groundwork for construction to launch later this year.

Indian and Australian solar will spearhead a grid parity shift set to take hold of Asia-Pacific renewables within less than a decade, according to Wood Mackenzie.

Spain has an opportunity in its upcoming reform of electricity charging to clear hurdles for self-consumption and electric vehicles (EVs), according to national PV body UNEF.