Solar Technology & PV R&D News

A team of scientists led by the University of Glasgow has discovered a more efficient method of splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen using electricity which it says could almost double the amount of hydrogen produced per millivolt.

The government of the Philippines will spend $500 million on solar-powered water supply and desalination in remote areas of Mindanao, the second-largest island in the archipelago. Elsewhere, a Finnish study has suggested drought-hit Iran could benefit from renewable-powered desalination.

Where seasonal storage is paramount, hydrogen comes into play. Under-the-radar solar market Sweden has presented its hydrogen projects and technological solutions to overcome the country’s natural solar barriers.

The uptake of solar power around the world is certainly a good thing for the planet, but that doesn’t mean it is without environmental consequence either. Some solar panel components are more easily recycled than others, and scientists in Australia may have just figured out how to repurpose one of the trickiest and most valuable: the silicon that serves as its semiconductor.

The best of rigid and flexible solar panels combine in SunUp, a product for outdoor adventurers invented by Brunel University design graduate Bradley Brister.

A U.S. research team has used protein bacteriorhodopsin to improve the efficiency of what it called ‘bioperovskite’ solar cells. The scientists used Förster Resonance Energy Transfer to predict the strength of long-range excitonic transport between the perovskite and protein layers.

Research from the United States has demonstrated how PV technology can be used to kill cancer cells. Although still at an embryonic stage, the findings of the study and initial test results suggest solar power could be an effective tool in relation to light-activated fluorescent dyes for disease diagnosis, image-guided surgery and site-specific tumor treatment.

A study has estimated the cost of PV project soiling may increase from €3-5 billion last year to €4-7 billion by 2023 due to more extensive deployment in high insolation and soiling-affected regions, such as China and India. The authors of the paper outlined the potential of soiling mitigation technologies while stressing more R&D is needed to reduce costs and for the adoption of such measures on a larger scale.

The four-year-old Hangzhou-based business says it already has a 20 MW perovskite module pilot line and is working on a mass production facility in the city of Quzhou.

Using recently developed technology known as a streak camera, MIT engineers were able to visualize the propagation of light in super slow motion.

A German start-up achieved more than 99% efficiency when charging a vehicle developed by the Bochum University of Applied Sciences with electricity from solar cells. Ambibox’s DC charging technology was used in a research project in the Australian desert.

The Solar Team of the Eindhoven University of Technology won the World Solar Challenge in Australia in the cruiser category. This is the fourth year in a row that the Eindhoven team won gold in this category for family solar-powered cars, the university announced on Twitter.

Scientists at the Tokyo Institute of Technology have developed a carbon nanotube which forms a strong junction with a lead-halide perovskite, improving performance and stability.

A microscopic quantity of two-dimensional titanium carbide called MXene significantly improves collection of electrical charges in a perovskite solar cell.

Researchers in Chicago have developed a world first fully rechargeable lithium-carbon dioxide battery, an achievement they claim could pave the way for the use of the greenhouse gas in advanced energy storage systems.