Saddled with more than $11 billion in debt and facing at least one investigation by federal officials plus a lawsuit from its own subsidiary, solar giant SunEdison is lurching toward bankruptcy. The shares of other leading solar providers, including SolarCity and Sunrun, have lost more than half their value in the last four months as investors lose confidence in the no-money-down, 20-year-lease model that has fueled the explosive growth of the rooftop solar market in the last few years.
Uno de cada tres colectores solares térmicos instalados en el país, obligatorios en la vivienda nueva para el agua caliente y la calefacción, no funciona por falta de mantenimiento o, en el peor de los casos, por una deficiente instalación.
Los propietarios, en la inmensa mayoría de los casos, lo desconocen, porque estos sistemas se conectan al circuito de calefacción habitual, alimentado por una caldera, que sigue prestando servicio, de modo que no se aprecia el mal funcionamiento de los paneles solares.
The technology giant that’s synonymous with photocopied documents has set its sights on highly efficient solar panels.
Researchers at PARC, an R&D-focused subsidiary of Xerox, say they’re developing a new digital printing process that could make it much cheaper to mass-produce concentrated solar photovoltaic systems. Such systems can dramatically increase the efficiency of solar cells by using lenses to concentrate and focus the sunlight onto small cells.
Driving forward in the race for highly efficient solar cells, First Solar says it has converted 22.1 percent of the energy in sunlight into electricity using experimental cells made from cadmium telluride—a technology that today represents around 5 percent of the worldwide solar power market. The company’s commercial line of solar cells has reached an energy conversion efficiency of 16.4 percent.
Silicon probably won’t be replaced as the dominant solar material anytime soon, but it might not be too long before it gets a partner from a promising class of materials called perovskites.
A group led by Henry Snaith, a physicist at the University of Oxford and leading perovskite researcher, has demonstrated what it says is a viable pathway to a device that combines a conventional silicon cell with a perovskite cell to boost the efficiency of that silicon cell by several percentage points.
Las últimas noticias sobre una adjudicación le han llegado a ACS desde Asia, territorio prácticamente acotado para las constructoras occidentales. El grupo que preside Florentino Pérez se ha impuesto en el concurso para diseñar, construir, operar y ocuparse del mantenimiento durante los tres primeros años de funcionamiento de una planta fotovoltaica en la isla de Kiushu (la tercera más grande del archipiélago japonés), en la prefectura de Kumamoto, donde Honda Motors tiene una de sus mayores fábricas.
El sector fotovoltaico se enfrenta a un nuevo obstáculo: tras la reforma eléctrica llega el recién aprobado real decreto sobre el autoconsumo ¿Sobrevivirá a estos envites?
La generación fotovoltaica ha sido la más afectada por el real decreto del autoconsumo que el Gobierno aprobó la semana pasada. Un golpe más que se suma los que ya ha sufrido, junto a las demás renovables, con el resto de medidas de la reforma eléctrica llevada a cabo por el Gobierno.
Driven by the explosion of residential solar power, the market for home energy storage—which attracted little interest until earlier this year, when Tesla announced its Powerwall battery—is suddenly looking crowded.
Try as he might, Vlatko Vlatkovic won’t make the sun shine brighter. So when he wanted to make a more efficient solar farm, he and his team had to go for the next best thing: a gray plastic box the size of a small hut called the inverter. “It takes direct current from the PV panels and turns it into alternating current that you can use,” says Vlatkovic, chief engineering officer at GE Power Conversion. “Since the inverter system also represents as much as 20 percent of the capital costs of the farm, you could make a huge impact if you made it more efficient.”
