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Emmvee Photovoltaic Power Ltd (NSE:EMMVEE) (Q2 2027) Earnings Call Highlights: Profit Surges …  Yahoo Finance
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Vikram Solar, an Indian solar PV module manufacturer, has secured a 187 MW module supply order from a renewable energy developer for solar projects at three locations across the southern Indian states of Karnataka and Tamil Nadu.
Under the agreement, Vikram Solar will supply its high-efficiency N-Type TOPCon G12R modules, featuring glass-to-glass construction and bifacial technology, with power ratings ranging from 615–625 Wp, the company said.
The engagement builds on Vikram Solar’s existing association with the developer and adds to Vikram Solar’s growing pipeline as an integrated domestic manufacturer at a time when India is scaling up toward its target of 500 GW of non-fossil capacity. 
“As India’s solar sector continues to scale, the focus is increasingly on technologies that can deliver performance, reliability and long-term value across utility-scale projects,” Sameer Nagpal, Chief Executive Officer, Vikram Solar, said. “At Vikram Solar, we remain committed to advancing our technology capabilities and maintaining the manufacturing and execution standards that our customers expect, delivering dependable, high-efficiency solar solutions that support the evolving needs of India’s renewable energy sector.”
Headquartered in Kolkata, West Bengal, Vikram Solar Limited specializes in photovoltaic (PV) module manufacturing, with an international presence across 39 countries. 

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Evertiq AB Linnégatan 64 114 54 Stockholm Sweden

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Qcells, a South Korean full-service solar technology provider with major plants in North Georgia, announced new versions of its residential solar panels featuring aluminum frames made in Tennessee.
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BEIJING, Oct 16 (Reuters) – China has proposed adding 40 technologies across the artificial intelligence, ​biomedicine and photovoltaic sectors to ‌its catalogue of technologies prohibited or restricted from export, the commerce ministry announced on Friday.
Public opinions are ‌now ​being sought on ⁠the proposed revision until ⁠November 15 and China is simultaneously implementing interim pre-export registration management for the relevant technologies.
Those ​included in the proposed revision are AI models, intelligent ⁠agents and computing ⁠clusters, which are the ​three fundamental building blocks of China’s ​AI industry, at a time ‌of increasing competition and geopolitical tensions with the United States over the technology’s frontier development.
In ⁠a separate statement, the ministry said the revision was proposed as applications of ⁠related ‌technologies in sensitive fields ⁠are constantly expanding and ​that ‌the move was routine ​and does ⁠not target any specific country, region or entity.
(Reporting by Shi Bu, Liz Lee and Eduardo Baptista; Editing by Alison Williams and ​Philippa Fletcher)
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On October 16, China’s Ministry of Commerce (MOFCOM) and Ministry of Science and Technology (MOST) issued Announcement No. 48, proposing revisions to China’s Catalogue of Technologies Prohibited or Restricted from Export, including 23 AI-related technologies.
At the same time, the authorities introduced an export registration requirement for the technologies listed in the announcement, effective immediately. This requirement also applies to exports that have already commenced but have not yet been completed.
Importantly, the registration requirement is already in effect, while the proposed additions to the export control catalogue remain subject to public consultation.
Pursuant to the Foreign Trade Law of the People’s Republic of China and the Regulations of the People’s Republic of China on the Administration of Technology Import and Export, the Ministry of Commerce and the Ministry of Science and Technology propose to revise the Catalogue of Technologies Prohibited or Restricted from Export to include certain technologies in artificial intelligence, biomedicine, and photovoltaics.
With the necessary approval, the proposed revisions are hereby released for public consultation. At the same time, a pre-export registration requirement will be introduced for the relevant technologies.
The public consultation covers 40 technologies across three sectors: artificial intelligence, biomedicine, and photovoltaics.
Artificial Intelligence: The proposed additions cover 23 technologies related to large AI models, AI agents, computing clusters, and information processing. Technologies that have already entered the public domain through open-source releases, academic publications, or other means will not be subject to these controls.
Biomedicine: The proposed additions cover five technologies related to cell and gene therapies, small nucleic acid drugs, and pathogenic microorganisms. Facilitation measures, including automatic licensing, will apply to overseas licensing arrangements that do not involve a transfer of ownership.
Photovoltaics: The proposed additions cover 12 technologies related to polysilicon manufacturing, silicon wafer production, and solar cell manufacturing. The scope of technology controls will also extend to key and core equipment incorporating the relevant technologies.
The specific technologies proposed for inclusion, together with explanations of the relevant policy measures, are provided in Annex 1.
The public may submit comments between October 16 and November 15, 2026, regarding the proposed scope of technologies, technical thresholds, control measures, and facilitation arrangements through the following channels:
Email: jinxianmulu@mofcom.gov.cn
Fax: +86-10-65197565
Postal mail: Bureau of Industry, Security, Import and Export Control, Ministry of Commerce, No. 2 Dong Chang’an Avenue, Beijing 100731, China.
Please indicate “Public Consultation on the Catalogue of Technologies Prohibited or Restricted from Export” in the email subject line, on the cover page of any fax, or on the envelope.
Submissions should include the name of a contact person, the organization they represent, and their contact details. Submissions made on behalf of an organization must bear its official seal.
(1) Effective Period and Scope
From the date of publication of this announcement until the revised Catalogue of Technologies Prohibited or Restricted from Export is formally issued and takes effect, technology exporters must register the export of any technology listed in the annexes to this announcement before proceeding with the export.
Registration must be completed through the Technology Trade Management Information System on MOFCOM’s Unified Business Platform:
https://ecomp.mofcom.gov.cn
The registration requirement also applies to technology exports that have already commenced but have not yet been completed.
(2) Transactions Subject to Registration
The following types of technology export transactions are subject to registration:
Transfers of technology ownership to overseas entities, including transfers of intellectual property rights.
Licensing of domestically held technologies for use overseas, including intellectual property licensing arrangements.
Changes in the ownership or actual control of domestically held technologies whereby the owner or actual controller becomes an overseas entity.
Other circumstances in which MOFCOM explicitly requires registration through notices or other official communications.
(3) Information Required for Registration
The information to be registered mainly includes:
Basic information about the technology exporter and the technology recipient.
The destination country or region.
Details of the technology proposed for export and its intended use.
The estimated value of the technology export.
The specific information requirements are subject to those set out in the Technology Trade Management Information System on MOFCOM’s Unified Business Platform, as detailed in Annex 2.
Where multiple technologies are intended to be exported to the same recipient as part of a single transaction, they may be included in one registration submission. In other circumstances, separate registrations should generally be submitted.
Annex 1: Proposed Scope of Artificial Intelligence, Biomedical, and Photovoltaic Technologies to Be Included in the Catalogue of Technologies Prohibited or Restricted from Export (Draft for Public Consultation).
Annex 2: Technology Export Information Registration Form.
Ministry of Commerce of the People’s Republic of China Ministry of Science and Technology of the People’s Republic of China
October 16, 2026
Serial number; industry sector; code; technology name; control points.
Internet and related services. High-performance detection technology: Technologies for manufacturing authentication systems and equipment specifically or mainly used for preventing and handling security risks in cross-border transmission of China’s network data, where the detection accuracy and recall rate for deeply synthesized video, audio, images, or multimodal information are 95%.
Information confrontation technology: 1. AI autonomous-driven malicious code generation and mutation technologies that have any of the following characteristics and may be used to attack highly sensitive systems such as national critical information infrastructure, national defense and military industry, and core government affairs, or to bypass national security defense systems: (1) an attack success rate of 60% against multi-engine malware detectors;
(2) an attack success rate of 85% against a single mainstream antivirus software;
(3) an attack success rate of 90% against machine learning models.
2. Adaptive evolution in adversarial environments and runtime dynamic behavior modification technologies that have any of the following characteristics and may be used to attack highly sensitive systems such as national critical information infrastructure, national defense and military industry, and core government affairs, or to bypass national security defense systems: (1) capable of detecting virtualization sandboxes, debuggers, and emulators, identifying the type and version of security products, or achieving sandbox escape;
(2) under the premise of maintaining complete malicious functionality, automatically rewriting 50% of code structure or control flow upon each execution.
3. Automated antivirus-evasion variant batch generation and distributed large-scale deployment technologies that have any of the following characteristics and may be used to attack highly sensitive systems such as national critical information infrastructure, national defense and military industry, and core government affairs, or to bypass national security defense systems: (1) generating 20 functionally equivalent but structurally different variants in a single run, or having an end-to-end automation rate of 80%;
(2) based on a single baseline payload, generating more than 10 variants every 24 hours with syntax tree divergence of 30%;
(3) sampled variants showing 90% consistency in behavioral profiles in sandboxes.
Software and information technology services. AI large model technology: Large models that provide services after being trained using China’s core data.
Note: The scope of “core data” is determined by the Data Security Law of the People’s Republic of China and other relevant laws and regulations.
Software and information technology services. AI agent technology: Agents specifically or mainly used in highly sensitive application scenarios such as national critical information infrastructure, national defense and military industry, and core government affairs, and reaching a high-performance level.
Note: “High performance” means meeting the control indicators for restricted-category AI agent technology under 266505X.
Serial number; industry sector; code; technology name; control points.
Internet and related services. High-performance detection technology: (Added on the basis of the existing seven items under this category of technology) 8. Technologies for manufacturing detection systems and equipment for deeply synthesized video, audio, images, or multimodal information, with accuracy and recall rate of 98%.
9. Video and image information steganography and extraction technologies that simultaneously meet the following characteristics: (1) high robustness, with an error code rate of 0.5% or recall rate of 99.9%;
(2) low false alarm rate, with false positive rate (FPR) of 0.1%;
(3) high imperceptibility, with structural similarity index (SSIM) of 0.999, or peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) of 41 dB, or learned perceptual image patch similarity (LPIPS) of 0.005.
Information confrontation technology: (Added on the basis of the existing five items under this category of technology) 6. AI-assisted vulnerability discovery technologies with any of the following characteristics: (1) in authoritative security benchmark tests, a vulnerability reproduction or exploitability determination score of 75%;
(2) for known publicly disclosed vulnerabilities, an end-to-end success rate for independently completing the process from vulnerability analysis to construction of a complete exploit chain: 50% success rate for mainstream operating systems or browsers, or 40% success rate for exploit construction at the arbitrary-code-execution level;
(3) vulnerability discovery and exploitation efficiency achieving an improvement of 10 times or more compared with the benchmark implementation by senior security experts, or achieving a performance improvement of 10 times or more in the number of exploitable vulnerabilities discovered in standard vulnerability database security benchmark tests;
(4) capable of autonomously chaining two or more low-risk or medium-risk software defects into a complete multi-stage attack chain and generating runnable proof-of-concept code;
(5) under a conventional testing framework, capable of autonomously discovering in one pass more than 5 previously undisclosed high-risk security defects, or more than 50 previously undisclosed security defects, in a major open-source project or mainstream operating system;
(6) reaching the highest level in mainstream domestic and international exploit capability grading systems.
Software and information technology services. Information processing technology: (Added on the basis of the existing 18 items under this category of technology) 19. Voiceprint recognition technologies with any of the following characteristics, including core voiceprint algorithm technology, anti-attack and anti-forgery technology, voiceprint recognition system technology, voiceprint data processing and protection technology, etc.: (1) under conditions of false positive rate (FPR) of 0.01%, enrollment speech duration of 30 seconds, test speech duration of 10 seconds, and speech signal-to-noise ratio of 20 dB, a true positive rate (TPR) of 99.1%;
(2) single voiceprint end-to-end processing latency of 300 milliseconds, and throughput of 100 requests/second;
(3) overall detection rate of 98% for common fraud attacks such as recording replay, speech synthesis, and voice conversion, or false acceptance rate of 1%;
(4) possessing specialized optimization capabilities for voiceprint recognition of minority languages or specific regional dialects, and recognition accuracy of 90% under standard test conditions.
20. Translation technologies with any of the following characteristics, specifically or mainly used for Chinese and minority languages: (1) an average mean opinion score (MOS) of 4.8 obtained through human evaluation on standard test sets;
(2) where translation semantic fidelity is 95%, a BLEU similarity score with standard answers of 35 for general-scenario translation, or 30 for professional-domain translation.
Software and information technology services. AI large model technology: 1. Large models that provide services after being trained using China’s important data.
2. Core technologies of large models with any of the following characteristics, including weight parameters, key checkpoints, underlying source code, architecture design, and technologies such as training optimization and inference acceleration: (1) computational volume of 1026 floating-point operations;
(2) parameter count of 000 billion;
(3) capabilities reaching the world-leading level.
Notes: Where only a trace amount (0.1%) of important data is used for training, the important data used cannot substantially improve the model’s core technology R&D capability in that data field, security measures such as desensitization and cleaning are adopted, the important data will not be reproduced in the output stage, or the relevant important data can be legally and publicly obtained, it is not included in the scope of administration of item 1. The scope of “important data” is determined by the Data Security Law of the People’s Republic of China and other relevant laws and regulations.
“Capabilities reaching the world-leading level” means that, at the time of the export activity, the model ranks among the global top 10 in public evaluations by mainstream domestic and international evaluation institutions, large-scale industry platforms, etc., in terms of comprehensive performance of large models, specialized business capabilities, global call volume, safety performance, training efficiency, etc.
Software and information technology services. AI agent technology: 1. Autonomous planning and task decomposition technology, capable of automatically decomposing natural-language instructions into a chain of 20 executable subtasks, with subtask decomposition accuracy of 80% and average subtask success rate of 90%.
2. Multi-agent collaborative architecture technology, supporting 60 concurrent collaborative agents, with overall task completion time, under the same effect, being two times the minimum completion time of a single agent, and the consistency rate between the final multi-agent conclusion and the standard answer being 85%.
3. Tool calling and system operation technology, supporting integration of 200 third-party tools, with tool selection accuracy of 90%, and in scenarios requiring three or more tools to collaborate to complete a task, average end-to-end task success rate of 90%.
4. AI game decision-making technology with all of the following characteristics: (1) single-task decision planning depth of 20 steps or 10 concurrent game agents;
(2) possessing strategy self-adaptation capability, complex dynamic game decision latency of 200 milliseconds and 10 control units;
(3) exceeding 90% of humans on standard game benchmarks.
Software and information technology services. AI chip design technology: 1. AI processor chip design technologies with any of the following characteristics, including chip architecture, self-developed instruction sets, intelligent computing intellectual property cores, supporting foundational software stacks, etc.: (1) requiring use of 14 nm or below manufacturing process;
(2) possessing floating-point or integer computing capability;
(3) adopting 2.5D or 3D advanced packaging integration technology;
(4) possessing high-speed interconnection capability;
(5) new architectures based on non-von Neumann architectures such as compute-in-memory and neuromorphic computing;
(6) applicable to specific scenarios such as autonomous driving, computer vision, and intelligent speech.
2. Memory chip design technology: (1) 3D flash memory chip design technologies with any of the following characteristics: 1) storage density of 8 gigabits per square millimeter (Gb/mm2); 2) I/O rate of 1.5 gigabits per second (Gbps); 3) adoption of bonding technology. (2) Memory chip design technologies with any of the following characteristics: 1) requiring use of 18 nm or below memory manufacturing process; 2) adopting a vertical-channel transistor architecture; 3) adopting bonding technology; 4) implementing multilayer stacking.
Software and information technology services. AI computing power cluster technology: 1. Inter-chip or inter-node high-speed interconnection technology for large-scale intelligent computing clusters, with bidirectional bandwidth of 800 gigabytes per second (GB/s).
2. Distributed training fault-tolerance technologies with any of the following characteristics, used in large-scale intelligent computing clusters to ensure stable operation of distributed training: (1) average mean time to recovery (MTTR) of the checkpoint recovery mechanism of 120 seconds;
(2) supporting automatic fault sensing and seamless task migration, with visible interruption time caused by faults to training tasks of 30 seconds;
(3) under a typical cluster scale, the effective computing power waste rate of graphics processing units (GPUs) caused by network faults is 5%.
3. Efficient communication scheduling technologies with any of the following characteristics, used in large-scale intelligent computing clusters to optimize cluster communication efficiency: (1) linear scalability of 98%;
(2) possessing dynamic topology-aware routing and cross-multiple-plane load balancing capabilities, with end-to-end communication latency of 1 microsecond;
(3) supporting deep overlap of communication and computation, with communication hiding rate of 90%.
4. Heterogeneous-cluster efficient inference and scheduling technologies with any of the following characteristics, supporting unified scheduling and collaborative inference of AI chips from two or more different vendors in large-scale intelligent computing clusters, including heterogeneous computing power unified scheduling frameworks, mixed-precision collaborative training technologies, heterogeneous inference optimization technologies, heterogeneous-cluster intelligent operation and maintenance technologies, etc.: (1) supporting unified adaptation and hybrid scheduling of two or more high-speed communication protocols, with cross-chip communication bandwidth utilization of 90%, or cross-node end-side communication latency of 5 microseconds;
(2) supporting unified management of computing nodes across more than two different architectures, with throughput performance of heterogeneous inference clusters improved by 30% compared with a single-chip cluster solution, or average utilization of AI accelerator cards in heterogeneous clusters improved by 65%, or inference cost reduced by 20% compared with a single-chip solution, or cluster average fault recovery time of 10 minutes and cluster availability of 99.9%;
(3) supporting unified computing power scheduling and task allocation across two or more geographically distributed intelligent computing centers, with cross-region scheduling training efficiency being 80% of single-cluster efficiency, or supporting real-time load balancing and task migration for cross-region heterogeneous computing power resources.
Note: “Large-scale intelligent computing cluster” refers to a computing entity with more than 10,000 AI accelerator cards in total.
Serial number; industry sector; code; technology name; control points.
Pharmaceutical manufacturing. Original cell and gene therapy technology: Cell and gene therapy technology process platforms with independent intellectual property rights.
Notes: Only outbound transfer of ownership is prohibited; outbound licensing, use of relevant technology processes to provide outsourced R&D and production services, and other circumstances that do not transfer ownership outbound are not within the scope of administration. For specific drug varieties at different R&D and production stages, relevant technology processes necessary for R&D, testing, production, quality control, marketing, compliance, etc. in the course of outbound cooperation or business transactions (BD) are not within the scope of administration.
“Technology process platform” refers to a set of reusable underlying common technologies formed through long-term R&D accumulation and capable of supporting the development of multiple drugs. Development technologies and processes used for a single drug variety are not within this scope.
Pharmaceutical manufacturing. Original small nucleic acid drug technology: Small interfering ribonucleic acid (siRNA) drug technology process platforms with independent intellectual property rights.
Notes: Only outbound transfer of ownership is prohibited; outbound licensing, use of relevant technology processes to provide outsourced R&D and production services, and other circumstances that do not transfer ownership outbound are not within the scope of administration. For specific drug varieties at different R&D and production stages, relevant technology processes necessary for R&D, testing, production, quality control, marketing, compliance, etc. in the course of outbound cooperation or business transactions (BD) are not within the scope of administration.
“Technology process platform” refers to a set of reusable underlying common technologies formed through long-term R&D accumulation and capable of supporting the development of multiple drugs. Development technologies and processes used for a single drug variety are not within this scope.
Research and experimental development. Pathogenic microorganism technology: Artificial genetic modification and directed passage gain technologies for pathogenic microorganisms, with any of the following characteristics: (1) function-enhancement technologies for known or potential pathogenic microorganisms;
(2) passage culture systems and processes used for large-scale proliferation of pathogenic microorganisms, directed accelerated evolution, and stable maintenance of specific virulence characteristics;
(3) artificial controlled passage induction technologies simulating natural evolutionary processes.
Serial number; industry sector; code; technology name; control points.
Pharmaceutical manufacturing. Original cell and gene therapy technology: Completely novel target discovery and validation technologies for cell and gene therapy with independent intellectual property rights.
Notes: “Completely novel target” refers to a drug target that has not been publicly disclosed worldwide through patents, academic literature, public databases, industry technical materials, academic conferences, or other channels.
“Completely novel target discovery and validation technology” refers to technology used to screen, discover, and confirm completely novel targets and to identify drug action sites with druggability potential.
Pharmaceutical manufacturing. Original small nucleic acid drug technology: Completely novel target discovery and validation technologies for small interfering ribonucleic acid (siRNA) with independent intellectual property rights.
Notes: “Completely novel target” refers to a drug target that has not been publicly disclosed worldwide through patents, academic literature, public databases, industry technical materials, academic conferences, or other channels.
“Completely novel target discovery and validation technology” refers to technology used to screen, discover, and confirm completely novel targets and to identify drug action sites with druggability potential.
Serial number; industry sector; code; technology name; control points.
Non-metallic mineral products industry. Polysilicon preparation technology: 1. Cold hydrogenation fluidized-bed process with single-line trichlorosilane production capacity of 250,000 tons/year, and technologies for manufacturing its equipment.
2. Silane fluidized-bed process with single-line capacity of 20,000 tons/year, and technologies for manufacturing its equipment.
Non-metallic mineral products industry. Silicon wafer preparation technology: Silicon wafer preparation technology with thickness of 70 micrometers, and technologies for manufacturing its equipment.
Note: “Silicon wafer preparation technology” includes program code, underlying algorithm models, equipment drawings, etc.
Electrical machinery and equipment manufacturing. Photovoltaic cell preparation technology: 1. Edge passivation photovoltaic-specific technology for crystalline silicon cell preparation, and technologies for manufacturing its equipment, simultaneously meeting the following conditions: (1) usable for full, half, or multi-split solar silicon wafers, and calculated by the size of a full silicon wafer, each side length is between 182 and 230 millimeters;
(2) silicon wafer thickness of 140 micrometers.
2. Perovskite and tandem cell module production technologies, and technologies for manufacturing their equipment, including: (1) perovskite-crystalline silicon tandem cell technology, with mass-produced silicon wafer size of 182 millimeters and efficiency of 30%;
(2) perovskite-specific slot-die coating technology, with processing width of 1.1 meters;
(3) large-area single-junction perovskite cell module technology, with single-junction perovskite cell module area of 1 square meter and efficiency of 18%;
(4) large-area tandem perovskite cell module technology, with module area of 1 square meter and efficiency of 28%.
Serial number; industry sector; code; technology name; control points.
Non-metallic mineral products industry. Polysilicon preparation technology: 1. Polysilicon engineering technology with single-line capacity of 30,000 tons/year.
2. Reduction process with single reduction furnace polysilicon capacity of 800 tons/year, and technologies for manufacturing its equipment.
Note: “Engineering technology” includes equipment engineering design, plant construction engineering design, process packages, etc.
Non-metallic mineral products industry. Silicon wafer preparation technology: 1. Technologies for pulling photovoltaic monocrystalline silicon rods, and technologies for manufacturing their equipment, including: (1) monocrystalline furnace design application schemes with furnace body chamber inner diameter of 1600 millimeters;
(2) monocrystalline furnace thermal field design application schemes with size of 35 inches;
(3) monocrystalline furnace design application schemes with pulling speed of 1.2 millimeters/minute;
(4) monocrystalline furnace design application schemes with constant-diameter power consumption of 40 kilowatts.
2. Machining technologies for photovoltaic monocrystalline silicon rods, and technologies for manufacturing their equipment, including: (1) half-rod cutting and grinding preparation processing technology;
(2) machining technology usable for manufacturing silicon rods with length of 720 millimeters.
3. Ultra-thin large-size photovoltaic silicon wafer preparation technologies, and technologies for manufacturing their equipment, including: (1) preparation technologies usable for manufacturing rectangular silicon wafers with any side length of 182 millimeters;
(2) technologies usable for preparing silicon wafers with thickness of 130 micrometers or below: 1) tungsten-wire slicing technology of 28 micrometers or below; 2) slicing equipment design application schemes with spindle speed of 6500 revolutions/minute, or main roller diameter of 120 millimeters, or transverse axial distance of main rollers of 370 millimeters.
Electrical machinery and equipment manufacturing. Photovoltaic cell preparation technology: 1. Preparation technologies for high-efficiency tunnel oxide passivated contact (TOPCon) and high-efficiency back contact (XBC) crystalline silicon cells, and technologies for manufacturing their equipment, including: (1) ultra-thin tunnel oxide layer and doped polysilicon selective passivated contact layer low-pressure chemical vapor deposition (LPCVD) and plasma-enhanced chemical vapor deposition (PECVD) photovoltaic-specific coating technologies simultaneously meeting the following conditions: 1) usable for full, half, or multi-split solar silicon wafers, and calculated by the size of a full silicon wafer, each side length is between 182 and 230 millimeters; 2) silicon wafer thickness of 140 micrometers; 3) calculated by a full G12 silicon wafer, LPCVD equipment capacity of 6000 wafers/hour and PECVD equipment capacity of 6000 wafers/hour. (2) Aluminum oxide surface passivation layer atomic layer deposition (ALD) photovoltaic-specific coating technologies simultaneously meeting the following conditions: 1) calculated by the size of a full silicon wafer, each side length is between 182 and 230 millimeters; 2) silicon wafer thickness of 140 micrometers; 3) calculated by a full G12 silicon wafer, capacity of 12000 wafers/hour. (3) High-temperature boron diffusion photovoltaic-specific technologies simultaneously meeting the following conditions: 1) calculated by the size of a full silicon wafer, each side length is between 182 and 230 millimeters; 2) silicon wafer thickness of 140 micrometers; 3) calculated by a full G12 silicon wafer, capacity of 4500 wafers/hour. (4) TOPCon cell copper electroplating electrode preparation technologies simultaneously meeting the following conditions: 1) usable for full, half, or multi-split solar silicon wafers, and calculated by the size of a full silicon wafer, each side length is between 182 and 230 millimeters; 2) silicon wafer thickness of 140 micrometers. (5) Low-temperature amorphous or microcrystalline silicon deposition and PECVD photovoltaic-specific coating technologies simultaneously meeting the following conditions: 1) usable for full, half, or multi-split solar silicon wafers, and calculated by the size of a full silicon wafer, each side length is between 182 and 230 millimeters; 2) silicon wafer thickness of 140 micrometers. (6) XBC cell electroplating and chemical coating technologies simultaneously meeting the following conditions: 1) used for full, half, or multi-split solar silicon wafers, and calculated by the size of a full silicon wafer, each side length is between 182 and 230 millimeters; 2) silicon wafer thickness of 140 micrometers.
2. Heterojunction (HJT) crystalline silicon cell preparation technologies, and technologies for manufacturing their equipment, including: (1) heterojunction cell stacked transparent conductive film deposition technologies with any of the following characteristics, usable for processing silicon wafers with thickness of 110 micrometers: 1) indium content in transparent conductive film of 50%; 2) calculated by G12 silicon wafers, capacity of 14000 half-wafers/hour. (2) heterojunction cell crystalline silicon film deposition technologies with any of the following characteristics, usable for processing silicon wafers with thickness of 110 micrometers: 1) used for high-efficiency N-type heterojunction cells, with film crystallization rate of 40%, or calculated by G12 silicon wafers, capacity of 14000 half-wafers/hour; 2) used for P-type heterojunction cells, with maximum conversion efficiency of 23% under AM1.5 test conditions, or maximum conversion efficiency of 20.5% under AM0 test conditions. (3) Low-silver silver-coated copper heterojunction solar cell preparation technology, with silver content of 30%. (4) Copper electroplating electrode heterojunction cell preparation technology.
Note: In this category of technologies, “high efficiency” means average cell conversion efficiency of 25% under AM1.5 test conditions, or average mass-produced module conversion efficiency of 22. 3%.
Technologies that have entered the public domain through open source, publication of academic papers, or other means are not included in the scope of administration.
For technology exports involving open source of this category of technologies, as well as Chinese enterprises’ self-built and self-operated computing power centers overseas, overseas chip tape-out manufacturing, joint R&D using overseas resources, participation in international standard setting, and other circumstances, facilitation measures such as automatic licensing shall apply.
For technology exports involving public health emergencies, humanitarian assistance, joint R&D using overseas resources, outbound licensing, and other circumstances, facilitation measures such as automatic licensing shall apply.
The scope of technology administration also includes key and core equipment carrying the relevant technologies, specifically including trichlorosilane cold hydrogenation fluidized beds, silane fluidized beds, reduction furnaces, photovoltaic silicon wafer slicing equipment, monocrystalline furnaces applied to photovoltaic crystal pulling, machining equipment for photovoltaic silicon wafer preparation such as truncating and squaring, photovoltaic silicon wafer slicing equipment, edge passivation equipment (EPD) applied to half-wafer or multi-split processes, tunnel oxide doped polysilicon selective passivated contact layer deposition equipment (including both PECVD and LPCVD equipment), atomic layer deposition (ALD) equipment, high-temperature boron diffusion furnaces, copper electroplating equipment applied to TOPCon cells, crystalline silicon film deposition (PECVD) equipment applied to HBC and HTBC cells, copper electroplating equipment applied to XBC cells, transparent conductive film deposition equipment (PVD), amorphous or microcrystalline silicon film deposition equipment (PECVD), heterojunction cell copper electroplating equipment, and slot-die coating equipment.

On October 16, 2026, the Ministry of Commerce (MOFCOM) and the Ministry of Science and Technology (MOST) issued Announcement No. 48 of 2026, launching a public consultation on proposed revisions to the Catalogue of Technologies Prohibited or Restricted from Export (the “Catalogue”) and introducing temporary pre-export registration requirements for the relevant technologies.
A MOFCOM spokesperson responded to questions from the media regarding the announcement.
A: Under Article 20 of the Foreign Trade Law of the People’s Republic of China, the competent foreign trade department of the State Council, together with other relevant departments, is responsible for formulating, adjusting, and publishing the catalogue of technologies prohibited or restricted from export.
Since 2001, MOFCOM and MOST have revised the Catalogue on multiple occasions, adding some technologies, removing others, introducing controls where necessary, and relaxing restrictions where appropriate. This has become an established regulatory practice.
The current revision is likewise part of China’s routine technology trade management, conducted in accordance with applicable laws and regulations. It is not directed at any particular country, region, or entity.
In recent years, technologies related to artificial intelligence, biomedicine, and photovoltaics have increasingly been applied in sensitive areas. Major economies have introduced export controls of varying degrees in these sectors.
Drawing on internationally accepted practices, China is implementing necessary regulatory measures in accordance with the law. The objective is to prevent the risks of technology becoming uncontrollable or spreading inappropriately, while safeguarding normal international technological exchanges and cooperation, and ensuring that technological development remains beneficial, safe, controllable, and serves humanity.
A: The public consultation covers 40 key technologies across three sectors: artificial intelligence, biomedicine, and photovoltaics.
Fourteen technologies are proposed to be prohibited from export, including AI-driven malicious code generation and mutation technologies, proprietary technology platforms and processes for cell and gene therapies, and production technologies for perovskite and tandem solar cell modules.
Twenty-six technologies are proposed to be restricted from export, including AI-assisted vulnerability discovery technologies, proprietary technologies for discovering and validating novel targets for general-purpose cell and gene therapies, and polysilicon engineering technologies with a production capacity of at least 30,000 tonnes per year per production line.
The announcement also specifies circumstances in which facilitation measures may apply. Further details are available in the original announcement.
A: The Chinese government has consistently supported enterprises in conducting mutually beneficial international business operations and technological cooperation in accordance with laws and regulations. This policy position remains unchanged.
Before launching the public consultation, MOFCOM and MOST, together with the relevant industry authorities, organized extensive assessments involving research institutions and industry associations. They also consulted major enterprises and carefully considered the current state and development needs of industries both in China and overseas.
This is reflected in three main aspects.
First, the scope of controls is precise and limited. Most of the technologies proposed for inclusion are defined by specific technical parameters. Products manufactured using these technologies are not subject to the controls. This provides enterprises with clear and narrowly defined compliance boundaries and facilitates implementation.
Second, facilitation measures will be available. The proposed controls identify various export scenarios eligible for simplified procedures, reflecting a differentiated and category-based regulatory approach. This is intended to improve policy transparency and predictability while ensuring that technology exports remain safe, compliant, and orderly.
Third, the Catalogue will be dynamically adjusted. MOFCOM and MOST will continue to adjust the scope of the Catalogue in accordance with the law and technological developments, removing technologies that are no longer advanced or have become obsolete.
The current public consultation is intended to gather views and recommendations from a broader range of stakeholders.
A: Global AI innovation is entering a period of unprecedented activity, bringing both opportunities and challenges.
The proposal to add 23 key technologies related to large AI models, AI agents, computing clusters, and information processing is based primarily on two considerations.
First, ensuring that AI technologies remain safe and controllable.
The inherent and associated risks of AI have attracted significant attention worldwide.
Some of the technologies proposed for control, such as AI-driven autonomous malicious code generation and mutation technologies, could be used to attack sensitive systems, including national critical information infrastructure, defense and military systems, and core government systems, or to circumvent national security defenses.
If acquired by non-state actors or malicious entities, these technologies could pose risks to national security and the shared security of humanity.
The Chinese government’s purpose in introducing necessary controls is to establish safeguards against misuse and malicious applications, ensure that AI remains under human control, and advance international AI governance.
Second, encouraging open source development, openness, cooperation, and technology sharing.
The Chinese government is committed to making AI an important driver of shared prosperity and common security.
To support the development of an open-source AI innovation ecosystem, facilitation measures, including automatic licensing, will apply to several categories of technology exports, including:
Open-source releases of AI technologies.
Chinese companies establishing and operating their own computing centers overseas.
Overseas semiconductor tape-out and manufacturing activities.
Joint research and development using overseas resources.
Participation in international standards development.
These measures are intended to allow exports to proceed with minimal delay, essentially on a “register and export” basis.
Technologies that have already entered the public domain through open-source releases, academic publications, or other means are proposed to be excluded from export controls, creating a favorable environment for international AI exchanges and cooperation.
It should be particularly emphasized that China advocates AI dialogue and cooperation with all countries on the basis of mutual respect, equality, and mutual benefit, in order to jointly address the risks of AI proliferation and loss of control.
China supports Global South countries in strengthening their AI capabilities, bridging the digital divide, and promoting sustainable development.
Additional facilitation and support will be provided for technology exports required for international cooperation among members of the World Artificial Intelligence Cooperation Organization, including capacity building, technology sharing, and joint development of rules.
A: Chinese AI models and applications are expanding internationally through a wide range of business models.
The key factor in determining whether a particular form of overseas expansion falls within the scope of technology export controls is whether it involves the transfer of restricted technologies from within China to overseas destinations.
The scope of AI technologies proposed for control is precise and limited. Once the relevant measures formally take effect, the vast majority of AI technologies will remain freely exportable.
For AI technologies classified as restricted:
Overseas local deployment falls within the scope of technology export controls. However, where deployment takes place on a company’s own overseas cloud infrastructure or under other relatively controllable circumstances, facilitation measures such as automatic licensing may apply.
By contrast, where enterprises use restricted large AI models to provide API access, interactions through apps or websites, SaaS applications, or lightweight deployment on local end-user devices, these activities do not fall within the scope of large AI model technology export controls.
A: The existing Catalogue already includes certain biomedical technologies. The current proposal would add five technologies related to pathogenic microorganisms, cell and gene therapies, and small nucleic acid drugs.
There are three main considerations.
First, protecting human health and safety.
Technologies involving pathogenic microorganisms are directly related to public health and national biosecurity.
Prohibiting the export of these technologies is an institutional measure intended to safeguard national security, strengthen biosecurity protections, and protect human health globally.
Second, supporting orderly international cooperation in China’s biomedical sector in accordance with laws and regulations.
The proposed controls include exemptions or facilitation measures for important forms of international cooperation.
For example, overseas licensing of relevant proprietary technology platforms and processes, as well as the provision of outsourced R&D and manufacturing services using those technologies, will be excluded from the scope of controls.
For proprietary technologies involving the discovery and validation of relevant therapeutic targets, exports conducted through overseas licensing arrangements will be eligible for facilitation measures such as automatic licensing.
Third, advancing the vision of a global community of health for all.
The proposed policy explicitly provides for automatic licensing and other facilitation measures for exports of restricted technologies required for public health emergencies, humanitarian assistance, or joint R&D using overseas resources.
China will continue to share the benefits of technological development with other countries and contribute to improving global health and well-being.
A: The proposal would add 12 photovoltaic technologies covering polysilicon manufacturing, silicon wafer manufacturing, and solar cell manufacturing.
The main considerations are as follows.
First, safeguarding national security and interests.
In recent years, photovoltaic technologies have increasingly been applied in sensitive areas such as aerospace, national defense, unmanned systems, and high-security infrastructure.
The potential national security risks associated with photovoltaic technology exports have therefore increased, making timely and proportionate regulation necessary.
Second, supporting the sharing of green technologies.
The scope of technologies proposed for control is limited. Technologies that do not meet the specified control thresholds may continue to be exported freely.
The announcement identifies a small number of key photovoltaic equipment categories. Controls apply only where such equipment incorporates technologies meeting the specified control thresholds.
Other photovoltaic equipment not explicitly listed in the announcement will, in principle, not be subject to its requirements.
Third, improving the technology export regulatory framework.
Exports of key photovoltaic technologies often take place alongside the export, installation, commissioning, modification, and upgrading of photovoltaic production lines.
Exporters engaged in such activities must apply for technology export licenses in accordance with applicable regulations and use the relevant documentation to complete foreign exchange, banking, tax, customs, and other procedures.
A: To better understand demand for technology exports, improve evidence-based regulatory management, and prevent potential export risks, the temporary registration requirement has been introduced with the necessary approval pursuant to Articles 18 and 20 of the Foreign Trade Law of the People’s Republic of China.
From the publication date of MOFCOM and MOST Announcement No. 48 of 2026 until the revised Catalogue formally takes effect, technology exporters must register exports of the technologies listed in the announcement through the Technology Trade Management Information System on MOFCOM’s Unified Business Platform before proceeding with the exports.
Exporters are responsible for determining whether their proposed technology exports fall within the scope of the temporary registration requirement.
Exports that have already commenced but have not yet been completed are also subject to registration.
The following circumstances require registration:
Transfers of technology ownership to overseas entities.
Licensing of domestically held technologies for use overseas.
Changes whereby the owner or actual controller of domestically held technologies becomes an overseas entity.
Other circumstances explicitly designated by MOFCOM as requiring registration.
It should be particularly noted that exports of key and core photovoltaic equipment falling within the scope of the Catalogue must also be registered in accordance with the relevant requirements.
Enterprises encountering difficulties or questions during the registration process may consult MOFCOM and MOST for assistance.
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As we all wait for voting on the Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act of 2026 to commence, it seemed appropriate to discuss an idea and technology that has taken hold in other countries and is beginning to be adopted in the United States: Permissionless Solar. 
In short, “permissionless solar” refers to solar panels specifically designed to integrate with the broader electric system without a permit or “permission” from a regulatory body. Most are simple enough that you don’t even need an electrician to install them. In practice, this means you can purchase a panel at your local big box retailer along with a gallon of milk. When you get home, you can stow the milk in the fridge and unbox the panel, appropriately orient it towards the sun, and plug it into the wall. Just as simply as you could plug in other appliances, whether a TV or a deep freezer.
It is well established that it costs more to install rooftop solar in the United States than in either Europe or Australia, even when the hardware costs are nearly the same. One component driving that difference is the cost of permitting and installation. And permitting is an important step when you’re affixing panels to roofs and hardwiring inverters and panels into a system that could potentially add power to the grid. On top of that, if you want to install rooftop solar, you need to own the roof, which only 53% of Americans do. If you’re in the 47% who don’t own your own home, solar is not an option, even in the face of increasing utility costs.
At least it wasn’t an option. Now that’s starting to change. Utah started a trend in 2025 with the passage of HB 340. Since then, 10 other states have passed legislation authorizing various forms of plug-in solar. Many others had bills introduced in 2026, with twenty-one of them likely to be reintroduced in 2027. 
What does this look like in practice in Utah? The system can have an output no greater than 1,200 watts (about enough to power a microwave), has to have a standard 120 volt plug to plug into the wall, must be certified by an appropriate testing laboratory (UL or equivalent), compliant with the National Electric Code, and must contain anti-islanding protection (a safety feature that automatically shuts it down or disconnects it from the grid during power losses).
This last bit is critical, and a key piece of why this plug-in solar can be permissionless. When the power grid goes down, due to a squirrel making a questionable decision or a lightning strike causing a tree to topple some lines, the distribution system de-energizes for safety. When linesmen come to inspect the damage and determine the appropriate fix, they rely on those lines being “cold” so they can safely work with the lines and poles and return everything to service as quickly as possible. Without the anti-islanding protection scheme in the solar hardware, there is a risk the solar could push a current to the grid and seriously injure or kill a linesman. With it, the local utility can be assured of the safety of their linesmen.
So where did this all come from? Germany. In 2022, after the invasion of Ukraine, European energy prices increased dramatically in part due to an overreliance on Russian natural gas. In order to help mitigate the costs, Germany reduced the regulatory burden of installing “Balkonkraftwerk,” or balcony power plant. Consequently, they went from an estimated 40,000 systems in 2017 to potentially four million systems in 2025. To be clear, this was about energy affordability, not clean power for the sake of it. The Germans limited the size of their systems to 2000 watts for panels. In the United States, that might offset between 12 and 18 percent of monthly kilowatt-hours purchased from the local utility by the target customer or renter. 
So as the calendar turns, and legislatures return to state capitals, permissionless solar should be a part of the affordability conversation. Customers should be able to choose what they do behind their meter while maintaining the safety of the broader grid. They say necessity is the mother of invention, but in this case it was also the mother of deregulation. Permissionless solar isn’t going to upend the electric grid, but it is a way to help consumers save a little cash while providing a hedge against power market volatility. Allowing it should be an easy call.
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The Ministry of Commerce of China File photo: VCG
The understanding reached by China and the EU on hybrid vehicles is reciprocal and mutually beneficial, He Yadong, …
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China stands ready to continue facilitating the review and approval of rare-earth export licenses to Europe, and hopes …

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Breaking | China mulls new tech export bans covering AI, biotech and solar power  South China Morning Post
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© 2025 THE COOL DOWN COMPANY. All Rights Reserved. Do not sell or share my personal information. Reach us at hello@thecooldown.com.
“Only advice you need is to contact the installer as everything, labor and materials, should be under warranty.”
Photo Credit: iStock
A home battery backup can look good on paper and still fall short when the grid goes down.
One Florida homeowner says their nearly 12-kilowatt solar setup with a Powerwall 3 failed within about 20 minutes of a blackout caused by Hurricane Isaias, despite the battery being in storm mode and charged to 100%.
The homeowner shared their story with Reddit’s r/TeslaSolar forum. The original poster said they paid Tesla about $60,000 in cash for the system about five months ago and lost grid power during the October hurricane.
Once the blackout started, the homeowner said the Powerwall ran the house for about 20 minutes before the Tesla logo flashed red. Later, it reportedly came back in short spurts, powering the home for roughly 10 to 30 minutes at a time, suggesting an error that Tesla or the installer should be called to address.
Commenters streamed in to add their two cents. After one commenter raised the possibility that the system was overloaded, OP replied, “We have one PW3 installed, we are only drawing 0.9 kw, and have been since the storm. We are only charging phones and such, no AC or even lights,” seemingly putting to rest the overloaded theory.
Users in the thread suggested several other possible explanations, though no one confirmed a cause.
Several commenters disagreed on whether storm-damaged panels could be the culprit. One said they “could be shorting out the system” if the Powerwall 3’s built-in inverter detected a fault, while another argued that a short should knock out only the affected string rather than prevent the battery from running the home.
Another wrote, “Only advice you need is to contact the installer as everything, labor and materials, should be under warranty given this was all installed over the summer.” 
FROM OUR PARTNER
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To get started, just answer a few questions about your home — no phone number required. Within a day or two, EnergySage will email you the best options for your needs, and their expert advisers can help you compare quotes and pick a winner.
Solar panels can save you more than $50k over their 25-year lifespan, and EnergySage can help you save as much as $10k on installation. Which begs the question — isn’t that worth an email or two?
“Call Tesla to see what the error is,” another urged.
While this homeowner needs to do some troubleshooting with their system, the thread also included a better outcome from another customer who said the same installer handled their project. This commenter shared, “My 26 panels withheld the winds of hurricane Isaias,” and said their system was working perfectly after the storm.
Indeed, battery storage can help protect a home during outages, save money on energy, and provide more energy independence when it performs as expected.
For homeowners considering a major battery purchase, exploring EnergySage can help compare home battery storage options and competitive installation estimates. EnergySage has teamed up with electrification brand Qmerit to help homeowners get the best price on home battery storage solutions and the best installer.
For households that do not need a whole-home system like this nearly 12-kW installation, Pila offers strong battery backup options. Pila’s plug-and-play batteries cost a fraction of a whole-home backup system and can back up even individual appliances.
These stories dig into similar questions about Tesla solar, Powerwalls, and how backup systems hold up when the grid goes down.
• In California, a Tesla owner found the whole neighborhood was out while backup power held steady.
• Some homeowners are avoiding Tesla’s once-dominant backup tech in favor of newer options.
• Tesla said half a million installations by June 2023 show how quickly Powerwall adoption expanded worldwide.
Get TCD’s free newsletters for easy tips, smart advice, and a chance to earn $5,000 toward home upgrades. To see more stories like this one, change your Google preferences here.
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Korean Researchers Develop Transformable Solar Panel That Can Be Stretched Like Paper
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Lithium Sulfur Chemistry & Perovskite Solar Cells Power Drone Flight  Unmanned Systems Technology
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Contact Energy, a New Zealand-based energy company, and Lightsource bp have officially opened the 150 MWac (168 MWdc) Kōwhai Park solar farm at Christchurch Airport, New Zealand. Prime Minister Christopher Luxon inaugurated the $273 million project in October 2026. Developed through a joint venture, the facility is the largest solar farm in New Zealand’s South Island. It is expected to generate 275 GWh of electricity annually, enough to supply approximately 36,000 homes. The project covers 230 hectares and comprises around 300,000 solar panels. Christchurch Airport and Synlait have secured electricity through long-term power purchase agreements (PPAs). Synlait will purchase 25% of the output for its Dunsandel and Dairyworks facilities. Construction employed 235 workers at its peak and involved 66 Canterbury businesses. Commissioning began in August 2026. The facility is the first completed solar project in New Zealand for both Contact Energy and Lightsource bp.
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China’s Solar Module Exports in August 2026: Market Insights  SolarQuarter
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Researchers at France’s Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission (CEA) have developed a leaching route that strips base metals from end-of-life solar cell waste in under 10 minutes while leaving the silver behind, avoiding the nitric acid used in most current recovery processes.
The process combines selective leaching with density-based separation and recovers more than 98% of the silver at laboratory scale, the researchers said. It produces a silver and silver chloride composite of 97.2% purity, and the team has validated it in a 20-liter pilot reactor.
Most hydrometallurgical routes dissolve silver in nitric acid and then precipitate it as silver chloride, a method that generates nitrogen oxides and nitrate-rich effluents, the researchers said. Alternatives such as methanesulfonic acid perform comparably but face high reagent costs and complex regeneration. Because the CEA process leaves the silver undissolved, the leachate can be reused over several cycles.
The leaching step uses 3 M hydrochloric acid with 10% hydrogen peroxide at 80 C. It dissolves more than 98% of the aluminum, copper, lead and zinc in the waste. Rather than dissolving, the silver forms an insoluble silver chloride shell around a metallic core, which shields it from further attack and limits silver losses during leaching to 1.7%. A density-based separation step at a 10% solid-to-liquid ratio then separates the silver from the silicon, leaving residual impurities below 0.5% by weight.
The feedstock is a metal-rich powder produced by sanding delaminated end-of-life modules layer by layer, a mechanical process the group described in a separate paper. The composite still needs downstream refining, such as chemical reduction or electrowinning, to become metallic silver.
Silver makes up only 0.1% to 0.5% of the waste by weight but accounts for about 60% of a module’s economic value, the researchers said, citing earlier literature.
The work was funded by the European Union’s Horizon Europe EVERPV project, which CEA coordinates. The same research group recently reported a mild oxalic acid process for recovering indium from heterojunction cells. Silver has become the main driver of PV recycling economics, and a University of Newcastle team reported 97% silver recovery using froth flotation in January.
The scientists described their findings in “A simplified hydrometallurgical process for silver recovery from photovoltaic waste,” which was recently published in Hydrometallurgy.
Recyclers’ silver recovery rates have risen as the sector has scaled. In data compiled by the International Energy Agency’s Photovoltaic Power Systems Programme (IEA-PVPS), US recycler Solarcycle reports recovering nearly 92% of silver at commercial scale and Italian pilot-scale recycler 9-Tech 90%. Alongside the EU-funded Photorama project, EVERPV is among the EU projects developing multi-step pilot lines that target 95% to 98% metal recovery.
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Emmvee Expands Solar Manufacturing Capacity with TOPCon Module and Cell Projects
Essar Oil & Gas Bags Five New CBM Blocks Across Three States
RDI Scheme Includes Advanced Chemicals, Petrochemicals and Material Technologies
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Emmvee Photovoltaic Power is expanding its solar manufacturing operations to meet growing market demand, supported by an order book of 10.4 GW at the end of Q2 FY27. The company expects to commission its new solar module production line by December 2026, followed by a 6 GW solar cell line in 2027.
As of September 30, 2026, Emmvee had an annual manufacturing capacity of 10.3 GW for solar modules and 2.94 GW for TOPCon solar cells. Once the planned expansion becomes operational, the company expects to increase its annual solar module manufacturing capacity to approximately 16.3 GW and solar cell capacity to 8.9 GW. Consequently, the expansion will strengthen backward integration, improve supply-chain resilience and support the company’s ability to meet rising demand for solar products.
In addition to expanding module and cell production, Emmvee plans to develop 9 GW of ingot and wafer manufacturing capacity in phases. The proposed project carries an estimated capital expenditure of ₹5,000–5,500 crore. The company expects to fund the investment largely through internal accruals. The planned ingot and wafer facilities could strengthen its domestic manufacturing capabilities and reduce reliance on external suppliers for key solar production materials. As reported by projectstoday.ai, through these investments, Emmvee is advancing its solar manufacturing expansion strategy while building a more integrated and resilient production ecosystem.

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SKYWORTH Wins Smart Energy Solution Provider Award 2026  SolarQuarter
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The Pulse
A forklift lowers its forks too fast and a wooden pallet tips.
Glass cracks before the load even settles on the concrete.
The panels stacked here spent decades on rooftops and in fields, turning sunlight into power.
Now the question is simpler and harder to answer.
Once that truck pulls away, where does all this cracked glass and metal actually go?
The claim that a panel is 95 percent recyclable describes what current technology is capable of recovering, which is not the same as what happens to the typical panel once it is unbolted from a rooftop or a field. Federal planning documents use that figure to describe the materials inside a module, not the fate of one. Two numbers, answering two different questions entirely.
The gap between them is economic rather than technical. Figures from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, carried in the federal end of life action plan for photovoltaics, put recycling a module at around $15 to $45 against a landfill fee of $1 to $5.
That spread decides almost everything that follows. A landfill will underbid a recycler unless a rule or a subsidy changes the comparison. The separation technology is real and improving, but what has not caught up is the incentive to pay for it.
A used panel weighs about 40 pounds and carries real value locked inside it, including silver, copper and silicon that nobody gains from burying. For most of its working life it sat producing electricity without drawing any attention at all. Now it is waste on a loading dock, waiting for someone to decide its fate.
That decision, repeated at sites across the country, is overwhelmingly the same one.
For roughly nine panels in ten, the destination is a landfill rather than a recovery line. The deciding factor is almost never whether the materials can be recovered. It is the price on the invoice that day, and nothing else.
An Environmental Protection Agency assessment of end of life panel management in the United States found that only about 10 percent of solar panels are recycled today, and that recycling costs exceed recovery economics in the absence of federal and state mandates. National lab projections point to a similar share persisting toward the middle of the century unless policy changes.
Even the recycled fraction does not always stay whole, or stay home. The United States lost its last operating primary lead smelter over a decade ago, after the national air quality standard for lead was tightened tenfold.
Recyclers have said publicly that silver is sent offshore for final refining because no domestic refinery works at that scale. That is an infrastructure gap rather than a verdict on any single operator, though firms disagree sharply over how much of a panel’s mass actually leaves the country.
Not everything inside a module has a buyer waiting. The encapsulant contaminated glass and the mixed fines left after metals are pulled out are hard to sell, because the laminate bonded to the glass drags down its value as cullet.
A great deal of recycling stops after the frame comes off, with the rest shredded and sold as low value glass cullet instead of being fully processed. So a panel can be collected, processed and partly recovered, and still send a share of its mass into American soil, just later and in smaller pieces.
That is the overlooked reason the recovery rate and the landfill rate are both so stubborn. Pressure to squeeze more out of aging hardware is showing up elsewhere on the grid, including at Kodiak Island, where a rural electric cooperative has pushed hard on getting more from equipment it already owns. A handful of American recyclers are expanding glass and aluminum recovery lines, keeping the heaviest materials closer to home.
None of this means solar power itself is dirtier than advertised. Panels reach the end of their useful life in about 25 to 30 years, and the emissions avoided over that span far outweigh what the end of life phase costs.
What it means is narrower. The current system rewards burying a panel over recovering one.
And only a shift in incentives, through state rules, cheaper separation technology or new domestic refining capacity, will move the real number closer to the marketing one. Laboratory work hints at what that shift could look like, including a pencil thin jet of dilute acid that strips most of the silver from a retired cell in a few minutes while leaving the silicon wafer intact.
Until the economics change, an old panel remains capable of coming back almost whole. Mostly, for now, it still does not.
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According to the OPIS Global Solar Markets Report released on Oct. 13, Free-On-Board (FOB) China TOPCon M10 cell prices fell 0.86% week on week to $0.0463/W, while FOB China TOPCon 210R cell prices fell 0.66% to $0.0454/W.
The declines ended two consecutive weeks of stability and left both formats around 13% below their late-August peaks, as overseas demand continued to signs of weakening after the Golden Week holiday.
A trader source, echoing a recent assessment by the China Nonferrous Metals Industry Association (CNMIA), said U.S. restrictions on stockpiling were expected to further weaken overseas demand and weigh on cell prices. The temporary U.S. rule covers polysilicon and its derivatives ahead of Section 232 measures taking effect on Dec. 4.
In India, a manufacturer said an earlier buying rush from the commercial and industrial (C&I) segment was tapering. An extended exemption allows eligible C&I projects commissioned by Dec. 31, 2026, to forgo the use of approved India-made solar cells. The manufacturer said, however, elevated FOB China cell prices and the approaching deadline made further stockpiling commercially unattractive.
In China, CNMIA forecast a gradual strengthening in utility-scale demand toward year-end. Procurement to meet project deadlines could support buying, although market participants questioned whether any pickup would translate into a sustained recovery in installations.
China added 97.19 GW of solar capacity in January-August, down more than 57% year on year, according to National Energy Administration (NEA) data.
The China Photovoltaic Industry Association (CPIA) forecast in February that installations would reach 180-240 GW in 2026, down around 24%-43% from the record 315.07 GW added in 2025. Reaching that range would require average monthly additions of 20.7-35.7 GW from September through December, compared with about 12.1 GW a month in January-August.
On the supply side, market participants continued to expect lower cell output in October, citing production-line upgrades ahead of China’s new minimum efficiency requirements. The mandatory standard, which covers modules and inverters, takes effect on Jan. 1, 2027, and will prohibit domestic sales of products that fail to meet the required thresholds.

The dynamics shaping global PV supply chains – including solar modules, inverters, and battery energy storage systems – will be discussed during the “Decoding solar supply chains” session at the NetZero event in Milan on Oct. 21.
The session will examine the forces reshaping clean energy supply chains, from manufacturing and sourcing strategies to shifting trade and regulatory requirements. It will also explore what these developments mean for companies procuring solar and energy storage equipment in an increasingly complex global market.
Join us in Milan to hear from industry experts and take part in the discussion on the future of solar supply chains.
Meanwhile, market sources said senior executives from several major solar manufacturers met in Hangzhou on Oct. 11 to discuss cost calculations, sales pricing and production cuts.
Although neither the meeting nor its reported outcomes have been officially confirmed, market participants said the discussions yielded more detailed implementation plans for capacity restrictions and a proposal to set a minimum polysilicon price of CNY 43 ($6.38)/kg, including tax. Sales below that threshold would reportedly be classified as low-price dumping.
Discussions also reportedly covered price floors of CNY 0.79/W for TOPCon modules and CNY 0.86/W for back-contact modules, with reported FOB equivalents of $0.117/W and $0.128/W, respectively.
The proposed TOPCon floor, at its FOB equivalent, would be approximately 9% above the Chinese Module Marker (CMM), OPIS’s benchmark for TOPCon modules below 645W from China, which was assessed at $0.107/W in the same report.
According to market participants, the proposed floors would apply to both export sales and domestic procurement, including tenders.
The meeting also reportedly called on relevant authorities to investigate and penalize state-owned enterprises that award procurement contracts through tenders based solely on the lowest available bids, citing concerns that such practices could disrupt market order.
However, market participants noted that industry self-regulatory agreements do not constitute legally enforceable price controls, with actual transaction prices continuing to be determined by supply-demand fundamentals. As such, the effectiveness of these measures would depend on manufacturers’ willingness to adhere to the proposed guidelines.
OPIS is a specialist business within Dow Jones Energy, a global energy intelligence business that brings together trusted price reporting, research and market intelligence across the energy value chain. OPIS publishes the OPIS Global Solar Markets Service, which includes pricing data for solar panels and components across Asia, Europe and the U.S., manufacturing capacity data, module forward curves, and a global solar policy tracker. 
The views and opinions expressed in this article are the author’s own, and do not necessarily reflect those held by pv magazine.
This content is protected by copyright and may not be reused. If you want to cooperate with us and would like to reuse some of our content, please contact: [email protected].
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Energies Media
A terminal roof built to shed rain and hide ductwork does not expect to carry a power plant too.
At Western Sydney’s new international airport, that is exactly what happened.
Crews spent four years threading thousands of solar modules around vents, skylights and steel.
The airport opens to the public this month.
Before any passenger arrives, the roof above them has already been doing a second job.
So what made a flat commercial roof this difficult to cover, and why did pilots get a say in how the panels were angled?
A conventional rooftop solar job means a clear, uninterrupted plane and a straightforward grid of racking. An airport terminal offers almost the opposite: a roofline broken by smoke vents, skylights, antenna mounts and the structural ribs that hold the whole span together. Every one of those features became ground the array could not simply cross, and each one had to be mapped, measured and routed around before a single rail went down.
The installer behind the job has described the hunt for usable space as one of the project’s defining fights. “Another challenge was fitting the 9,000 panels onto the roofs available. You would think being an airport it would be a very large roof with a lot of space, but there was alot of infrastructure that we had to navigate around.”
That crowding forced a custom hardware fix. A new clamp design was developed with a mounting supplier after large bulb profile roof sheets demanded a different fastening approach, built specifically for the terminal’s own sheet metal rather than adapted from a catalog part.
The structure underneath the panels is itself a significant piece of engineering. The structure covers over 44,000 square meters, spanning fixed link bridges, piers and the terminal main building, and it is supported by over 40 kilometers of Australian made steel purlins and more than 3,500 metric tons of steelwork.
That is the skeleton the solar team had to work above, around and occasionally through. Against that scale, the finished solar array reads almost modest, which is the point. The sizable rooftop installation, rated near 4.5 megawatts, spans the main terminal roof, both piers and covered car park walkways.
A smaller share rides lower down, closer to where cars and shuttle buses move. Roughly 1.3 MW of capacity is installed on covered walkways alone, turning a stretch of shade travelers barely notice into one of the array’s steadier producing sections.
An airport rooftop carries one constraint no office building or warehouse ever faces: a landing aircraft a few hundred feet overhead, and a tower full of controllers watching the runway through glass. Sunlight bouncing off a tilted module at the wrong angle is not a nuisance here, it is a safety question.
So before a single panel was fixed in place, engineers modeled how light would reflect off every candidate surface at every sun angle through the year. Since the array sits within an airport, the team had to run detailed glare studies so that reflections would not affect pilots or air traffic control.
Sections that failed that test were adjusted in tilt, moved, or left bare. That same discipline shaped the wider project record, a pattern this desk has traced at other solar builds that pair rooftop canopies with similar shading math, though none carried the added weight of runway sightlines.
Once switched on, the array is expected to produce a specific, measurable yield rather than a vague promise. Output is projected at more than 5,800 MWh of estimated clean, renewable energy generated annually, avoiding an estimated 3,712 metric tons of CO2 emissions each year.
Yet the completed system was never meant to be the whole story. The 4.5 MW installation is described as the first milestone in large scale onsite electricity generation, with a further 9 MW of solar and a 120 MW battery energy storage system already in the pipeline.
That sequencing echoes a pattern seen at other new builds racing to meet their own power demand on day one, including a Nevada data center project that broke ground on dedicated solar generation rather than waiting for utility supply to catch up.
The honest caveat here is timing. The airport is set to open to the public on 25 October 2026, so the array is finished before a single commercial flight has used the terminal it powers.
So the real test, running under full terminal load with aircraft taxiing nearby, has not yet happened in public view. Even so, the physical build is finished and verifiable, and the modules are fixed, the clamps seated, the glare studies filed, a status the installer’s own project record lists down to the panel count.
Engineers describe the finished array as proof that complex problems can be solved at genuine mega project scale, and the next data point will simply be the first full year of generation logged against that 5,800 MWh target. For an industry that increasingly weighs cost predictability before committing capital to unconventional rooftops, a finished airport array that survived its own steelwork is a useful data point, whatever the meters eventually show.
Hugo is an engineer with strong technical expertise. Multilingual from an early age, his writing combines technical clarity with a strong interest in science and energy.
Hugo is an engineer with strong technical expertise. Multilingual from an early age, his writing combines technical clarity with a strong interest in science and energy.
Hugo is an engineer with strong technical expertise. Multilingual from an early age, his writing combines technical clarity with a strong interest in science and energy.

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The power of too much: why renewable energy overcapacity makes sense from China to Spain  Medium
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India’s largest utility, NTPC, to deploy 247Solar’s advanced solar thermal technology in its first commercial project  StreetInsider
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In ten months, India’s battery storage assembly industry has gone from a few containerised-system lines to a pipeline that, on company statements alone, adds up to about 180 GWh a year. Roughly 30-34 GWh is operating today. The rest is a mix of groundbreakings, state approvals and memoranda of understanding. Reliance’s upcoming 40 GWh (Long term-120 GWh) Jamnagar gigafactory, if counted, takes the total past 220 GWh. 
Set that against demand. CRISIL Ratings expects 45–50 GWh of storage to be commissioned across FY27 and FY28 combined, up from about 1 GWh at the end of FY26. That is roughly 25 GWh a year. Anyone who covered solar manufacturing in 2023 knows how this overcapacity arithmetic tends to end. The honest question is whether it ends the same way, and how soon. Read full story at BessXchange…
We are India’s leading B2B media house, reporting full-time on solar energy, wind, battery storage, solar inverters, and electric vehicle (EV)
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Perovskites, manufactured crystals used in solar cells, have long promised to boost solar power, but internal defects have blunted their potential. Now, researchers at Princeton Engineering have corrected the defects by adding a novel combination of chemicals during fabrication.
The technique could translate to a 1% improvement in the power generation of even the most cutting-edge perovskite solar cells, said Dane deQuilettes, a senior author on the paper and assistant professor at Princeton. The advance is due to the defect-free perovskites’ ability to retain energy from sunlight 10 times longer than untreated perovskites.
The paper was published Oct. 8 in the journal Science.
Perovskites are semiconductors with a complex crystalline structure that makes them well suited to capturing solar energy and converting it to electricity. While perovskites can be found in nature, the ones used to create solar cells are engineered in labs. The ingredients that scientists use to make perovskites can be prepared in liquid form, so perovskite solar cells can be fabricated by printing the material in sheets, like ink on newsprint.
Most solar cells are made of silicon, which is highly durable, but perovskite solar cells may be cheaper and more sustainable to produce. Increasingly, silicon and perovskites are paired together, a thin coat of perovskite layered over a silicon solar cell. These tandem solar cells generate about 40% more power than a solar cell made from only one material.
One major hurdle in manufacturing perovskites for everyday use is that the printing and layering process often creates atomic-level defects in the material. These defects dampen the ability of electrons to retain their excess energy after they absorb sunlight. The longer electrons can retain excess energy, the more power can be generated from a solar cell, deQuilettes said.
Led by faculty at Princeton, the University of California-San Diego and Sungkyunkwan University in Korea, the research team found a way to mitigate these microscopic defects by adding a mixture of zinc bromide and methyl ammonium chloride early in the fabrication process. Adding these chemicals produces perovskites with fewer defects in the crystal structure, which allows electrons to retain energy from sunlight longer.
“We opened up this new class of chemical mixtures that improve the performance of perovskites,” deQuilettes said. The key is that the two chemicals need to have a lower melting point when combined, like adding salt to ice.
While researchers have been working to correct perovskite defects for years, this discovery was a surprise, deQuilettes said. A few years ago, Jason Yoo, a first author on the paper and then a researcher at the Korea Research Institute of Chemical Technology, contacted deQuilettes with questions about some unusual lab results.
“He told me the samples were behaving like nothing he had seen before,” deQuilettes said. “He asked if I could help study them.”
DeQuilettes’ lab develops tools to understand how electrons behave and interact inside perovskites. He was amazed by Yoo’s samples — deQuilettes showed that the electrons retained excess energy for up to 300 microseconds, about a hundred thousand times longer than many other semiconductors.
This decrease in the number of defects enables a more efficient perovskite layer that can be used to augment standard silicon solar cells. This boost in solar power generation could provide a new source of energy in a time when demand is rising, deQuilettes said, especially for AI and datacenter infrastructure. “The whole solar industry has been asking, what are the next set of technologies that are going to contribute to energy production?” he said.
The possible applications of these low defect perovskites go beyond solar cells, deQuilettes noted. Because electrons in the perovskite can retain energy for so long, it opens new possibilities for how the crystals can be used.
“Energy is living in the material for so long, it broadens what’s actually possible with a semiconductor,” DeQuilettes said. The research has raised more questions than it’s answered, he added. “It’s been really eye-opening.”
The paper, Volatile eutectics to tailor crystallization for perovskite optoelectronics, was published in Science on October 8. In addition to deQuilettes, authors include Jason Yoo and Bong Joo Kang at the Korea Research Institute of Chemical Technology; Connor J. Dolan, Zhewen J.D. Deng, Jack R. Palmer, Kelly X. Vences and David P. Fenning at the University of California-San Diego; Seongsik Nam, Jinho Lee, Kyu Min Kang, Daesoo Kim, Jang Hee Cho, Donghyuk Chung and Seong Sik Shin at Sungkyunkwan University in Korea; Rushik Desai and Arun Mannodi- Kanakkithodi at Purdue University; Niranjana Mohan Kumar, Mariana I. Bertoni and Arkita Chakrabarti at Arizona State University; Yanqi Luo, Barry Lai, Zhonghou Cai, Martin V. Holt and Tao Zhou at the Argonne National Laboratory; Andrew M. Kiss at Brookhaven National Laboratory; In Sun Cho at Ajou University in Korea; Dong Hyun Kim and Jun Hong Noh at Korea University in Korea.


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India has expanded its domestic production of photovoltaic modules at a fast pace in recent years, helped by continued policy backing, according to pv magazine. The country is now shifting attention toward the harder areas of cell and wafer manufacturing.
The second Approved List of Models and Manufacturers, known as ALMM-II, took effect on June 1, 2026. The source describes this as a significant milestone for India’s supply chain.
The source also lists a series of industry events. A session on Thursday, October 29, 2026, runs from 11:00 am to 12:00 pm CEST across Berlin, Paris and Madrid. A second session on Thursday, November 5, 2026, is scheduled from 10:00 am to 11:00 pm CEST in the same cities.
A new issue of pv magazine Global is available in print and digital formats. A multi-day virtual event hosted by pv magazine USA covers U.S. solar and energy storage, including domestic manufacturing, distributed energy and the role of solar-plus-storage in meeting power demand.
A four-day virtual event hosted by pv magazine examines European solar and energy storage, looking at market opportunities, solar-plus-storage business cases, technical quality and cybersecurity in the years ahead. A pv magazine session returns to NetZero Milan as a knowledge partner, organizing and moderating a two-hour conference on the changing global solar supply chain. Tickets are offered at a discounted rate through pv magazine.
An expert session hosted by pv magazine will explore quality, technology and the challenges of scaling India’s solar industry. Further sessions are listed for Monday, October 19, 2026, from 16:00 to 17:00 CEST; Friday, October 23, 2026, from 11:00 am to 12:00 pm CEST; and Monday, October 26, 2026, from 10:30 am to 11:30 am CEST, all across Berlin, Paris and Madrid.
Interactive table based on the Store Companies dataset for this report.
This report is an independent strategic market study that provides a structured, commercially grounded analysis of the market for Solar Cells and Module in India. It is designed for battery and storage manufacturers, power-electronics suppliers, system integrators, EPC partners, developers, utilities, investors, and strategic entrants that need a clear view of deployment demand, technology positioning, manufacturing exposure, safety and qualification burden, project economics, and competitive structure.
The analytical framework is designed to work both for a single specialized storage or conversion component and for a broader renewable energy generation component, where market structure is shaped by chemistry, duration, project economics, system integration, safety requirements, route-to-market, and grid-interface logic rather than by one narrow customs heading alone. It defines Solar Cells and Module as Semiconductor devices that convert sunlight directly into electricity, manufactured as individual cells and assembled into modules (panels) for integration into solar power systems and examines the market through deployment use cases, buyer environments, upstream input dependencies, conversion and integration stages, qualification and safety requirements, pricing architecture, commercial channels, and country capability differences. Historical analysis typically covers 2012 to 2025, with forward-looking scenarios through 2035.
This report is designed to answer the questions that matter most to decision-makers evaluating an energy-storage, battery, renewable-integration, or power-conversion market.
At its core, this report explains how the market for Solar Cells and Module actually functions. It identifies where demand originates, how supply is organized, which technological and regulatory barriers influence adoption, and how value is distributed across the value chain. Rather than describing the market only in broad terms, the study breaks it into analytically meaningful layers: product scope, segmentation, end uses, customer types, production economics, outsourcing structure, country roles, and company archetypes.
The report is particularly useful in markets where buyers are highly specialized, suppliers differ significantly in technical depth and regulatory readiness, and the commercial landscape cannot be understood only through top-line market size figures. In this context, the study is designed not only to estimate the size of the market, but to explain why the market has that size, what drives its growth, which subsegments are the most attractive, and what it takes to compete successfully within it.
The report is based on an independent analytical methodology that combines deep secondary research, structured evidence review, market reconstruction, and multi-level triangulation. The methodology is designed to support products for which there is no single clean official dataset capturing the full market in a directly usable form.
The study typically uses the following evidence hierarchy:
The analytical framework is built around several linked layers.
First, a scope model defines what is included in the market and what is excluded, ensuring that adjacent products, downstream finished goods, unrelated instruments, or broader chemical categories do not distort the market boundary.
Second, a demand model reconstructs the market from the perspective of consuming sectors, workflow stages, and applications. Depending on the product, this may include Grid-connected solar farms, Commercial rooftop installations, Residential solar systems, Industrial self-consumption projects, Off-grid electrification, and Solar-powered consumer electronics and mobility across Power Generation (Utilities/IPPs), Commercial Real Estate, Industrial Manufacturing, Residential Construction, Telecommunications, and Public Infrastructure and Technology R&D and Pilot Lines, Capacity Planning and CAPEX Deployment, Supply Chain Sourcing and Qualification, Manufacturing Process Optimization, Quality Assurance and Certification, Sales Channel and Distribution Setup, and Project Design and System Integration. Demand is then allocated across end users, development stages, and geographic markets.
Third, a supply model evaluates how the market is served. This includes Polysilicon, Silicon Wafers (Mono Grown, Cast Multi), Solar Glass, Encapsulation Materials (EVA, POE), Backsheets, Frames (Aluminum), Silver Paste & Conductive Adhesives, and Specialty Gases and Chemicals, manufacturing technologies such as Passivated Emitter and Rear Cell (PERC), Tunnel Oxide Passivated Contact (TOPCon), Heterojunction Technology (HJT), Interdigitated Back Contact (IBC), Bifacial Module Design, Half-Cell and Shingled Cell Interconnection, and Advanced Module Encapsulation and Framing, quality control requirements, outsourcing, contract manufacturing, integration, and project-delivery participation, distribution structure, and supply-chain concentration risks.
Fourth, a country capability model maps where the market is consumed, where production is materially feasible, where manufacturing capability is limited or emerging, and which countries function primarily as innovation hubs, supply nodes, demand centers, or import-reliant markets.
Fifth, a pricing and economics layer evaluates price corridors, cost drivers, complexity premiums, outsourcing logic, margin structure, and switching barriers. This is especially relevant in markets where product grade, purity, customization, regulatory burden, or service model materially influence economics.
Finally, a competitive intelligence layer profiles the leading company types active in the market and explains how strategic roles differ across upstream material suppliers, component and controls providers, OEMs, storage-system integrators, EPC partners, project developers, and distribution or service channels.
This report covers the market for Solar Cells and Module in its commercially relevant and technologically meaningful form. The scope typically includes the product itself, its major product configurations or variants, the critical technologies used to produce or deliver it, the core input categories required for manufacturing, and the services directly associated with its commercial supply, quality control, or integration into end-user workflows.
Included within scope are the product forms, use cases, inputs, and services that are necessary to understand the actual addressable market around Solar Cells and Module. This usually includes:
Excluded from scope are categories that may be technologically adjacent but do not belong to the core economic market being measured. These usually include:
The exact inclusion and exclusion logic is always a critical part of the study, because the quality of the market estimate depends directly on disciplined scope boundaries.
The report provides focused coverage of the India market and positions India within the wider global energy-storage and renewable-integration industry structure.
The geographic analysis explains local deployment demand, domestic capability, import dependence, project-development relevance, safety and approval burden, and the country’s strategic role in the wider market.
This study is designed for strategic, commercial, operations, project-delivery, and investment users, including:
In many energy-transition, storage, power-conversion, and project-driven markets, official trade and production statistics are not sufficient on their own to describe the true market. Product boundaries may cut across multiple tariff codes, several product categories may be bundled into the same official classification, and a meaningful share of activity may take place through customized services, captive supply, platform relationships, or technically specialized channels that are not directly visible in standard statistical datasets.
For this reason, the report is designed as a modeled strategic market study. It uses official and public evidence wherever it is reliable and scope-compatible, but it does not force the market into a purely statistical framework when doing so would reduce analytical quality. Instead, it reconstructs the market through the logic of demand, supply, technology, country roles, and company behavior.
This makes the report particularly well suited to products that are innovation-intensive, technically differentiated, capacity-constrained, platform-dependent, or commercially structured around specialized buyer-supplier relationships rather than standardized commodity trade.
The report typically includes:
The result is a structured, publication-grade market intelligence document that combines quantitative modeling with commercial, technical, and strategic interpretation.
Energy-Storage Market Structure and Company Archetypes
Part of Adani Group; one of India's largest integrated solar manufacturers.
India's largest solar module exporter; capacity over 12 GW.
Leading module producer with global certifications.
Subsidiary of Tata Power; established player in solar manufacturing.
Integrated manufacturer of solar modules and encapsulation materials.
Rapidly expanding module capacity; strong domestic and export presence.
Known for high-efficiency modules and EPC services.
Diversified energy company with solar manufacturing division.
Focus on residential and commercial solar modules.
Manufacturer of polycrystalline and monocrystalline modules.
Part of Chiripal Group; new entrant with large capacity plans.
Known for high-efficiency mono PERC modules.
Exports to multiple countries; ALMM certified.
Growing manufacturer with focus on quality and innovation.
Part of the Goyal Group; produces mono and poly modules.
Diversified engineering group with solar manufacturing arm.
Major supplier of solar glass to module manufacturers.
One of India's oldest solar cell manufacturers; recently revived.
Part of Moser Baer Group; cell and module producer.
Specializes in solar cell production; under restructuring.
Integrated manufacturer with cell and module lines.
Part of Borosil group; produces modules for domestic market.
Focus on off-grid and rooftop solar solutions.
Part of Mahindra Group; major solar project developer.
Independent power producer; large solar portfolio.
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A proposal to put privately owned solar panels on dozens of government buildings in Richmond had stalled out before Mayor Danny Avula said he would stop pushing for it so the city could look into a “possible relationship” that might erode public trust in the deal.
The City Council stood by its 5-4 vote on Sept. 28 to reject the deal, rebuffing an effort to put the solar proposal back on the agenda for a meeting on Oct. 5. In an email sent Oct. 2, the Council clerk said a majority of members “have not agreed” to reconsider the solar vote. 
That email was sent a few hours before news broke that a part-time staffer in the city’s Office of Sustainability, which was leading the solar energy project, was working with the private solar developer at the same time.
The Council’s decision not to revisit the matter seemed to be the end of the proposed agreement with Staunton-based Secure Solar Futures, because it meant officials wouldn’t be signing off on any rooftop leases by the project deadlines the city had been given. The company would have paid to install and maintain solar panels on city buildings, while selling the energy back to the city at a lower rate than what Dominion Energy charges.
Council members balked at the deal due to concerns it was being forced through on a compressed timeline and over the objections of some administration officials who felt it would come with too much legal and financial risk.
Adding to the difficulties, there’s now an open inspector general investigation related to the project and an internal review of a possible staff conflict of interest.
However, Tony Smith, the CEO of Secure Solar Futures, said he thinks there’s still a chance to work something out after the city completes its investigation.
“There’s definitely an opportunity. But we want to allow the investigation to follow its course,” Smith said in an interview last week. “My hope and expectation is that it would resolve quickly.”
The drama surrounding the proposal — which proponents said could lead to around $20 million in energy savings over 25 years — has also led some city officials to wonder if the company will eventually choose to just walk away.
“We don’t walk away. We walk towards,” Smith said. “We’re fully committed to helping the city realize its goals for sustainability, energy savings and relieving the taxpayer burden.”
City officials don’t appear to be trying to reintroduce another version of the solar plan. There was no new solar-related legislation introduced at the Council’s Oct. 13 meeting, making it unlikely the matter will be reconsidered anywhere close to the deadlines listed in a previous memo from the Avula administration. As of late last month, the administration said the Council had until Oct. 1 to approve the full solar deal involving 39 rooftops. A smaller-scale project involving 17 rooftops was possible by Oct. 5, that memo said.
Without Council action by that timeline, the administration said, the “project does not move forward.”
“We will, of course, try to regroup, but we don’t have a clear path to rooftop solar in Richmond now that key deadlines have passed,” said Susan Kruse, executive director of Community Climate Collaborative, a nonprofit that was involved in planning the solar project.
Though the city has said it’s doing an internal review, answers haven’t come quickly.
It’s not clear what Inspector General Foster Curtiss is looking into. The IG’s office typically doesn’t comment on active investigations and doesn’t give timelines for how long a particular investigation might take.
The revelation that caused the mayor to put the project on hold dealt with part-time sustainability staffer Andre Eanes, who also had a professional relationship with Secure Solar Futures, according to public LinkedIn info.
Staunton-based Secure Solar Futures isn’t exactly an unknown company with a limited track record. The organization has done several solar power purchase agreements across Virginia like the one Richmond was considering, including a deal with Richmond Public Schools.
In an Oct. 2 email to the Council, the mayor said he didn’t think the issue impacted the solar negotiations. But, Avula added, it “will absolutely color the public perception around this work.” The mayor told the Council “we are going to stop pursuing this effort right now.”
“While I absolutely believe in the importance of this effort, and the integrity of the negotiating process, this uncertainty raises too many concerns, and I believe stepping away from this is necessary to preserve the public’s trust,” Avula wrote.
Eanes has told media outlets the city was aware of the relationship and had signed off on it through the human resources department. Smith has said the same.
“The city was aware that he was doing this work with us and it was cleared by HR,” Smith said, explaining that Eanes had done some technical site analysis work for the company related to the solar project the sustainability office was pursuing.
City officials haven’t commented on the assertion the matter was fully cleared by HR.
The HR department declined to answer emailed questions from The Richmonder. On Oct. 7, a city spokesperson said the Office of Strategic Communications was working to “gather the appropriate details” to be able to answer. More than a week later, there was no response.
Officials also said they would need more time to pull potentially relevant HR records in response to Freedom of Information Act requests, saying the city couldn’t respond within FOIA’s standard five-day window and would need the additional seven workdays the law allows.
According to city HR policies, employees must seek “written approval” for outside employment. A copy of any such approval is supposed to be kept in the employee’s personnel file.
The sustainability office also didn’t answer emailed questions.
The mayor’s office has offered few updates since saying the matter was under review.
“We’re taking the time to find out more about the questions that are being raised,” Avula spokesperson Mira Signer said on Oct. 2. “The Mayor directed the CAO to look into the situation immediately, and we will know more soon.”  
There has been no formal determination any rules were broken. Under Richmond’s ethics policy, employees are instructed to avoid anything that could create the appearance of a conflict of interest, even if there’s no intent to do anything overtly improper.
“It is important that all City employees remain independent, impartial and responsible to Richmond citizens,” the city ethics policy states. “No employee of the City of Richmond shall engage in business activity or have any direct or indirect financial interest, professional activity or incur any obligation of any nature which conflicts or would appear to conflict with the fair, impartial and objective performance of officially assigned duties and responsibilities.”
As part of a 2025 review of the city’s purchasing card system, City Auditor Riad Ali identified lax enforcement of conflict of interest policies as an area of concern. That audit was mainly focused on employees who had authority over procurement and purchasing decisions, but included recommendations for strengthening conflict of interest rules more broadly.
The audit suggested requiring annual conflict of interest disclosures from all employees with “with purchasing, approval or vendor selection authority” and a stronger system for reviewing and acting on “disclosed relationships.”
The auditor also recommended a conflict of interest disclosure tracking system and yearly “conflict of interest and ethics training” for employees with authority over how public dollars are spent with private companies.
The purchasing card audit was issued in June of 2025.
In a June 2026 update from the auditor’s office, the suggestions regarding conflicts of interest were listed as “high priority” recommendations that had not yet been resolved.
Contact Reporter Graham Moomaw at gmoomaw@richmonder.org
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Chinese Solar Panels Drop to 12 Cents a Watt, Rooftop Installs Surge Worldwide  Yahoo Finance
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Every year in late August, tens of millions of monarch butterflies begin their migration south for the winter. Navigating thousands of miles against harsh weather and habitat loss, the monarchs face an uphill battle to reach their destination. A recent breakthrough in tracking technology may pave the way for improved understanding and protection of their annual trip.
At the University Wisconsin-Madison, Biology Professor Seth McGee is using solar power to track monarchs’ full migration. The new tech will allow researchers to answer specific questions about flight behavior — such as whether butterflies fly into headwinds or wait for tailwinds, and how they react to inclement weather. This information can be transformative for conservation efforts by pinpointing critical parts of monarchs’ migration, McGee said.
Before Project Monarch Collaboration’s tech — the group of research organizations behind the solar panels —  scientists could track monarchs’ migrations partially, by placing stickers on their wings, but that method only provides two datapoints: where the tag is attached and where the monarch is found, according to McGee. 
“It’s sort of like putting a message in a bottle,” McGee told The Daily Cardinal. “The data that you get is just two points, where you put it on and what the butterfly looked like then and then wherever it was found. So it’s like the beginning and last chapter of a 2,000 mile book.” 
The logistical hurdle to tracking monarchs’ complete migration was their weight. A single monarch weighs roughly the same as a paper clip. Attaching a traditional battery-powered tracking device on an insect that small would seriously impede its flight and ruin its chances of surviving the journey to Mexico, McGee said. 
McGee displayed the brand new trackers at the Biocore Prairie, where he has been tagging monarchs for years. Tiny solar panels on each tag mean no battery pack is necessary. The new radio tags can track monarchs at every step of their migration, filling the chapters sticker tags could not.
The tags provide information on “Where they’re going, how they’re going, when they’re going,” McGee said. “It’s such a revolutionary technique.” 
Upon receiving charge from its solar panel, the tracker emits a bluetooth signal that can be received by smartphones within 100 to 200 meters away. The phones automatically relay the signal to researchers at the Project Monarch Collaboration, the group of research organizations that pioneered the new trackers.
“It’s going to allow scientists to sort of concentrate our efforts in the conservation of the habitat that these organisms depend on,” McGee said. “We haven’t been able to do that before.”
As he works, McGee’s phone lets off a series of pings from the Project Monarch app  — a fun addition to the new tracking efforts that allows smartphone users to track their favorite tagged monarchs. 
“If somebody is using the app and the monarch is close, it will actually tell you that the monarch is there if you have the app open. So you can do like Pokémon Go with the monarchs,” McGee said. 
McGee is rarely alone when he goes out to the Biocore Prairie to find and tag monarchs, often joined by interested students and members of the Biocore program. 
UW-Madison Senior Eashna Agarwal told the Cardinal she has loved accompanying McGee on his tagging trips to the prairie. 
“Every time I come here, I learn something new, and I get to apply a lot of what I’ve learned over the course of my biology education,” Agarwal said. 
For students and community members looking to join the migration tracking, the Project Monarch app is free to download, offering real-time updates as tagged butterflies make their journey south.
“And it’s really quite addicting actually to see,” Mcgee said. “It’s just mesmerizing to see where they’re going and when they’re moving.”

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The AD/CVD orders will be issued by Commerce on November 2, 2026
October 15, 2026
Follow Mercom India on WhatsApp for exclusive updates on clean energy news and insights
The United States International Trade Commission (USITC) has ruled that imports of crystalline silicon photovoltaic (PV) cells, whether assembled into modules or not, from India, Indonesia, and Laos materially injured the domestic solar manufacturing industry.
Following the USITC’s affirmative determination, the Department of Commerce will issue antidumping and countervailing duty orders on November 2, 2026, on the covered solar products imported from India, Indonesia, and Laos.
The determination follows the US Department of Commerce’s September findings that solar products imported from the three countries were sold in the U.S. at less than fair value and benefited from government subsidies.
In its final affirmative determinations, Commerce finalized a dumping margin of 123.04% on Indian solar cell exporters. The companies include Mundra Solar PV, Mundra Solar Energy, Kowa Company, Premier Energies Photovoltaic, and all other unnamed exporters.
In the countervailing duty investigation, Commerce determined a subsidy rate of 126.09% for Mundra Solar Energy and Mundra Solar PV. It applied the same rate to all other Indian exporters and producers.
The USITC’s October 14 determination completes the injury assessment required for the imposition of the trade remedies.
The investigations followed petitions filed on July 17, 2025, by the Alliance for American Solar Manufacturing and Trade, comprising First Solar, Hanwha Q CELLS USA, and Mission Solar Energy.
The Department of Commerce initiated antidumping and countervailing duty investigations in August 2025 to examine the allegations.
In February 2026, Commerce announced preliminary affirmative countervailing duty determinations for solar imports from the three countries. For India, it assigned a preliminary subsidy rate of 125.87% to Mundra Solar Energy and Mundra Solar PV and applied the same rate to other exporters.
In April 2026, Commerce announced preliminary affirmative antidumping determinations. It assigned a dumping margin of 123.04% to Mundra Solar Energy and Mundra Solar PV.
Rakesh Ranjan
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Lead-Free Cs2BiAgI6 Perovskite Solar Cell Hits 29% Efficiency in Simulation Study
Perovskite solar cells have been the most electrifying story in photovoltaics for over a decade, with power conversion efficiencies climbing from a modest 3.8 percent in 2009 to nearly 30 percent in 2023. Yet the best-performing compositions have shared a troubling ingredient: lead. Now a team of researchers led by Md Shawon and Kanij Fatema has published a comprehensive numerical study in Results in Optics showing that a fully inorganic, lead-free double perovskite, cesium bismuth silver iodide (Cs2BiAgI6), could deliver a power conversion efficiency of 29.06 percent in an optimized device, placing it squarely in the same performance territory as its toxic lead-based rivals.
The study, conducted entirely with the SCAPS-1D simulation software developed at Ghent University, systematically explored how every major design parameter of a solar cell affects its output. The researchers modeled an n-i-p architecture of the form FTO/TiO2/Cs2BiAgI6/Cu2O/Ag, in which a titanium dioxide electron transport layer extracts electrons from the Cs2BiAgI6 absorber, while a copper oxide hole transport layer ferries holes to a silver back contact. Under the standard AM 1.5G solar spectrum at 1000 W/m2 and a temperature of 300 K, the optimized structure produced an open-circuit voltage of 1.2998 V, a short-circuit current density of 26.68 mA/cm2, a fill factor of 83.80 percent, and the headline efficiency of 29.06 percent.
One of the most striking findings concerns the choice of back-contact metal. The team tested silver, gold, and platinum electrodes and found remarkably similar performance across all three. The platinum variant actually edged ahead with a simulated efficiency of 30.03 percent, an open-circuit voltage of 1.2816 V, a current density of 26.69 mA/cm2, and a fill factor of 84.94 percent, while the gold contact yielded 29.00 percent. Because the differences were marginal, the researchers selected silver for their reference design, a pragmatic choice given silver’s cost advantage over platinum and its favorable work function for hole collection.
Layer thickness proved to be a delicate balancing act. Varying the electron transport layer revealed that 120 nm of TiO2 delivered the optimal 29.06 percent efficiency, with efficiency rising only slowly as the layer thickened before the fill factor and power conversion efficiency began to decline. The hole transport layer told a similar story: at 140 nm of Cu2O, the device reached its peak, and the relationship between thickness and efficiency was found to be directly proportional up to that point. These results echo earlier work on organic semiconductor devices, where transport layers must be thick enough to resist field-induced degradation, typically between 10 and 20 nm at minimum, yet thin enough to avoid parasitic light absorption and excessive series resistance.
The absorber layer itself, the heart of the device, was swept from 650 nm to 1050 nm. Efficiency rose steadily with thickness, confirming a positive correlation, although the fill factor moved in the opposite direction. The optimum landed at 750 nm, where the simulated device achieved its maximum performance. This thickness optimization matters because the absorber must be thick enough to capture incoming photons and generate electron-hole pairs, but not so thick that photogenerated carriers recombine before reaching the transport layers.
Perhaps the most consequential parameter was the bulk defect density of the Cs2BiAgI6 absorber. The researchers varied defect concentrations from 10^11 to 10^15 cm−3 and found that efficiency peaked at the lowest density, 10^11 cm−3, remaining nearly constant below that threshold. Simulations at even lower densities suffered from convergence failures in the iterative solver, a common numerical limitation when defect populations become vanishingly small. The physics here is governed by Shockley-Read-Hall recombination, the dominant loss pathway in perovskite devices: defects act as traps that capture charge carriers and dissipate their energy non-radiatively, shortening carrier lifetimes and eroding both quantum efficiency and open-circuit voltage. The recombination rate depends on the carrier capture cross-section, thermal velocity, and trap density, so every order-of-magnitude reduction in defects translates directly into longer diffusion lengths and better charge collection.
Temperature emerged as a persistent adversary. Sweeping the operating temperature from 300 K to 380 K, the team observed that open-circuit voltage, fill factor, and efficiency all declined as temperature rose, while short-circuit current density increased. The mechanism is well understood: additional thermal energy generates more charge carriers and slightly narrows the bandgap, boosting current, but it simultaneously raises series resistance, lowers shunt resistance, and accelerates recombination, dragging down voltage and fill factor. The open-circuit voltage follows a logarithmic dependence on the ratio of short-circuit current to the dark saturation current, so any increase in recombination-driven dark current exacts a heavy toll on voltage. The best performance was therefore obtained at the coolest simulated condition, 300 K, a reminder that thermal management will be essential in real-world deployments.
Bandgap engineering also proved decisive. The Cs2BiAgI6 absorber’s native bandgap of 1.5 eV sits close to the ideal value for single-junction solar energy conversion, and the simulations confirmed that this is where the device shines, delivering roughly 29 percent efficiency. As the bandgap was widened, the material absorbed fewer photons from the solar spectrum, reducing current density, fill factor, and overall efficiency, with the lowest recorded efficiency of 26.08 percent at a wider gap. Beyond about 1.6 eV the simulation became numerically infeasible. The authors note that alloying strategies, such as substituting small amounts of tin into related double perovskites like Cs2AgBiBr6, can push bandgaps as low as 0.5 eV, underscoring how compositional tuning could open further design space without introducing toxicity.
Electron affinity, the energy difference between the vacuum level and the conduction band, was varied from 3.8 to 4.3 eV. Efficiency fell as the affinity increased, with the optimum at 4.00 eV yielding the familiar 29.06 percent benchmark and the worst case at 4.3 eV producing 28.65 percent. The band alignment between the absorber and its transport layers, characterized by conduction band offsets, directly shapes how easily electrons flow out of the absorber and how much voltage is lost at the interfaces. The study highlights that conduction band offset and absorber thickness are among the most critical levers for maximizing performance in double perovskite devices.
Beyond the headline efficiency, the team examined quantum efficiency across the solar spectrum. The simulated devices achieved approximately 98.68 percent quantum efficiency at a wavelength of 360 nm, holding strong through much of the visible range before declining toward 820 nm, while the photon energy of the absorbed light fell from 4.13 eV at 300 nm as wavelength increased. Defects and interface imperfections can devastate quantum efficiency, with prior studies reporting drops from over 90 percent to as little as 20 percent when carrier capture cross-sections grow, which is why precise external quantum efficiency measurements, accurate to within 5 percent for estimating short-circuit current, remain essential for validating any future experimental device. The authors caution that translating these simulated results into the laboratory will be challenging: environmental factors such as moisture and temperature sensitivity, long-term stability, and the economics of large-scale manufacturing all stand between a 29 percent numerical model and a commercial product. Still, the message of the study is unambiguous. With careful control of absorber thickness, defect density, doping, band alignment, and contact materials, lead-free Cs2BiAgI6 double perovskites can theoretically rival the efficiency of lead-based champions while eliminating one of the technology’s most serious environmental liabilities, offering a credible path toward sustainable, eco-friendly photovoltaics.
Subject of Research: Numerical optimization of lead-free Cs2BiAgI6 double perovskite solar cells using SCAPS-1D simulation
Article Title: A performance analysis of inorganic Cs 2 BiAgI 6 perovskite solar cell: A comprehensive study using SCAPS -1D
Article References: Shawon, M., Fatema, K., Akter, R., Hossain, S., & Shalauddin (2026). A performance analysis of inorganic Cs2BiAgI6 perovskite solar cell: A comprehensive study using SCAPS -1D. Results in Optics, Article 101187. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rio.2026.101187
Image Credits: AI Generated
DOI: 10.1016/j.rio.2026.101187
Keywords: perovskite solar cells, Cs2BiAgI6, lead-free photovoltaics, SCAPS-1D, double perovskite, power conversion efficiency, Shockley-Read-Hall recombination, defect density, bandgap engineering, electron transport layer, hole transport layer, quantum efficiency
News Source: Denise Maddox. (October 15, 2026). Lead-Free Cs2BiAgI6 Perovskite Solar Cell Hits 29% Efficiency in Simulation Study. Scienmag.
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New Zealand PM opens South Island’s largest solar PV plant at Christchurch Airport  PV Tech
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Living Solar Panels: Microbes and Light Join Forces to Generate Clean Electricity
Imagine a power source that feeds on wastewater, drinks in sunlight, and repairs itself when it breaks down. That is the promise of microbial electrochemical systems, a family of technologies in which electroactive bacteria convert the chemical energy stored in organic matter directly into electricity. A new mini-review published in Frontiers in Environmental Engineering by Rajani Bansode, Mukta Patil, and Vidya Karande compiles the latest advances in solar-assisted microbial fuel cells and related hybrid bio-solar platforms, mapping out both the remarkable engineering progress of recent years and the stubborn obstacles that keep these systems out of commercial deployment.
The context is pressing. The global population is expected to reach 9.8 billion by 2050, and even under effective new energy regulations worldwide consumption is projected to rise by 32 percent compared with 2013 levels, reaching 17,934 million tonnes of oil equivalent by 2040. That trajectory would require oil production to increase by more than 15 percent and would push carbon dioxide emissions even higher, deepening global warming and ocean acidification. Decarbonizing the economy to keep warming below 2 degrees Celsius demands genuinely new energy technologies, and microbial bioelectrochemical systems have emerged as one of the more intriguing candidates because they combine renewable energy harvesting with pollution cleanup in a single device.
At the heart of the field sits the microbial fuel cell, or MFC. In its classic configuration, electrochemically active bacteria such as Geobacter sulfurreducens and Shewanella oneidensis MR-1 oxidize organic substrates at an anaerobic anode, releasing electrons that travel through an external circuit to a cathode, where oxygen is reduced to water. Protons migrate across a proton exchange membrane to complete the circuit. Performance is measured in maximum power density, Coulombic efficiency, and the rate of chemical oxygen demand removal. Mediators can boost output: in experiments reviewed by the authors, Methylene Blue at 0.1 to 1.0 millimolar raised voltage to 684 millivolts, roughly a 70 percent increase over mediator-less controls, while Neutral Red delivered a 20 percent enhancement. Substrate choice matters too, with molasses wastewater reportedly achieving a maximum power density of 1,410.2 milliwatts per square meter.
The real excitement, however, lies in hybridizing these systems with light. Solar-assisted MFCs weave photosynthetic components into the microbial electrochemical framework, using sunlight to drive anodic metabolism, stimulate photocathodic reactions, or reduce the external energy needed for conversion. The review catalogues several distinct architectures: microbial solar cells that pair photosynthetic microbes with electroactive bacteria, biophotovoltaic devices that convert sunlight directly into current using cyanobacteria and algae, MFCs with photobioanodes, microscale devices built on ultramicroelectrodes, intimately coupled photobiocatalysis, and dye-sensitized solar cell platforms that use bacterial pigments as sensitizers. Each aims to overcome the low power densities and poor scalability that plague conventional MFCs.
Microbial solar cells and their plant-based cousins illustrate the elegance of the approach. In a plant microbial fuel cell, root exudates secreted by a living plant in the rhizosphere are metabolized by resident bacteria, which release electrons that are captured by a buried anode. Because the plant continuously supplies organic matter through photosynthesis, these systems can generate electricity around the clock, even under changing weather. Plant selection is critical: species with high root exudate production, extensive root systems, and efficient photosynthetic pathways perform best. Reported power densities vary dramatically, from 679 milliwatts per square meter for the marsh grass Spartina anglica to below 0.001 milliwatts per square meter for some Sedum species tested over 360 days on semi-arid green roofs.
Biophotovoltaics, the review notes, take a more direct route, extracting current from the photosynthetic electron transport chain itself. Whole-cell systems consistently outperform devices built from isolated chloroplasts or photosystems: cyanobacterial systems such as Synechocystis sp. PCC 6803 achieve current densities of 1,200 to 1,500 milliamps per square meter, while subcellular preparations manage only 60 to 200 milliamps per square meter. The advantage is biological self-repair and self-replication, which isolated enzymes cannot match. In one striking photobioanode demonstration, a hybrid cell combining a TiO2 photoanode with a light-absorbing silicon nanowire photocathode maintained a photocurrent of 0.3 milliamperes per square centimeter for more than 120 hours under simulated sunlight, using the acetogen Sporomusa ovata as microbial catalyst.
Engineering the interface between living cells and inorganic semiconductors is where much of the frontier research now concentrates. Materials including titanium dioxide, cadmium sulfide, silicon nanowires, graphene derivatives, and graphitic carbon nitride nanocomposites provide light absorption and conductivity, while conductive nanomaterials such as graphene oxide, carbon nanotubes, and nanostructured hydrogels support microbial adhesion and boost biofilm conductivity. A persistent problem is energy mismatch: when the semiconductor Fermi level shifts above the potential of the biological mediator, charge transport becomes thermodynamically unfavorable and photocurrent collapses. Plasmonic nanoparticles of silver or gold mounted on photoanodes can help, enhancing local light harvesting through surface plasmon resonance and reducing recombination losses.
Intimately coupled photobiocatalysis offers a different kind of synergy, this time in environmental remediation. By positioning bacteria close enough to semiconductor photocatalysts to rapidly degrade photocatalytic products yet shielded from the reactive oxygen species generated during photocatalysis, ICPB systems dramatically accelerate pollutant breakdown. Quantitative results cited in the review are striking: dinitrotoluene degradation was 3.5 times faster than in controls, trichlorophenol removal increased 2.8-fold, and 92 percent of trinitrotoluene was removed within 24 hours compared with 35 percent in conventional systems. In one setup, an N-doped TiO2 photocatalyst coated on macroporous carbon foam hosted a Geobacter-dominated anode-respiring biofilm that generated 50 percent more current than a bioanode alone.
Even electricity generation itself can borrow from biology. Dye-sensitized solar cells, third-generation thin-film devices that mimic plant photosynthesis, have been built using pigments from microorganisms. A pigment from the Antarctic bacterium Streptomyces fildesensis functions as a sensitizer, exploiting the fact that intense ultraviolet radiation in Antarctica drives pigment production as a defense mechanism. Similarly, prodigiosin from Serratia marcescens 11E produced a working dye-sensitized cell with an open circuit voltage of 560 millivolts and showed high photostability after five days. Co-sensitizing with several biological pigments such as anthocyanins and chlorophylls can broaden the absorption spectrum and reduce charge recombination.
Despite this creativity, the authors are candid about the hurdles. Power outputs remain low compared with conventional electrochemical systems, electron transfer between microbes and electrodes is inefficient, biofilms are fragile, materials are expensive, and larger reactors suffer from elevated internal resistance, mass transfer lags, and oxygen diffusion losses. Some semiconductors are toxic or photocorrode under illumination, and the long-term sustainability of nanomaterial disposal remains an open question. The path forward, the review argues, lies in combining affordable materials with synthetic biology and CRISPR-mediated engineering of electrogenic microbes, building robust biofilms, redesigning reactors, and grounding development in serious techno-economic analysis. If those pieces come together, living solar panels that clean water while generating power could yet earn a place in the circular economy of the coming decades.
Subject of Research: Solar-assisted microbial electrochemical systems for bio-solar energy conversion
Article Title: Microbial electrochemical systems for bio-solar energy conversion: recent advances, interfaces, future challenges
Article References: Bansode, R., Patil, M., & Karande, V. (2026). Microbial electrochemical systems for bio-solar energy conversion: recent advances, interfaces, future challenges. Frontiers in Environmental Engineering, 5, Article 1886265. https://doi.org/10.3389/fenve.2026.1886265
Image Credits: AI Generated
DOI: 10.3389/fenve.2026.1886265
Keywords: microbial fuel cells, biophotovoltaics, bio-solar energy, microbial solar cells, photobioanodes, dye-sensitized solar cells, intimately coupled photobiocatalysis, extracellular electron transfer, semiconductor-microbe interfaces, wastewater treatment, renewable energy, synthetic biology
News Source: Faith Mcneil. (October 15, 2026). Living Solar Panels: Microbes and Light Join Forces to Generate Clean Electricity. Scienmag.
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Energies Media
The pond sits where stormwater has always gone: a shallow basin built to hold runoff, never to hold hardware.
Now it holds something else entirely.
Dark panels cover the surface, locked flat on interlocking floats.
The water underneath is barely ten feet deep at its lowest point.
Yet the array already powers a fleet of electric buses overnight.
So what makes a basin this shallow the right platform for solar, and what does that warm water do to the panels sitting on it?
A stormwater retention pond is engineered for one thing: slow water down. It stores peak runoff and releases it gradually, keeping the surrounding land from flooding. That function never changes, and neither does the surface area, which sits idle for every hour the sun shines.
So the engineering insight is simple. An idle water surface is also a stable, flat, temperature moderated platform for a photovoltaic array. Water cools the underside of floating panels in a way that concrete or asphalt never can, and the advantage can boost efficiency by up to 15 percent.
The catch is depth. At just ten feet, conventional pile anchoring into the pond bed was never realistic, so the array is anchored from the banks instead, with tensioned lines holding the island steady as water levels rise and fall with each storm.
That bank anchored design is the single biggest engineering constraint on the whole project. It dictates how the floats link together and how the array flexes when the water surface shifts beneath a tropical storm front.
The floats themselves draw from a modular pontoon platform that links individual units into one continuous island. Each float clips into its neighbors, so the whole array moves as a single piece on the water rather than as hundreds of independent rafts, which matters when wind loads push across open water.
The result is dense. Spread across about 2.5 acres, the panel count works out to roughly 1,350 panels per acre, tighter than a typical ground mount field because the pontoon system wastes almost no space between rows.
The floating array was energized earlier this year and confirmed by Solar Power World as a 1.4 MW peak installation, one of three solar systems at the park that together reach 3.7 MW. The floating contractor that built it has deployed more than half of all operating floating solar systems in the United States, and this Orlando site is its second for the same resort campus.
The park expects the three installations to produce more than 6.7 million kWh of electricity each year, enough to power more than 900 homes. Power gathered by day is stored in batteries and discharged overnight to charge the park’s electric bus fleet, linking solar generation, storage and transportation into one closed loop.
The managing director of the floating solar contractor summed it up plainly: “We’re proud to continue our relationship with Universal Orlando through a second floating solar project.”
A retention pond at a theme park is not a remote reservoir. It sits within guest sight lines, carries stormwater that may include cleaning chemicals, and must stay accessible to maintenance crews without a service road around its edge.
Because there is no berm to drive on, access by inflatable tender becomes the standard method for inspecting connections and clearing fouling. Florida’s subtropical climate also breeds algae faster than the temperate European lakes where floating platforms were first tested, and while it will not harm the panels directly, it can coat the underside of floats and shift buoyancy, tilting units and cutting output.
Even so, the pond’s enclosed shape limits wave action to ripples rather than swells, protecting the clips and wiring between panels. That is exactly the kind of advantage a carport array found in its own unglamorous parking lot setting.
There are tens of thousands of stormwater ponds across the country, most already owned and maintained by municipalities or commercial properties. That makes floating solar a way to generate power without claiming new land, which matters where land near load centers is scarce and expensive.
This Orlando park became the first theme park to attain LEED Platinum certification under the standard for communities, and the floating array contributed by closing the loop: generation on the pond, storage in the battery bank, and consumption by the bus fleet overnight with no grid export required. This shallow Orlando pond proves the bank anchored design can work at the thin end of the depth range, not unlike how a grain belt solar park proved a design could work on unfamiliar terrain.
What remains unproven is long term performance through repeated Florida summers. An earlier, smaller array on the same Orlando campus has operated since 2021, with 645 panels covering about half an acre, and offers the closest available comparison. If its record holds, the case for retrofitting retention ponds everywhere gets measurably stronger, and the pond itself keeps doing exactly what it was built to do, catching rain, holding it, releasing it slowly, while now also generating power.
Hugo is an engineer with strong technical expertise. Multilingual from an early age, his writing combines technical clarity with a strong interest in science and energy.
Hugo is an engineer with strong technical expertise. Multilingual from an early age, his writing combines technical clarity with a strong interest in science and energy.
Hugo is an engineer with strong technical expertise. Multilingual from an early age, his writing combines technical clarity with a strong interest in science and energy.

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Cloudy with periods of rain. High near 65F. ESE winds shifting to WNW at 10 to 20 mph. Chance of rain 90%. Rainfall near a quarter of an inch. Locally heavy rainfall possible..
Cloudy skies this evening will become partly cloudy after midnight. Low 46F. Winds NW at 10 to 20 mph.
Updated: October 15, 2026 @ 5:06 am
In this photo taken with a phone, Mohammed Saber cleans a solar panel to ensure it charges properly on Oct. 4, 2026, in Teknaf, Bangaldesh.
In this photo taken with a phone, Mohammed Hares turns on a solar-powered fan inside his shop Oct. 4, 2026, in Teknaf, Bangaldesh.
Solar panels sit on top of makeshift shelters to power homes and streetlights Oct. 3, 2026, in Teknaf, Bangaldesh.
FILE – A displaced man inspects a small solar panel at a makeshift camp in Taiz, Yemen, March 13, 2026.
FILE – A family displaced by flooding has a solar panel set up outside their tent in Garsen town within Tana River County, Kenya, Dec. 3, 2023.
In this photo taken with a phone, children use a light powered by a solar panel to study at night inside their shelter on Oct. 3, 2026, in Teknaf, Bangaldesh.
In this photo taken with a phone, a woman uses a light powered by solar panels in her kitchen on Oct. 4, 2026, in Teknaf, Bangaldesh.
In this photo taken with a phone, Mohammed Hares keeps his small shop open at night using a light powered by solar panels on Oct. 2, 2026, in Teknaf, Bangaldesh.

In this photo taken with a phone, Mohammed Saber cleans a solar panel to ensure it charges properly on Oct. 4, 2026, in Teknaf, Bangaldesh.
In this photo taken with a phone, Mohammed Hares turns on a solar-powered fan inside his shop Oct. 4, 2026, in Teknaf, Bangaldesh.
Solar panels sit on top of makeshift shelters to power homes and streetlights Oct. 3, 2026, in Teknaf, Bangaldesh.
FILE – A displaced man inspects a small solar panel at a makeshift camp in Taiz, Yemen, March 13, 2026.
FILE – A family displaced by flooding has a solar panel set up outside their tent in Garsen town within Tana River County, Kenya, Dec. 3, 2023.
In this photo taken with a phone, children use a light powered by a solar panel to study at night inside their shelter on Oct. 3, 2026, in Teknaf, Bangaldesh.
In this photo taken with a phone, a woman uses a light powered by solar panels in her kitchen on Oct. 4, 2026, in Teknaf, Bangaldesh.
In this photo taken with a phone, Mohammed Hares keeps his small shop open at night using a light powered by solar panels on Oct. 2, 2026, in Teknaf, Bangaldesh.
ISLAMABAD (AP) — Every day, Mohammed Saber places a single rectangular solar panel on the roof of the bamboo-and-tarpaulin shack that he and his family have called home for years, the last stop on their journey after fleeing the Myanmar military’s brutal crackdown on the Rohingya in 2017.
The panel is part of a portable solar kit given to the Rohingya refugee family as humanitarian aid six years ago. It’s been the family’s primary source of electricity, making daily life so much easier in the camp for the displaced in Teknaf, Bangladesh.
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Solar Power World
By Kelly Pickerel | October 15, 2026
Pisgah Energy has finished a third solar project for Vanguard Furniture, continuing a multi-year partnership between the North Carolina-based businesses.
Building on two earlier solar investments in Conover, North Carolina, Pisgah has completed a 848-kW rooftop system at Vanguard’s manufacturing facility in Hillsville, Virginia. The project should offset 95% of the craft furniture building’s electricity usage.
“Pisgah Energy has been an outstanding partner as we’ve expanded solar across our facilities,” said Andy Bray, Vanguard Furniture CEO and President, “This project reflects our commitment to responsible stewardship and investing in solutions that strengthen our business for the long term.”
Pisgah Energy was the lead designer/developer and served as the primary contractor during project construction. The solar project features SEG Solar panels and SolarEdge inverters.
“It’s almost unheard of for a manufacturing facility to offset most of its electricity usage with solar, and we’re proud to be a part of this milestone achievement for Vanguard Furniture. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again, it’s an honor to partner with a company so deeply committed to using renewable energy to produce its wares,” said Evan Becka, president of Pisgah Energy.
Vanguard’s environmental commitment also includes recycling 95% of its post-manufacturing waste, from wood and fabric scraps to metal, paper and packaging. Its emphasis on furniture built to last for generations connects responsible production with lasting product value.
News item from Pisgah Energy
Kelly Pickerel has more than 15 years of experience reporting on the U.S. solar industry and is currently editor in chief of Solar Power World.

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From climate-driven disasters to Rohingya refugee camps, solar kits help keep the lights on  WSPA 7News
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The Will County Board voted Thursday to reject one solar energy project in Green Garden Township near Monee and approve another project in New Lenox Township near Manhattan after board members lamented over the lack of local control on solar siting.
Action on a third solar project in Manhattan Township, which also included a battery energy storage facility, was postponed for a month to see if the developer would make changes more palatable to County Board members.
Board member Dan Butler, a Republican from Frankfort, likened the number of solar projects to “an invasion” and said about 25% of Green Garden Township has been taken up by solar farms.
“Are we going to take up all the agricultural land in a township,” Butler said. “I’m begging you to just say no.”
Butler said the board has a duty to speak on behalf of its residents.
“They can’t fight these corporate entities without us,” Butler said.
Board member Frankie Pretzel, a New Lenox Republican, agreed.
“These people are begging for our help,” he said.
The county’s Planning and Zoning Commission and Land Use and Development Committee recommended denying all three solar projects. Several residents and municipal officials urged the board to deny the projects.
Bolingbrook Republican Raquel Mitchell told the audience, many holding signs urging the board to deny the solar farms, that they need to be in Springfield to urge state action restoring local control.
Other board members said while they don’t agree with the state law superseding local control on solar projects, they have to follow law.
Board member Kelly Hickey, a Naperville Democrat, said she has talked with state representatives to lobby for greater control at the county level.
Democratic Leader Sherry Williams, of Crest Hill, said voting against solar projects leads to litigation, which costs the county money.
County Executive Jennifer Bertino-Tarrant said she does not want to put the county in jeopardy.
The board rejected a project proposed by US Solar for a 4-megawatt solar energy facility to be located on about 40.5 acres at 25740 80th Ave., Monee, after three board members abstained from voting. The project failed with eight members voting in favor of the project and 11 voting against it.
The Monee Fire Protection District wrote to county officials that they opposed the tall vegetation that creates a fire risk and fire growth potential.
Green Garden Township officials opposed the project due to its proximity to a residential subdivision, township Supervisor Dean Christofilos said.
The solar project could affect property values and harm the residential character of the bordering Charlevoix subdivision, Christofilos said. The project could also affect stormwater runoff, he said.
“This has become so distressful in our community,” Christofilos said. “As supervisor, I get the phone calls.”
Christofilos urged the board to vote in the residents’ best interests.
“When you think like that, decisions become easy,” he said.
Jeff Becker, chairman of the township’s Watershed Committee, said the proposal solar project goes against the county’s wetlands regulations.
“I think this is a disgrace,” Becker said.
Alexis Snow, a Green Garden Township resident, said residents in the rural, agricultural area feel written off as though they don’t matter.
Steven Molter, the landowner of the project, said the solar panels would be “fairly invisible” to nearby homeowners because of the curvature of the land. He said he opted to use a portion of his farm land for solar to help pay bills, including for medical issues, during retirement.
Farm land has been plowed over during the years and replaced with houses, he said.
In a separate development, the board voted 12-11 vote along party lines to approve a plan by submitted by Arena Renewables for two 5-megawatt plants to be located on about 80 acres at 22939 Spencer Road, Manhattan. Bertino-Tarrant broke the tie to pass the project with Democrats in favor and Republicans opposed.
The project falls within the village of New Lenox’s planning area, though Frankfort, Mokena and Manhattan are also within about 1.5 miles.
New Lenox officials objected to the solar farm, saying it was inconsistent with the village’s comprehensive plan that envisions residential development.” The village also maintains jurisdiction over South Spencer Road and will not grant ingress or egress to the property, county documents said.
An attorney for the project, Ben Jacobi, agreed to soil testing before the project is built as well as a schedule for the duration of the lease. He said he does not anticipate the solar farm will have any impact on the soil’s quality.
The board postponed action until November on a project proposed by Cultivate Power for a 5-megawatt commercial solar farm and a battery energy storage system on 153 acres at 15520 W. Baker Road, Manhattan. The solar facility would occupy about 52 acres while the battery storage system, which stores excess energy generated on the site, would take up about 10 acres, county documents said.
Manhattan Township officials met with the solar developer Aug. 31 and voted 4-0 at the end of the meeting to object to the plans.
The township cited several concerns, including a township policy that states no battery storage facilities are permitted, county documents said. Another concern was the impact the solar project would have on a planned bike path by the Forest Preserve District of Will County as well as the number of overhead electrical poles that would connect the facility to the ComEd system.
Township Supervisor Jim Walsh said the board should put a moratorium on solar farm projects.
Michelle Mullins is a freelance reporter for the Daily Southtown.
 
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Now
57°
Fri
71°
Sat
45°
by WJAC staff
A Lancaster County company is looking to bring solar energy to a Clearfield County township.
Paradise Energy Solutions has submitted plans for a five-acre ground mount solar array along Kauffman Road in Lawrence Township near Glen Richey.
County officials said the project would feature 2,500 solar panels, with security fencing.
However, Lawrence Township planning commission has tabled the application for now, saying it needs further engineering review.
Commission members said discussions will continue at its meeting on November 10.
2026 Sinclair, Inc.

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Mobile Batteries That Chase the Sun Cut Rooftop Solar Waste in Crowded Grids
Rooftop solar power has quietly transformed the low-voltage grids that feed homes and small businesses around the world, but that success has created a stubborn and growing headache. When the sun blazes at midday and households use little electricity, surplus photovoltaic output pushes power backward through neighborhood transformers, driving voltages upward and forcing operators to throw away clean energy. Now, a research team from Guangdong Power Grid and the National Institute of Guangdong Advanced Energy Storage has developed a framework that treats a single battery not as a fixed asset but as a traveling resource, one that can physically migrate among transformer service areas to chase grid stress wherever it appears.
The study, published in Frontiers in Energy Research, confronts a subtle problem that has plagued energy storage planners for years. A stationary battery, no matter how well sized and sited, can only shift energy in time at its one connection point. Yet the operational stress caused by high solar penetration does not sit still. Reverse-power-flow violations, voltage rise, and photovoltaic curtailment migrate across different transformer service areas over the course of a day, as load patterns and solar output change from one neighborhood to the next. A battery bolted to one transformer simply cannot follow that moving target.
Mobile shared energy storage, abbreviated MSES, offers an elegant answer: a single storage unit that can drive or be transported between connection interfaces at different distribution transformers. But mobility is not free. Every relocation consumes traction energy drawn from the battery itself, occupies a full scheduling period during which no charging or discharging can occur, and requires connection-preparation time after arrival before the unit can resume grid service. Previous research on mobile storage often glossed over these engineering frictions, and frequently compared mobile units against stationary batteries that were never properly optimized, making the apparent benefits of mobility difficult to trust.
The new framework introduces a two-part solution. The first element is a diagnostic tool called the effective mobility service index, or MSIeff, computed from the location and magnitude of reverse-power-flow exceedances in a network operating without any storage. The index captures two things at once: how much solar stress exists in total, and how far that stress migrates among service areas over time. If violations stay concentrated at a single transformer, a well-placed stationary battery captures nearly all the available benefit, and mobility adds nothing. If the dominant violations hop from one area to another across the day, mobility becomes genuinely valuable. The index therefore acts as a pre-assessment screen, telling planners before any detailed optimization whether a mobile unit is likely to pay off.
The second element is a rigorously fair comparison design. The team optimized stationary storage and mobile storage within an identical finite candidate domain of power and energy ratings, spanning 100 to 200 kilowatts and 200 to 800 kilowatt-hours, subject to a common two-to-four-hour duration rule. The stationary benchmark’s connection location, rating, and daily dispatch schedule were all independently optimized, eliminating the common trap of benchmarking mobility against a deliberately weak fixed alternative. Both schemes shared the same total boundary for connection-infrastructure investment, and the mobile model explicitly represented travel-induced unavailability, traction consumption, interface limits, state-of-charge dynamics, and end-of-day closure constraints on both energy and location.
Solving the coupled problem required a nested optimization architecture. An outer layer enumerated feasible power-energy configurations and, for the stationary case, candidate fixed locations. For each candidate, an inner 24-hour dynamic program minimized daily operating cost, tracking stored energy, current service area, and connection-preparation status in its state space for the mobile unit. The daily costs were annualized and combined with investment and maintenance costs to produce a single equivalent-annual-cost metric for every configuration, from which the best option in each scheme was selected.
The results, drawn from 30 parameterized scenarios varying solar capacity, load levels, and temporal shifts in photovoltaic output, paint a nuanced picture. Mobile storage reduced photovoltaic curtailment in 16 of the 30 scenarios and lowered equivalent annual cost in 15, achieving both benefits simultaneously in 13. In the remaining cases, the mobility premium in travel, startup, and traction costs ate up the physical gains. Critically, the effective mobility service index proved to be a strong predictor of real-world benefit: its Pearson and Spearman correlation coefficients with realized curtailment reduction reached 0.867 and 0.870, respectively, confirming that a simple no-storage diagnostic can reliably flag the scenarios where a traveling battery will actually earn its keep.
The starkest illustration comes from a representative high-adaptability scenario in which reverse-power-flow violations first emerged in one service area and then migrated to two others. Both storage schemes converged on the same 200-kilowatt, 800-kilowatt-hour rating, isolating the effect of location flexibility alone. The mobile unit departed its depot, spent the morning absorbing surplus solar in the hardest-hit area, and returned home by midday. The result was a 14.54 percent reduction in daily photovoltaic curtailment, a 2.02 percentage-point increase in solar accommodation, and a 2.04 percent drop in equivalent annual cost compared with the optimally sited stationary battery. The cost breakdown showed that savings came from slashing curtailment penalties and network losses, not from cheaper equipment.
Sensitivity analyses sharpened the practical guidance. The mobile scheme’s cost advantage eroded as the unit price of mobile connection interfaces rose, breaking even at roughly 280,000 to 300,000 yuan per connection point and collapsing entirely at about 600,000 yuan, beyond which the optimizer chose no storage at all. Longer connection-preparation times also chipped away at the benefit, cutting the annual cost advantage from about 59,800 yuan to roughly 23,000 yuan when preparation stretched to two hours. An idealized mobility model that ignored travel time and traction energy overstated performance, overstating curtailment reduction and understating cost relative to the engineering-constrained design.
The broader lesson is that mobility is a conditional asset, not a universal upgrade. The authors emphasize that their framework rests on an aggregated voltage-sensitivity model and deterministic representative-day profiles, with only three service areas and a single mobile unit, leaving three-phase unbalanced power-flow validation, year-round uncertainty-aware planning, and multi-unit coordination to future work. Yet the message for distribution planners is already actionable: before investing in either fixed or roaming batteries, measure whether your grid’s solar stress actually wanders. If it does, a single battery on wheels can outperform an optimally placed stationary one; if it does not, the open road is just an expensive detour.
Subject of Research: Coordinated planning and operation of mobile shared energy storage in photovoltaic-rich low-voltage distribution networks
Article Title: Service adaptability assessment and coordinated planning and operation of PV-rich low-voltage active distribution network clusters
Article References: Service adaptability assessment and coordinated planning and operation of PV-rich low-voltage active distribution network clusters. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.3389/fenrg.2026.1963215
Image Credits: AI Generated
DOI: 10.3389/fenrg.2026.1963215
Keywords: mobile energy storage, photovoltaic curtailment, low-voltage distribution network, reverse power flow, battery storage planning, grid flexibility, voltage rise, energy storage sharing, smart grids, rooftop solar, service adaptability index, distribution transformers
News Source: Faith Mcneil. (October 15, 2026). Mobile Batteries That Chase the Sun Cut Rooftop Solar Waste in Crowded Grids. Scienmag.
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TOWN OF TRENTON, Wis. — The Town of Trenton plan commission tabled a decision on whether to approve a conditional use permit for a solar panel project that most Prairie Meadow neighbors don’t want built next to their property lines.
Neighbors first brought the issue to TMJ4 News’ attention at “Let’s Talk West Bend” in June. The issue was tabled on Monday.
The subdivision sits in West Bend, while the proposed solar panel project would be in the Town of Trenton — two different governments right next to each other.
Brandon Schneiberg is among the neighbors opposed to the project.
“There is no positive to this project for us,” Schneiberg said. “We’re not thinking this is a place to raise a family anymore. We feel like we are being forced out of our own homes, unfortunately.”
Schneiberg’s family purchased their home in December, and he said they are already thinking of selling it.
“We’re going to have to deal with the construction noise, after that 12 months, it’s the property values…” he said. “it’s living with the glare of the panels.”
SunVest Solar is pitching the project. The company sent a statement saying it has listened to neighbors, increased the distance between the project and the homes, added trees and received DNR approval.
Still, neighbors David Wallace and Ingrid Wallace don’t feel the farm field is a good fit.
“I’m not in favor of it,” David said. “It’s just not something that I’d really do.”
“I’m kind of sad that farmers are selling their land for something like that,” Ingrid said. “I think it’s more important to grow food instead of solar panels.”
The farmland property owners Dennis and Lynn Schloemer declined to speak on camera but said neighbors are not entitled to a view of the land they never owned.
The plan commission could approve the permit in November, after which it would go to the full board.

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Long-Duration Energy Storage  California Community Choice Association
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From ESS News
France-based Exide Technologies has launched Solition Powerflex, a modular battery energy storage system (BESS) designed for commercial and industrial applications, renewable energy integration, e-mobility infrastructure and agricultural facilities.
The new system combines a 261 kWh LFP battery with a 125 kW bidirectional power conversion system (PCS) in an outdoor cabinet. Up to 15 cabinets can be connected in parallel for grid-connected applications, providing a maximum combined capacity of 3.915 MWh and power output of 1.875 MW. For off-grid installations, the system supports up to five cabinets.
Each cabinet contains five battery packs with a capacity of 52.25 kWh each, based on 314 Ah LFP cells. The system supports charging and discharging rates of up to 0.5C and operates at an AC voltage of 400 V, with a frequency of 50 Hz or 60 Hz.
According to the manufacturer’s technical datasheet, the system offers a nominal round-trip efficiency of 86%, including auxiliary power consumption.
The IP55-rated outdoor cabinet measures 1,000 mm × 1,420 mm × 2,250 mm and weighs approximately 2,720 kg. It occupies a footprint of around 1.42 m² and is designed to operate at ambient temperatures ranging from -20 C to 50 C, with power derating above 45 C. It is IP55 rated for outdoor use.
Thermal management is provided by a dual-loop liquid cooling and heating system, with separate circuits for the battery and power conversion system, rated at 5 kW and 3 kW, respectively.
The cabinet integrates a battery management system, energy management system, PCS, thermal management and fire protection equipment. Safety features include automatic aerosol fire suppression, emergency shutdown, audible and visual alarms, explosion relief devices and a dedicated external firefighting interface.
Exide said the system incorporates a European-developed Storage Control System (SCS) that enables integration with on-site generation assets, grid operators and energy markets. Supported applications include peak shaving, self-consumption optimization, spot-market trading and ancillary services.
The control platform also offers remote monitoring, over-the-air software updates and interfaces for third-party systems. According to Exide, its digital architecture includes encrypted remote connections, EU-based data hosting and multilayer access controls.
“Organizations are increasingly seeking to improve energy resilience, integrate renewable generation and optimize energy costs,” said Serge Arbes, senior business director global, energy solutions, at Exide Technologies. “Solition Powerflex has been designed to address these evolving requirements, combining a scalable architecture with advanced control capabilities in a solution that can adapt to changing business needs.”
Exide has not disclosed standard warranty terms. The technical datasheet indicates that battery capacity and system warranty conditions are available on request.
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Thursday, October 29, 2026
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Available in print and digital – get your copy today!
pv magazine USA hosts its multi-day virtual event on U.S. solar and energy storage, covering domestic manufacturing, distributed energy and the growing role of solar-plus-storage in meeting AI-driven power demand.
pv magazine hosts its four-day virtual event on European solar and energy storage, exploring market opportunities, solar-plus-storage business cases, technical quality, and cybersecurity in the years ahead.
pv magazine Session returns to NetZero Milan as Knowledge Partner, organizing and moderating a two-hour conference on the evolving global solar supply chain.
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The volume is genuinely extraordinary. Government-owned undertakings including Solar Energy Corp. of India (SECI), Powergrid, NLC India, and NTPC – along with a widening range of local utilities in Gujarat, Rajasthan, Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra, and other states – collectively floated more than 130 GWh of storage-linked tenders in 2025 alone. SECI’s FDRE-IX tender, seeking 1.2 GW of …
Thursday, October 29, 2026
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Thursday, November 5, 2026
10:00 am – 11:00 pm CEST, Berlin, Paris, Madrid
The new issue of pv magazine Global is out now!
Available in print and digital – get your copy today!
pv magazine USA hosts its multi-day virtual event on U.S. solar and energy storage, covering domestic manufacturing, distributed energy and the growing role of solar-plus-storage in meeting AI-driven power demand.
pv magazine hosts its four-day virtual event on European solar and energy storage, exploring market opportunities, solar-plus-storage business cases, technical quality, and cybersecurity in the years ahead.
pv magazine Session returns to NetZero Milan as Knowledge Partner, organizing and moderating a two-hour conference on the evolving global solar supply chain.
Get your ticket at a discounted rate with pv magazine.
Join pv magazine for an expert session exploring quality, technology and the challenges of scaling India’s solar industry.
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Your source for better building and operations strategies.
Aaron Wilson, CEO of Solar One, delivered an overview of solar installation, storage, and benefits at the 2026 North Texas Facilities Expo.
Energy costs have been rising due to an increase in power demand driven by growth in certain areas of the country, including the Dallas-Fort Worth area, explained Aaron Wilson, CEO of Solar One, at the 2026 North Texas Facilities Expo. The marketplace is highly dynamic—but with this chaos comes opportunity.
“Properly leveraged chaos can provide a lot of economic benefit and savings. It doesn’t have to be something negative,” Wilson said. “How do we plan? Are we planning right, or are we planning wrong? Are we sitting back and letting the market come to us, or are we meeting the market and using the market chaos to our advantage?”
Commercial building owners and operators can take the opportunity to control their energy costs by installing solar infrastructure, with or without battery storage, controls, and gas generator backups.
The utility covering your area and your local rules and regulations will be a key deciding factor in how your solar array is designed, Wilson said. Your expected load and use case will come into play too, but rules and regulations are where to begin.
For example, if your utility doesn’t have net metering—the ability for you to send power back to the grid if you overproduce—you should seriously consider battery storage for your excess power, since you can’t sell the excess back to the utility. This is the case in Texas, where retail energy providers are not required by law to pay individual power generators back for their extra power, Wilson explained.
You’ll also want to understand what your building’s insurers want. Some rooftop solar systems are ballasted, meaning that weight holds the system in place. However, many insurers prefer to see mechanical attachments.
“There are good ways and bad ways to go about mechanical attachments,” Wilson said. “The key is that you want the attachment under your existing roof warranty, which means whoever holds the warranty needs to do the work on that scope.”
There are plenty of options if rooftop solar isn’t an option for you. Ground-mounted systems don’t require disrupting your roof at all and can be designed with tracking so that they move to capture maximum sunlight throughout the day.
“Having a single-axis tracker is a great way to increase production, but now you have working parts,” Wilson said. “There are motors to track, there’s gears, there’s grease, there’s cabling. If you’re looking at a tracker vs. a fixed tilt, be aware that you may have some additional functions that are ongoing—maintenance, spare parts, and ensuring you have a tracker manufacturer who has a good track record of standing behind their work.”
Covered canopies over parking spaces are another option, but know that solar canopies by themselves aren’t watertight because the panels need to have a quarter-inch gap between them to prevent overheating—the canopies should have an EPDM gasket between the gaps to keep rain off of parked vehicles, Wilson said.
“All of these things can be done economically, but you just need to be prepared to ask the right questions and make sure you’re getting what you want at the end of the day,” Wilson said.
Ask your solar installer about these considerations for your installation.
Existing underground utilities: “Think about the underground utilities between Point A and Point B,” Wilson said. “Maybe it’s too close to fiber or another feed. If you don’t have a good underground utility map or it’s not very accurate, be prepared for a ground-penetrating radar study.”
Special zoning considerations: “If you’re looking at putting solar on the ground or on a canopy, be aware to bake in time for getting zoning approvals you may need, a special use permit, or things of that nature,” Wilson said.
Addition of mechanical and civil trades to your electrical project: Canopy or ground mounts require the mechanical and civil trades to contribute. Make sure whoever you’re utilizing for the electrical installation respects those trades and has capability in them. For example, you may need to add concrete piers to the metal columns holding up your solar canopy if you’re in a location where salting is needed during the winter.
Impact and benefit to your on-site staff during construction and the long term: These systems are sophisticated, and there will be a lot of work happening to install them. Make sure the work is phased so that you’re not shutting down your entire parking lot for six months.
Geographical design considerations: Your location can influence your needs for the installation.
Budgetary accommodations: You may not expect to have to install things like concrete piers.
Utility regulations on your system rating: Your solar contractor may not be thinking through the lens of utility rules and additional requirements for systems above a certain size, Wilson said. Many utilities will require impact studies, supplemental reviews, or other documentation if your installation is above 1 MW AC.
Janelle Penny has been with BUILDINGS since 2010. She is a two-time FOLIO: Eddie award winner who aims to deliver practical, actionable content for building owners and facilities professionals.

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‘Mexico’s mixed investment scheme provides clean energy investors with certainty’  Energy-Storage.News
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Australia solar investment decisions reach record 3.5GW in 2026  PV Tech
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Solar power allowed the European Union to sidestep over EUR40 billion in gas imports from 1 March through 15 October 2026, SolarPower Europe reported. According to the industry body, this saving resulted from solar arrays throughout the bloc producing sufficient electricity to markedly cut gas usage for power generation, bolstering Europe’s energy security and protecting consumers from steeper fossil fuel expenses.
The achievement, announced from Brussels on 15 October 2026, spans the timeframe beginning with the 2026 Middle East war. SolarPower Europe observed that seven months into the conflict, fossil fuel markets continue to be susceptible to geopolitical shocks, and that disruptions previously regarded as unusual are turning into a regular aspect of Europe’s energy situation.
The organization stated that following years of turmoil caused initially by Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine and subsequently by the 2026 Middle East war, Europe can no longer view fossil fuel price shocks as separate incidents. It contended that the EU needs to reinforce its economic resilience and further lessen its vulnerability to fossil fuel price swings as a top priority.
Walburga Hemetsberger, who leads SolarPower Europe as chief executive, described the EUR40 billion sum as an expense Europe was spared, and said the continent’s solar capacity has once more proven the worth of domestically produced renewable energy amid geopolitical instability. She noted that Europe continues to face exposure to fossil fuel price fluctuations, with households and companies absorbing the costs, and added that the EU has options to act now and protect consumers from a structural weakness.
SolarPower Europe is urging the EU to implement an emergency set of measures capable of yielding advantages within the coming year while tackling the underlying drivers of Europe’s fossil fuel vulnerability.
The bundle ought to encompass expanding behind-the-meter electrification, solar generation and self-consumption, assisting households and businesses in generating and using more of their own power.
It should further encompass speeding up the rollout of large-scale battery energy storage, lowering how often fossil gas determines electricity prices and allowing more inexpensive renewable electricity to meet demand at peak moments.
SolarPower Europe said it has been tracking the daily savings produced by Europe’s solar capacity via avoided gas imports.
Interactive table based on the Store Companies dataset for this report.
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Concise View of Market Direction
Market Size, Growth and Scenario Framing
Commercial and Technical Scope
How the Market Splits Into Decision-Relevant Buckets
Where Demand Comes From and How It Behaves
Supply Footprint, Trade and Value Capture
Trade Flows and External Dependence
Price Formation and Revenue Logic
Who Wins and Why
Where Growth and Supply Concentrate
Commercial Entry and Scaling Priorities
Where the Best Expansion Logic Sits
Leading Players and Strategic Archetypes
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Largest solar cell & module producer globally.
World's largest monocrystalline wafer & module maker.
Major integrated solar manufacturer.
Leading producer of high-performance PV products.
Global manufacturer with production in Americas & Asia.
Major cell/module maker with US & Asian production.
Top-tier PV module and cell manufacturer.
Largest thin-film solar manufacturer globally.
Major LED chip & packaging for displays/lighting.
Pioneer and leading supplier of LED phosphors & chips.
Historically leading innovator in LED chips.
Major European LED & opto-semiconductor producer.
Producer of high-efficiency IBC solar cells.
World's largest producer of solar cell wafers.
Leading ABC cell (N-type) technology producer.
Rapidly growing solar cell and module manufacturer.
Integrated PV manufacturer under Chint Group.
Major global LED packaging and component supplier.
Leading supplier of LED components for automotive/lighting.
One of world's largest LED epitaxial wafer & chip makers.
Innovator in LED packaging (WICOP) and chip technology.
Major LED component supplier, part of LG Group.
Key LED epitaxy and chip manufacturer.
Historically significant in both PV and LED production.
Major PV manufacturer part of GCL Group.
Specialist in N-type TOPCon solar cells and modules.
Historic PV leader, continues manufacturing.
Leading LED chip manufacturer, part of Ennostar.
Major LED packaging company for lighting & display.
Leading Chinese LED packaging and component supplier.
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Solar panels cover the land at the Unchahar solar power plant, Raebareli district, India, Thursday, Oct. 15, 2026.
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From ESS News
EcoFlow is targeting the cost of home battery storage in the US with its new Titan series, offering three models that start at 5 kWh and expand to 30 kWh, along with a pre-wired home panel to cut installation work.
The Titan range, which includes the Titan 5000 Classic, Titan 5000, and Titan 5000 Plus, joins EcoFlow’s existing Delta Pro Ultra and Ultra X systems. In launching, its new products, EcoFlow said it analyzed data from 100,000 households and found that 80% stayed below a rough power demand of 6.7 kW for some 99% of the time. In a standard day, that might be just 15 minutes of high-power draw. That informed the Titan’s design, with the company arguing that most homes do not need the output of its larger systems. That supports its output choice, although backup duration still depends on battery capacity and the loads being supplied.
The standard Titan 5000 and flagship 5000 Plus match the original Ultra’s 7.2 kW output, but start with a smaller battery, at 5 kWh versus 6.144 kWh.
The Titan 5000 Plus supplies 7.2 kW at 120/240 V, rising to 10 kW when hooked in to a solar supply, with the additional power contributed through a boost function. EcoFlow says it can run a 3-ton central air conditioner alongside a refrigerator, TV and lights, without a soft starter.
On the input side, the Plus handles up to 8 kW of solar through two 4 kW MPPTs, compared with 5.6 kW for the original Delta Pro Ultra. The standard Titan 5000 takes up to 4 kW through one MPPT. The cheaper Titan 5000 Classic drops to 4 kW of output at 120 V, with 3.2 kW of solar input.
The Plus weighs 55 kg and measures 623 mm × 336 mm × 428 mm. Both it and the expansion batteries carry an IP20 rating, requiring dry indoor placement. Charging is specified from 0 C to 45 C, with discharge from -10 C to 45 C. Warranty coverage is five years.
EcoFlow said the new hardware uses a 200 V architecture, LFP cells and silicon carbide power electronics. EcoFlow noted the battery was powered by an “industry-first 40160 tabless 2C LFP cell.” A tabless cell design can effectively reduce heat generation by eliminating traditional narrow current tabs, lowering resistance.
For home integration, the new Smart Home Panel 10 manages up to 10 circuits and supports 50 A, with automatic transfer to battery power in under 20 milliseconds. The company’s home energy management system, OASIS 3.0, manages charging and discharging against household demand, tariffs and weather forecasts.
EcoFlow quotes around $1,200 in installation labor and about two hours on-site. Its seven-business-day installation service starts after permits and approvals are obtained, though this offer or similar was already available with the Ultra X.
FCC authorization for all three Titan 5000 systems are dated July 20, before the FCC’s July 28 restrictions on foreign-produced inverters.
EcoFlow Titan 5000 pricing and availability
For now, pricing is being given in bands in a slightly unusual but welcome move for launch. The Titan 5000 and 5000 Plus will be in the $3,000 range standalone, or the $7,000 range including the home panel and installation. The Classic will be in the $2,000 range standalone, or the $5,000 range installed.
EcoFlow announced availability from Oct. 13, with its product pages currently offer reservations including . Further pricing details are due Nov. 3.
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The USITC has found that solar cell and module imports from India, Indonesia, and Laos materially injured the US solar industry 
The final determination from the USITC follows a 15-month investigation into solar imports from the three countries 
The DOC is scheduled to issue AD/CVD orders on November 2, 2026, after which US CBP will begin collecting cash deposits 
The US International Trade Commission (ITC) has issued a final affirmative determination that solar cell and module imports from India, Indonesia, and Laos have materially injured the US domestic solar industry.  
The decision clears the way for the US Department of Commerce (DOC) to issue antidumping and countervailing duty (AD/CVD) orders on November 2, 2026. Combined duties will vary by country and producer. US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) will start collecting cash deposits once the orders are in effect. 
In its final determination, the USITC upheld the finding that solar imports from India, Indonesia, and Laos had materially injured the US solar industry. The investigations found that suppliers sold solar cells and modules in the US below fair value and benefited from government subsidies in their respective countries. 
The investigation was launched in July 2025, in response to a petition filed by a group of US solar PV manufacturers, the Alliance for American Solar Manufacturing and Trade (AASMT). In September 2026, the DOC confirmed dumping and subsidization of solar imports from all three countries and set AD margins and CVD rates (see US Finalizes Solar Import Duties On India, Indonesia, Laos). 
This is another win for AASMT, which was previously successful in getting AD/CVD orders against solar imports from Cambodia, Malaysia, Thailand, and Vietnam, leading to a significant drop in imports from these countries (see USITC Issues Final Injury Determination In AD/CVD Investigation). 
AASMT is now pursuing another AD/CVD investigation against imports of solar cells and modules assembled in Ethiopia using Chinese-origin components (see New US Petition Targets Ethiopia Solar Imports). Its complaint against India’s Waaree Energies and Waaree Solar Americas for evading AD/CVD on certain solar imports led to a final CBP customs ruling.  
Tim Brightbill, Lead Counsel to the AASMT and Co-Chair of Wiley Rein’s International Trade Practice, said the USITC’s final determination on solar imports from India, Indonesia, and Laos strengthens fair competition. 
Meanwhile, another coalition of US-based solar manufacturers called AMER is pursuing an investigation into South Korea-produced solar cells being used to circumvent tariffs on Chinese products, including by Hanwha Qcells (see Waaree Hit By US Duties; South Korea AD/CVD Probe Sought). 
TaiyangNews 2024

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Revitalize C&I Solar with Enphase Microinverter Repowering  SolarQuarter
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