Solar Now

GameChange Energy Commissions Tracker System at 23 MWp Dannevirke Solar Farm in New Zealand  SolarQuarter
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The Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO) said a record pipeline of new generation and storage is putting Australia on a stronger path to maintain electricity reliability but stressed the timely delivery and operational availability of these developments is key to ensuring the power system’s ability to replace retiring coal-fired generation and meet growing electricity demand.
AEMO’s 2026 Electricity Statement of Opportunities (ESOO) report – the annual 10-year reliability outlook for electricity supply and demand across Australia’s eastern and southeastern states and territories – highlights that electricity consumption and peak demand is forecast to increase by more than 40% over the next decade as homes, businesses and industry electrify and data centre demand grows.
About 15 GW of coal and gas generation is scheduled to retire during that timeframe but the 2026 ESOO shows the pipeline of generation and storage needed to maintain reliability in the National Electricity Market (NEM) has “strengthened materially,” backed by a strong rollout of new renewable generation, batteries, transmission and growing investment by households in rooftop solar and battery storage. 
AEMO Chief Executive Officer Daniel Westerman said relative to last year’s report, the reliability outlook has improved, with no forecast reliability gaps identified before 2030.  
“The outlook is encouraging, supported by record levels of new generation and storage, and a strong pipeline of projects expected over the next decade,” he said.
“There is a clear pathway to maintain reliable electricity supply, provided new generation, storage, transmission and consumer energy resources continue to be delivered on time as electricity demand grows and older generation retires.” 
About 24 GW of newly committed and anticipated generation and storage projects is now progressing through the development pipeline, increasing total committed and anticipated capacity to approximately 40 GW – more than half the current 77 GW NEM capacity. A further 33 GW of publicly announced generation and storage projects have been awarded government investment support.
Since the 2025 ESOO, approximately 9.1 GW of new capacity reached full output over the past year, a new annual record and more than double the connection rate of the year before.
These utility-scale developments are complemented by continued growth of distributed energy resources with more than 2.4 GW / 7.4 GWh of household batteries added to the grid since 1 July 2025, along with continued growth in rooftop solar. In the past year, for every 1 MW of rooftop PV installed, 2.5 MW / 7.7 MWh of storage has been installed in households across the NEM.
While the outlook is encouraging, Westerman added that the report highlights the importance of timely delivery of projects to maintain reliability as coal and gas generation retires and electricity demand grows.
“Delivering this new infrastructure, on time and in full, will be critical,” he said, adding that additional investments will be needed to continue the momentum.
“Beyond 2030, the next wave of investment will be critical to maintaining reliability,” he said
Australian Energy Minister Chris Bowen acknowledged that more work needs to be done but said the report shows Australia’s energy transformation is gathering pace. 
“In many ways, this is the best ESOO we’ve had in many years,” he said. “It shows our grid is increasingly reliable. It shows that the investment needed to ensure grid reliability across the National Electricity Market is coming through.”
“This is a very strong result. It shows that we need to keep our foot on the accelerator to replace the ageing coal-fired power stations across the country, to ensure not only emissions come down, but grid reliability continues to improve.”
A major focus of the 2026 ESOO is the growing impact of data centre electricity demand with forecasts showing the number of proposed data centres seeking to connect to the NEM has more than doubled in the past year, from 97 to 225.
Data centre electricity consumption in the NEM is forecast to increase from approximately 5 TWh today to 34 TWh in 2035-36, increasing from about 3% to approximately 13% of electricity supplied through the grid.
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Our special edition for Intersolar South America 2026 is here!
Discover the latest insights into the Brazilian solar market – in Portuguese.
The new issue of pv magazine Global is out now!
Available in print and digital – get your copy today!
Entries open in seven categories: Modules, Inverters, BoS, BESS, Manufacturing, Sustainability, Projects.
April 01 – August 31, 2026
A two-day conference in Austin, Texas, bringing together leaders in US solar manufacturing, equipment specification, and factory execution.
Tuesday, August 25, 2026
10:00 am – 11:00 am CEST, Berlin, Paris, Madrid
Saudi Arabia is accelerating its clean energy transition—join the SunRise Arabia Clean Energy Conference 2026 in Riyadh to explore how solar PV and energy storage are powering its digital economy.
Thursday, August 27, 2026
5:30 am – 6:30 am CEST, Berlin, Paris, Madrid
pv magazine USA hosts its third multi-day virtual event on advancing U.S. solar and energy storage markets, covering financing, supply chains, and distributed energy’s role in grid resilience.
Thursday, October 7, 2026
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The Australian government has opened registrations for the Capacity Investment Scheme (CIS) Tender 11 in Western Australia.
Bidding for Tender 11 will open on 27 August 2026 and close on 22 October 2026, seeking nearly 1.8GW of renewable energy generation in Western Australia’s Wholesale Electricity Market (WEM).
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This is the fourth and likely last tender in the WEM, with awarded projects expected to start operations by 2030.
The tender represents the latest round in Australia’s flagship renewable energy support mechanism, administered by AusEnergy Services Limited (ASL) on behalf of the Australian government.
Tender 11 includes an 180MW First Nations Equity and Revenue Sharing Set Aside. First piloted in Tender 9 with 500MW of renewables reserved for First Nations communities, this latest tender aims to award specific projects that commit at least 5% of equity participation or revenue-sharing arrangements with First Nations communities.
Similar to previous tenders in Western Australia, successful projects must take part in the state’s Reserve Capacity Mechanism, which helps keep the power system reliable as more renewables are added to the grid.
Moreover, this is the fourth tender in the WEM region. Two of the previous tenders were for dispatchable energy and awarded 2.6GWh and 3.7GWh of BESS in Tender 2 and Tender 6, respectively. Whereas most of the renewable energy awarded under Tender 5 went to wind projects, while only a single solar-plus-storage project was awarded with a 350MW solar PV capacity and 2.1GWh of BESS.
Recent data from Australia’s Clean Energy Regulator highlighted the increase in renewable energy projects in the pipeline in the probable category. At the end of May 2026, the probable queue reached 32GW, which has mostly been a reflection of the registration of the CIS awarded Tenders 5, 6 and 7.
Despite that accelerated growth in the pipeline coming from CIS awarded projects, a gap between probable and committed categories reflected a structural challenge that has been building since the CIS programme began generating large tender outcomes.
For more details regarding Tender 11 and how to participate can be accessed here.

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Science China Press
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Fluorine, chlorine, and bromine were introduced into the central core of azaphenanthrene-fused acceptors. Increasing halogen size progressively improved crystallinity and packing order; CHNBr delivered a 78.84% fill factor and enabled binary organic solar cells with power conversion efficiency above 20%.
Credit: ©Science China Press
Organic solar cells are attractive as lightweight and flexible photovoltaic devices that can be fabricated from solution. Their performance, however, depends on simultaneously maintaining a high open-circuit voltage, short-circuit current density, and fill factor. Molecular core expansion can reduce energy loss and improve acceptor packing, but enlarging fused frameworks may also disturb molecular organization. Most existing core-expanded acceptors rely on quinoxaline-fused frameworks, and larger systems containing five or more fused rings remain comparatively rare.
A Nankai University team addressed this limitation with a heteroatom-guided molecular design. The researchers constructed a series of azaphenanthrene-fused non-fullerene acceptors and introduced fluorine, chlorine, or bromine into the central core. Comparison of the three halogenated acceptors revealed a clear size-dependent trend. As the halogen radius increased from fluorine to chlorine to bromine, the crystallinity and packing order of the acceptors were progressively enhanced. The results show how atom-level substitution within an expanded core can govern solid-state organization rather than merely extend the conjugated skeleton. As a result, PM6:CHNBr-based devices deliver an outstanding FF of 78.84% and a champion PCE of 20.18%, representing the highest efficiency reported for binary OSCs employing polycyclic fused-ring acceptors.
Taken together, the findings establish N/halogen engineering as a way to reconcile two objectives that can otherwise conflict in multi-ring acceptors: expanding the molecular core and preserving favorable molecular packing. The strategy provides a design direction for polycyclic acceptors that balance voltage, current, and fill factor, and may support further development of efficient organic photovoltaic materials.

See the article:
Azaphenanthrene-based polycyclic acceptors regulated by N/halogen engineering achieving over 20% efficiency in binary organic solar cells
https://doi.org/10.1007/s11426-026-3507-9
Science China Chemistry
10.1007/s11426-026-3507-9
Disclaimer: AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert system.
Media Contact
Bei Yan
Science China Press
yanbei@scichina.com

Expert Contact
Xiangjian Wan
Institute of Polymer Chemistry, College of Chemistry, Nankai University
xjwan@nankai.edu.cn

Science China Press


Copyright © 2026 by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)
Copyright © 2026 by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)

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SpaceNews
Covering the business and politics of space
Updated 7 p.m. Eastern to correct full name of company.
SALT LAKE CITY — A startup has developed large deployable structures that could enable small satellites to generate large amounts of power.
Beyond Reach Labs announced Aug. 24 its Flarewing line of rigid deployable structures. Those structures can be used to mount solar panels, enabling satellites to carry large arrays that can be tightly stowed for launch.
The Flarewing-S, the smallest of the three configurations of the product, has dimensions of 1 x 0.25 x 0.08 meters when stowed but deploys to provide a surface area of 30 square meters. That can provide between five and eight kilowatts of power, depending on the type of solar cells used. The largest, Flarewing-L, has dimensions of 6 x 0.29 x 0.13 meters when stowed but deploys to provide a surface area of 625 square meters, generating up to 200 kilowatts of power.
The concept for Flarewing has its roots in a NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts, or NIAC, study that co-founder and Chief Executive Mitch Fogelson worked on while a graduate student at Carnegie Mellon University. The NIAC study examined how to deploy kilometer-scale structures on a single launch.
That study led to the development of a truss design that stows flat but pops up into a triangular shape when deployed. A key aspect of the design is the high stiffness of the deployed structure, which reduces bending modes that can be a problem for pointing accuracy and during maneuvers.
“I think what’s unique about our structure is as it deploys out, it grows and it gets stiffer,” said Pele Collins, co-founder and chief technology officer of the company, in an interview.
The deployable structure, he added, also supports changes in satellite design as companies optimize for SpaceX’s Starship and its slot-shaped payload dispenser. “People are going from building giant boxes to more like the SpaceX Starlink style,” he said.
The deployable structures don’t require composite materials and can be made of aluminum and “a variety of novel joints,” said Fogelson. “We can manufacture at scale and produce at scale to support the hundreds of thousands of satellites that some of these companies are proposing over the next five years.”
Beyond Reach went through the Y Combinator accelerator program earlier this year and generated $350 million in letters of intent for using its structures for power generation and heat dissipation.
“It was everything from orbital data centers and commercial space stations to in-space manufacturing and satellite defense,” he said.
The company, focusing for now on deployable structures for solar arrays, has two contracts with undisclosed customers doing what he called “deeper investigations” into the technology. It has raised a little more than $11 million to date, including a $10 million seed round it announced in July.
Beyond Reach has 14 people working in a 16,000-square-foot facility in Brooklyn, New York. “We have a lot of strong opinions about bringing aerospace to the Northeast and the amazing talent and capabilities that the Northeast offers as a new aerospace hub,” Fogelson said of the company’s decision to locate in New York.
Fogelson and Collins met as undergraduates at the University of Pennsylvania. “What we see a lot, and what I experienced myself, is that if you’re a mechanical engineer and you want to work in aerospace and go to school in the Northeast, you end up having to move west because that’s where the jobs are,” said Collins, who worked at SpaceX for seven years on the Dragon spacecraft’s parachute system before co-founding Beyond Reach.
Basing the company in Brooklyn, they said, is a deliberate effort to help build up a space industry in the region and allow engineers who go to school in the region to stay there after graduation. While that industry is currently small, they said they can tap into an extensive network of machine shops and suppliers in the area to help them. The company is based in Industry City, a manufacturing hub that offers room for significant expansion.
“When we’re thinking about building the biggest structures,” Collins added, “New York City is the place for big structures.”

Jeff Foust writes about space policy, commercial space, and related topics for SpaceNews. He earned a Ph.D. in planetary sciences from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a bachelor’s degree with honors in geophysics and planetary science… More by Jeff Foust
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Aug 24 (Reuters) – Tesla has stopped selling premium solar roof tiles on its website, nearly ​a decade after CEO Elon ‌Musk launched the product as a more attractive alternative to panels.
• Tesla’s solar roof url now redirects to a ‌solar ​panels offering.
• Discontinuation ⁠of the product ⁠was first reported by Electrek last week.
• Tesla did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
• ​Musk unveiled the roof tiles in 2016 as Tesla sought ⁠to acquire SolarCity, ⁠the solar installer run ​by his cousins.
• The company in ​2021 had targeted 1,000 installations per ‌week, but industry estimates said the actual figure was far less.
• Tesla’s solar strategy has shifted ⁠to traditional panels, which it produces at its factory in Buffalo, New York, and ⁠began ‌delivering to residential customers ⁠this year.
• Musk still ​has ‌big ambitions in solar. Tesla ​filed plans ⁠in Texas this month for a $10.1 billion solar-cell factory outside Houston that would create 9,712 permanent jobs.
(Reporting by Nichola Groom; Editing by ​Mark Porter)
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The automaker is evaluating multiple states for Project Crystal Sun. The Fort Bend County site would create more than 9,712 jobs and begin construction as soon as this year.
First published on
Both of Musk’s companies, Tesla and SpaceX, are separately working toward a combined goal of building out of 100 gigawatts per year of manufactured solar power capacity in the United States, the CEO said at the World Economic Forum at the start of the year.
“That’ll probably take us three years or something,” Musk said at the event. He added that China makes solar cells at an “incredibly low cost,” and thus it would be “worth doing large-scale solar” domestically.
SpaceX has submitted permit applications to build a 10-gigawatt solar cell factory in Bastrop, Texas, with plans to build aerospace-grade infrastructure for its orbital data centers, Bloomberg reported in May.
Currently, Tesla engineers its solar panels and systems in California and assembles them in Buffalo, New York, with a capacity of more than 300 megawatts per year. Project Crystal Sun would massively expand Tesla’s capacity.
Tesla is considering multiple U.S. locations for its proposed solar cell manufacturing facility, but it did not disclose where beyond the Fort Bend County site, according to comptroller documents. The EV and robotics maker is seeking incentives from the state to offset property taxes, including support from the Texas Jobs, Energy, Technology and Innovation Act.
Without the JETI incentives, Tesla said the Fort Bend County site would not be as competitive as the other unnamed site.
Through the first half of the year, Tesla generated $5.5 million in revenue from its energy generation and storage division, which accounts for solar and battery systems. This was comparable to last year.
While energy comprises a fraction of its earnings compared to automotive sales, the company said in its latest report that it’s focusing on ramping production of energy storage products and developing its solar manufacturing and battery technologies.
“There’s going to be tremendous need for electricity in the future,” Musk said on a July 22 earnings call, citing increased demand from the electrification of transportation and artificial intelligence.
“We’re working on what we believe is the most ambitious build-out of advanced infrastructure and manufacturing capacity ever in history,” he said.
SpaceX recently moved forward with plans to invest $16.8 billion on a 100-million-square-foot Terafab semiconductor manufacturing facility in Grimes County, Texas. The first phase of construction is set to begin this year and create 3,000 jobs.
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Climbing interest rates and high inflation have resulted in slowing demand despite the data center boom, writes a construction accountant. 
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Climbing interest rates and high inflation have resulted in slowing demand despite the data center boom, writes a construction accountant. 
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Sol Systems Acquires 200 MW Lumberton Solar Project in Texas  energynews.pro
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Integrating photovoltaics into greenhouses is not simply a matter of determining how much electricity a solar roof can generate. It also requires assessing how much radiation reaches the plants, under what microclimatic conditions, and how this affects their water requirements. A project developed by the University of Jaén (UJA) in Spain has investigated this interaction using two commercially available semi-transparent photovoltaic module technologies.
The research, funded by the Regional Ministry of Universities, Industry, Energy and Innovation of the Government of Andalusia, compared cadmium telluride (CdTe) and amorphous silicon (a-Si) modules installed as roofs on small experimental greenhouses. The results indicate that photovoltaic generation can significantly alter the indoor microclimate, with temperature reductions of up to 5 C and lower water losses through evaporation.
The study, published in AgriEngineering under the title “Spectral Selectivity and Microclimatic Buffering of Semi-Transparent Photovoltaics in Greenhouses: A Comparative Analysis of CdTe and a-Si Technologies for Agrivoltaic Applications,” builds on the development of agrivoltaics (APV) by applying the concept to protected agriculture, where radiation management is particularly important.
To investigate the trade-off between electricity generation and the amount of radiation available to crops, the researchers built two greenhouses fitted with semi-transparent modules and a third with a conventional transparent roof that served as a reference.
The first technology analyzed was CdTe, which transmitted approximately 50% of incident solar radiation, while the a-Si modules used in the experiment transmitted around 20%.
Five successive tomato and lettuce growing cycles were conducted over approximately one year. The primary objective was to characterize how the different roofs altered the growing environment, rather than to rank the technologies according to crop productivity.
The prototypes incorporated a monitoring system that recorded data at five-minute intervals. The researchers measured variables including solar radiation and its spectral distribution, air and soil temperature and humidity, CO2 concentration, and electricity generation.
This temporal resolution enabled the researchers to study how the greenhouses responded to changes in radiation and temperature and determine how the photovoltaic roofs altered environmental conditions compared with the reference greenhouse.
The reduction in radiation caused by the modules had a direct impact on the greenhouses’ thermal balance. Both photovoltaic systems produced cooler and more humid indoor environments, reducing evaporative demand from the plants and soil.
According to the project results, water losses fell by approximately 31% under the CdTe modules and by more than 60% under the amorphous silicon modules.
The effect is particularly relevant in Mediterranean regions, where high summer temperatures and limited water availability are among the main constraints affecting protected agriculture.
The findings also point to a second potential source of economic value for greenhouse operators. Electricity generated by the roof could reduce energy costs or provide additional revenue, while changes to the microclimate could help reduce irrigation requirements.
In addition to quantifying the total amount of radiation passing through the modules, the researchers analyzed its spectral composition.
The CdTe technology displayed a potentially valuable agronomic characteristic. Although it reduced the total amount of radiation available to the plants, it allowed a relatively higher proportion of certain wavelengths to pass through, including blue and red regions of the spectrum that are relevant to photosynthesis.
This suggests that assessments of photovoltaic greenhouse roofs should not be based solely on their transparency levels. The spectral quality of transmitted radiation may be equally important when evaluating the physiological response of crops.
Subsequent trials conducted by the research team also point to plant adaptation mechanisms under lower-radiation conditions. Crops can modify their architecture through greater leaf expansion and stem elongation to improve their ability to capture the available light.
The next stage of the research will involve further testing in Murcia, southeastern Spain, using additional photovoltaic technologies and environmental conditions representative of the region’s intensive agricultural sector.
The researchers aim to determine the extent to which photovoltaic generation, spectral transmission, temperature, humidity and water consumption can be optimized simultaneously without compromising crop yields.

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Our special edition for Intersolar South America 2026 is here!
Discover the latest insights into the Brazilian solar market – in Portuguese.
The new issue of pv magazine Global is out now!
Available in print and digital – get your copy today!
Entries open in seven categories: Modules, Inverters, BoS, BESS, Manufacturing, Sustainability, Projects.
April 01 – August 31, 2026
A two-day conference in Austin, Texas, bringing together leaders in US solar manufacturing, equipment specification, and factory execution.
Tuesday, August 25, 2026
10:00 am – 11:00 am CEST, Berlin, Paris, Madrid
Saudi Arabia is accelerating its clean energy transition—join the SunRise Arabia Clean Energy Conference 2026 in Riyadh to explore how solar PV and energy storage are powering its digital economy.
Thursday, August 27, 2026
5:30 am – 6:30 am CEST, Berlin, Paris, Madrid
pv magazine USA hosts its third multi-day virtual event on advancing U.S. solar and energy storage markets, covering financing, supply chains, and distributed energy’s role in grid resilience.
Thursday, October 7, 2026
11:00 am – 12:30 pm CEST, Berlin, Paris, Madrid

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ReNew Energy (Nasdaq: RNW) to add 4 GW solar cell capacity by 2026  Stock Titan
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By Canary Media

By Canary Media
Canary Media
24 August 2026
A thousand solar roofs per week. That was the pace Elon Musk predicted Tesla would install its electricity-generating roof tiles in 2020, more than three years after he unveiled the product to great fanfare on the set of the TV show Desperate Housewives.
That estimate fell flat. Tesla managed to install a total of just 3,000 solar roofs in the U.S. by the end of 2022 and now appears to be scrapping the product altogether, Electrek reports. As of Monday, the solar roof was no longer featured among the home energy products on Tesla’s website. Tesla did not return requests for comment.
The official demise of Tesla’s supposedly transformative solar roof comes as the company is back in the news for a fresh round of eye-popping claims about its solar ambitions. In July, Tesla indicated interest in building a $10.1 billion solar cell factory in Texas. Earlier this year, Musk declared that Tesla will work with SpaceX to manufacture 100 gigawatts of integrated solar panels — meaning each major step of the supply chain. That’s far more than the entire country makes or installs annually.
When Musk unveiled the solar roof, he was pitching Tesla investors to acquire rooftop solar leader SolarCity, of which he was the largest shareholder. By combining the talents of those two companies, he argued, they could build a new kind of solar product to disrupt the two-step process of installing roofs and putting solar panels on top of them. The roof itself would contain the photovoltaic capability, while looking like high-end slate or tile.
As generally happens in the solar market, the specialty product underperformed mass-produced conventional panels. Tesla’s solar roofs were far more expensive. They took longer than expected to install. In some cases, they warped or underproduced their nameplate capacity.
Tesla’s solar roof didn’t even crack 0.03% of the roofing market in 2022, and amounted to just 0.17% of the residential solar capacity installed that year, according to a 2023 report by data firm Wood Mackenzie.
The product did, however, help secure Tesla shareholders’ approval of the SolarCity acquisition, which converted Musk’s shares in that startup into Tesla stock. The rooftop solar business quietly declined from there, and Tesla’s solar performance never matched the company’s market-leading achievements in electric vehicles and battery storage.
Tesla was not alone in the solar roof space. GAF, a major roofing company, launched its own nailable solar shingles in 2022. In March 2024, it opened a second factory, bringing its total capacity to 300 megawatts, making it the ​“largest producer of solar roofing in the world,” per a press release. But last December, ​“in light of ongoing changes in the solar industry,” GAF’s energy division shuttered its San Jose, California, headquarters, laid off 138 employees, and moved all operations to Texas.
Tesla’s recent solar moves are fundamentally more modest than its once-grand plans for the solar roof.
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In January, amid flagging EV sales, the company brought online 300 MW of manufacturing capacity for a new rooftop solar panel, to be made at the beleaguered Buffalo, New York, factory where it once produced the solar roof.
“This is the first time that we’ve actually fully designed and manufactured our own solar panel, aside from everything that we’ve been doing on the solar roof,” Colby Hastings, who runs the residential energy business at Tesla Energy, told Canary Media at the time.
While Tesla’s all-black solar panel offers an especially sleek look, and the company says it streamlined certain installation elements, it is, essentially, a normal solar panel. Its new factory is smaller than the multi-gigawatt factories others have opened in the U.S. with help from incentives in the Inflation Reduction Act.
Tesla is also mulling a major move further upstream in the solar supply chain. Late last month, Tesla submitted documents to Texas regulators for the possible $10.1 billion solar cell factory near Houston, with construction beginning as soon as this year and wrapping up by the start of 2029.
There is considerable demand for domestic cells — the pieces that actually convert sunlight into electricity — because the U.S. does not make nearly enough to supply its rapidly expanding fleet of module-assembly factories. Newly announced tariffs on imported solar products have increased the urgency to expand domestic cell production.
Tesla’s Texas solar factory — if built — would be an enormous, though not inconceivably large, investment relative to the domestic supply chain. The filing does not disclose capacity figures, though it notes the facility would create nearly 10,000 full-time jobs. In May, trade publication PV Magazine reported that the U.S. had, in total, $14.5 billion worth of operational solar manufacturing facilities. Another $22.2 billion were under construction.
Pulling off a factory of that scale will be quite an undertaking for a company that has lately shifted its strategic focus to robotic butlers.
Regardless of what happens with the Texas proposal or Musk’s fantastical 100-GW prediction, Tesla’s turn toward producing regular old solar panels suggests a lesson drawn from the solar roof’s downfall: Don’t be too fancy, stick with the form factor that has become the biggest new power source worldwide, and drive efficiency through economies of scale.

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Dan McCarthy is a senior editor at Canary Media.
Julian Spector is a senior reporter at Canary Media. He reports on batteries, long-duration energy storage, low-carbon hydrogen, and clean energy breakthroughs around the world.
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Fuyao Glass, one of the world’s largest suppliers of automotive glass, has listed a new product for sale that it says can generate electricity from a car’s roof glass. But before you get too excited: this doesn’t mean solar-powered electric cars are right around the corner.
Almost as long as electric cars have been a thing, the thought of powering them from the sun has been an attractive idea. Why not greatly reduce the need for a large battery if we can just collect all the power we need from the sun?
The problem is, it doesn’t work quite like that. The amount of sunlight reaching the surface Earth, over the area of a car, is simply not enough to power that car.
It hasn’t stopped people from trying. Student competitions make successful solar cars all the time, like the ones at the Electrek American Solar Challenge and Formula Sun Grand Prix. But those are tiny, ultralight, single-occupancy vehicles that bear little resemblance to what we see on the road.
The trials of Aptera are an indication of this. The company has been developing an electric car with a solar roof for years upon years now, and is finally getting there with driveable prototypes (that we got to take a drive in!). But it’s got a lot of compromises compared to a normal car, and still doesn’t produce enough solar to completely power itself on the road (though thanks to a large battery, many drivers will generate enough solar to power their whole commute, once you account for the solar power gained while parked).
But is it possible to make a normal, regular-looking car “solar-powered?” Fuyao Glass now has a product that looks like it can be slotted into any vehicle, at a reasonable price, and function both as a glass roof and a solar power generator.
Fuyao says its new automotive solar glass product can produce around 150W of power per square meter. That’s an impressive number, given standard modern solar panels produce somewhere in the range of ~200W per square meter. (And the Aptera mentioned above can produce 400-500W in the best conditions – notably, not parked under trees or in the shade of buildings, where cars sometimes spend their time).
The difference is that Fuyao’s glass is translucent, whereas standard solar panels are not. Translucent panels obviously won’t work as well as they’re not capturing all the light going through them, but might work well for an automotive glass roof, which is intended to cut out a significant percentage of light passing through it anyway.
There are not a lot of pictures available of what this might look like in practice, though the company has provided some videos and infographics with renders. One of Fuyao’s videos shows trees visible through the roof as the car drives by, with the pattern of solar cells visible through the roof glass from the inside.
But even if the whole sunroof is made of this glass, that’s just not enough power to move a standard vehicle down the road. Even highly-efficient EVs will use hundreds of times more power to accelerate up to speed.
Instead, this power could be used to offset the drain of the myriad electronics in modern vehicles. Fuyao says it could be used to power internet connectivity functions, air conditioning, or an in-car data recorder (like Tesla’s Sentry Mode, which uses a lot of power).
On an EV, you’ve got a big battery to power all of those items, but that drain means you need to plug in more often, and your car will drain battery while it’s parked.
So Fuyao doesn’t market this technology as providing motor power for EVs – or even being EV-targeted at all. The video that the above screenshot came from uses a gas-powered BMW as a demonstration car, for example. On a gas car, a battery would need to be added to store solar power, but it would allow those cars to have some of the capabilities that large traction batteries have afforded EVs.
However, there have been media reports that BYD would offer Fuyao’s glass as an option on its EVs, at a price of 8,000 Yuan ($1,192), with the glass taking up enough area to provide a total of 720W at peak. Those reports have not been confirmed by either company.
With power output like that and ideal sun conditions, it could be enough to power a grocery-getter or a vehicle for a very short commute, in the single-digit mile territory. (But if you’ve got a car for such a short commute, I’d suggest looking into e-bikes…)
As an automotive supplier for vehicles around the world, there’s always potential that this product could make it out of China, too. But so far, we’ve only got unconfirmed reports from BYD, and not other automakers.
Sure it wouldn’t produce enough for a car running errands all day but for a commuter car it would be great. 10mi to work. Sit in the sun for 9-10hrs. Ten miles home. Get another couple of hours in the evening and morning. You could cover a lot of your electricity needs.
Fuyao is not the only solar glass manufacturer in the world, but it’s the first we’re aware of that claims to have a commercialized technology for semitransparent automotive solar glass.
Another potential application for solar glass is in buildings, which do spend a lot of predictable time pointed in the same direction at the sun, and which often have large glass windows that don’t need to articulate. Fuyao also supplies glass for building construction, so that could be another application of this product (there are many other suppliers offering something similar).
So it looks like we are inching closer to a solar future… in fits and starts. This might be a nice little boost for either EVs or gas cars, and the price is at a point where it might even be a reasonable addition. But don’t get your hopes up for solar-powered cars, because until we rethink what a car is (and stop heading towards disgusting murderous SUVs), the limits of physics are not going to allow for fully solar cars.
If you *don’t* have a solar car, you can charge your electric vehicle at home using rooftop solar panels. Find a reliable and competitively priced solar installer near you on EnergySage, for free. They have pre-vetted installers competing for your business, ensuring high-quality solutions and 20-30% savings. It’s free, with no sales calls until you choose an installer. Compare personalized solar quotes online and receive guidance from unbiased Energy Advisers. Get started here. – ad*
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“Imposing tariffs and price floors on solar materials will … raise energy costs for families and businesses.”
Photo Credit: iStock
A new U.S. trade action could significantly reshape the solar market by making it much harder for imported panels and components to compete on price.
PV Magazine reported that the Trump administration’s Section 232 updated framework for imported polysilicon and related solar products, announced on August 6, will enforce a combination of stage-based minimum import prices, a 15% ad valorem tariff, and volumetric duties. 
At the center of the policy is a strict pricing threshold meant to stop foreign solar goods from being sold into the U.S. at levels that undercut domestic producers across the supply chain.
The report lists current baseline minimum import prices at $9.53 per pound for polysilicon, $45.36 per pound for ingots/wafers, $0.22 per watt for cells, and $0.38 per watt for modules. A U.S. module manufacturer that imports foreign cells or wafers cannot price the finished module below the $0.38-per-watt threshold.
The Commerce Department also has the authority to raise those minimum prices, and the framework allows those adjustments to move only upward.
Customs and Border Protection is working with Commerce to review import data and enforce the rules. Importers that fail to meet documentation standards could be permanently blocked from bringing in covered solar goods.
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PV Magazine noted that independent analysis firm Intertek CEA projected that crystalline silicon solar module imports are likely to largely dry up after the exclusion window closes.
That could provide a major boost to domestic manufacturing. At the same time, it could slow the clean energy rollout many communities are counting on for lower-cost electricity and cleaner air.
The Solar Energy Industries Association says operational U.S. cell manufacturing capacity is only 3.2 gigawatts, which means module assemblers still rely on imports for more than 90% of their cell supply. Meanwhile, U.S. module manufacturing capacity has climbed to 65.5 gigawatts, and domestic production now covers about 70% of annual installation demand, even though the country still imported 32 gigawatts of modules.
If solar becomes more expensive to build, that could lead to project delays, higher electricity costs, and slower progress in replacing planet-warming energy sources. 
Intertek CEA projected that domestic module prices could reach about $0.35 per watt if suppliers maintain historical margins.
The report also says integrated suppliers with overseas non-duty cell sources could retain an advantage at roughly $0.30 to $0.33 per watt. By contrast, U.S. assembly shops without their own cell supply could face severe margin pressure, PV Magazine noted.
Higher module prices are expected to cause project cancellations and reduce annual U.S. solar installations from 2027 through 2030. A slowdown on that scale could make it harder for utilities and communities to expand cleaner power quickly, even as demand for reliable and less-polluting energy continues to grow.
Supporters of the policy say those near-term costs are necessary to build a stronger domestic supply chain. U.S. manufacturing leaders argue that the action could help unlock more investment in American factories and jobs, rather than allowing imports to dominate the market indefinitely.
Paolo Maccario, Silfab Solar president and CEO, praised the move, saying, “Silfab Solar and the Trump administration share a common goal, to level the playing field and enable companies like ours to expand in the U.S. and build American products supported by a domestic supply chain.”
Dan Barcelo, chairman and CEO of T1 Energy, similarly called it “a decisive win for advanced American manufacturing and investment in domestic energy supply chains.”
The proclamation also includes narrow rules for existing contracts. Fixed-term contracts signed before August 6 can bypass minimum import price requirements, though they may still face the 15% tariff, and parties cannot restructure those agreements afterward.
Country exemptions are not part of the plan. Any future deals are expected to be tied to managed trade quotas rather than broad tariff relief.
The measure still presents a difficult tradeoff between expanding domestic production and keeping solar deployment affordable.
As Tim Pawlenty, president and CEO of the Solar Energy Industries Association, put it: “America has made terrific progress rebuilding its solar manufacturing base, but imposing tariffs and price floors on solar materials will create new challenges for American manufacturers and raise energy costs for families and businesses.”
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The choice depends on whether the priority is quick comfort or future flexibility.
Photo Credit: iStock
A sweltering shed and a tight budget led one off-grid DIYer to ask: Is it better to buy a solar-powered fan first or start with a small battery setup?
The person took this question to Reddit’s r/OffGrid community, where other off-grid homeowners largely agreed that the answer was less about choosing a single gadget and more about building a system that works even after the sun goes down.
The situation involved “a small off-grid shed that gets pretty hot/uncomfortable in the late afternoon but only needs light and airflow for a couple of evening hours.” 
Because the original poster had no home backup battery and did not want to keep moving a power station back and forth, they were deciding between a small general solar setup and a separate solar ceiling fan that comes with its own panel and battery. OP ultimately asked, “What would you power first in a tiny, off-grid shed: ceiling fan or general battery bank?”
Most commenters pushed the conversation toward energy storage first. As one person put it, “You power the batteries so they can power the fan and lights.”
While panels generate electricity when the sun is shining, batteries make that power available when it is actually needed. In this case, that meant the evening hours. 
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Another commenter echoed the same point, writing, “Kinda need both, you can’t really power stuff directly from solar, you need a buffer which is the battery.”
One user added, “Batteries first, fan never! Insulate the building so it’s cool in the summer and warm in the winter. Camouflage netting supported away from the building not draped over it makes a massive difference.”
Commenters also pointed out that self-contained solar products can still be useful for very small needs. In places like a chicken coop, porch, or shed, a standalone device may be enough when all that is needed is limited airflow or a few hours of light, without the work of putting in a larger system.
Many people across America are looking for a simple, lower-cost way to make a shed, workshop, or outbuilding more comfortable without committing to a full-scale home energy system.
The easier installation and lower upfront cost of a dedicated solar fan or light can make it an appealing first purchase. The tradeoff is that it may box owners in later, while even a small battery bank provides more room to grow and eventually run lights, chargers, tools, or other low-wattage devices.
For anyone setting up a tiny off-grid space, the most practical first step may be to calculate the real nightly energy load: one light, one fan, and the number of hours each will run. That can make it much easier to decide whether a dedicated appliance is enough or whether a small, expandable battery system is worth the higher upfront cost.
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Posted by Linton CorbetTuesday 25^th August 2026  5:07 PM   Topic: 2026-08-25
On Tuesday 25 August SA Power Networks had planned to conduct its annual test of its ability to temporarily curtail rooftop solar generation.
A high-level overview of the what, why and how of the test is described the SA Power Networks announcement. It explains that the capability to temporarily curtail rooftop PV is needed to manage electricity grid stability when rooftop solar exports are very high and electricity demand is very low, to avoid an unstable electricity grid.
A high-level overview of the what, why and how of the test is described in the announcement. We note:
The test will check:
In the leadup to the test, at 10:00 (NEM time) AEMO’s small scale rooftop PV forecast was indicating there would be 1179 MW exporting in SA at peak.

A south to southwesterly airstream was driving thicker morning cloud away from Adelaide. This is seen in teh Bureau of Meteorology SatView image below. Patchy cloud cover and temperatures in the low teens followed.

It is likely too early to say how much of an impact the test had on demand or other electricity data inidcators. More data, or more analysis, or both is likely needed to assess the test.
In the Trends chart below we observe an increase in SA demand between 15:00 and 15:30 aligning with a decline in rooftop PV. A return to possibly normal demand levels appears by 16:00 and this aligns with a weakening of the rooftop PV decline.
We know there was cloud cover that would create output variability. Further, demand levels appear to have been well below the forecast 1179 MW peak, reaching 879 MW at 14:30. These aspects indicate that fluctuations in the data might be attributable to many things.

WattClarity compiled a list of three different causes/drivers of distributed PV curtailment. In that article, we say “distributed” to encompass small scale rooftop systems and larger commercial systems found distributed throughout the network.  Summarising, for ease of access:
This ability to curtail rooftop PV export levels is sometimes referred to as an emergency backstop mechanism. In SA, the Smarter Homes regulations set out requirements that support  ability to achieve this.
AEMO’s Learnings from industry implementation of emergency backstop mechanisms for distributed resources offers insights into how these mechanisms have been implemented and used (as of 2025).  This report includes learnings from SAPN’s experiences.
Paul McArdle Tue 25^th February 2025 
A question from a client led me to take a (very quick) look at curtailment over the recent weekend (Saturday 22nd and Sunday 23rd February 2025) at New England Solar Farm 2 … with this article a prompt for something deeper that will follow later (time permitting).
Paul McArdle Mon 4^th October 2021 
Looks like AEMO will be announcing a new ‘lowest point’ for Operational Demand in NSW later, given what has happened on Monday 4th October 2021 (Labour Day holiday).
Paul McArdle Mon 29^th September 2025 
On LinkedIn someone wrote about the QLD price dropping to the Market Price Floor for the 10:05 and 10:10 dispatch interval today (Mon 29th Sept 2025). So I had a quick look
Paul McArdle Sat 17^th April 2021 
Looking back at Tuesday 13th April 2021 – a day in which the ex-tropical cyclone Seroja in Western Australia caused some wobbles in rooftop solar PV output in South Australia.
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2026-04-24
Toyota Tsusho Corporation (“Toyota Tsusho”) announced today that, through its Group company AEOLUS SAS (“AEOLUS”), which is engaged in the renewable energy business in Africa, it has completed the construction of two solar power plants (totaling 100MW) in the Republic of Tunisia (“Tunisia”) and begun commercial operation.
This project is Toyota Tsusho’s first renewable energy project in Tunisia and AEOLUS’ first investment project. The two solar power plants being constructed in Tunisia’s Sidi Bouzid and Tozeur governorates through an operating company funded by AEOLUS and Scatec ASA, a Norwegian company involved in the construction and operation of solar power plants, have now been completed. Sidi Bouzid Mezzouna PV Power (50MW) began commercial operation on January 1, 2026, and Tozeur PV Power (50MW) began commercial operation on March 4, 2026.

Going forward, these plants will supply electricity equivalent to the annual consumption of approximately 120,000 Tunisian households (resulting in approximately 108,000 tons of reduced CO₂ emissions) to the Tunisian Company of Electricity and Gas for a period of 30 years.

Both power plants were selected by the Ministry of the Environment, Japan for Financing Programme for Joint Crediting Mechanism (JCM) Model Projects* in FY2023.

Toyota Tsusho Group promotes carbon neutrality in order to deliver a better global environment for future generations. In Africa, under the key message “for the future children of Africa,” we will continue to promote green businesses that contribute to solving social issues and realizing economic growth in Africa.

* Ministry of the Environment, Japan has been implementing the “JCM Model Projects,” which provides financial supports covering up to half of the initial investment costs. The purpose of this model projects is to financially support the implementation of projects which reduce GHG emissions by utilizing leading decarbonizing technologies in developing countries, and in return, to acquire JCM credits for achievement of Japan’s GHG emission reduction and the partner countries’ emission reduction target. This project is being implemented with the cooperation of the Tunisian and Japanese governments.
– August 6, 2024 release: Participation in 100MW Solar Photovoltaic IPP Projects in Tunisia
(https://www.toyota-tsusho.com/english/press/detail/240806_006449.html)
The information in this release is current as of the date of announcement.
Please note that information may change after the date of announcement. Thank you in advance for your understanding.

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A research team from Malaysia’s Curtin University has developed a simplified operating cell temperature model for floating PV (FPV) systems. The new model is compatible with the existing nominal operating cell temperature (NOCT) model and can therefore be integrated into existing solar PV software.
“The new FPV-NOCT model extends the existing standard NOCT PV model by incorporating water temperature to estimate solar cell temperature floating over a water body,” corresponding author Ramanan Chidambaram Jayaraj told pv magazine. “A key advantage is that it remains compatible with existing PV temperature models, requires only water temperature as an additional input, and preserves the simplicity of the original NOCT framework.”
Jayaraj said he is currently working to refine the model to improve its predictive accuracy. “I am also planning to extend the development of cell temperature models to emerging solar cell technologies,” he added.
The researchers combined field measurements, computational fluid dynamics (CFD), statistical analysis and theoretical modeling. They first collected one-minute data from two custom-built FPV systems in Malaysia, using 100 W modules positioned 250 mm and 800 mm above the water surface. They used the measurements to derive an experimental regression model and validate a two-dimensional CFD model developed in Ansys Fluent.
The team then used Taguchi statistical analysis to generate 10-factor and seven-factor CFD regression models and assess the influence of environmental and design variables. Based on the results, the researchers developed an FPV-specific NOCT model incorporating the ambient water temperature difference, as well as a version featuring a wind-correction factor.
The researchers compared five models – the experimental regression model, the 10-factor and seven-factor CFD-Taguchi regression models, the FPV-NOCT model, and the FPV-NOCT model with a wind-correction factor – against the experimental data. They then validated the strongest candidates, particularly the FPV-NOCT models, using independent FPV datasets from Passaúna Lake in Brazil and Windsor and Oakville in California. The basic FPV-NOCT model delivered the strongest overall performance.
“When the FPV-NOCT model was tested against floating PV data from Passaúna Lake, it successfully predicted the observed cell temperatures for 11 of the 12 months, and for all 12 months when the wind correction factor was included,” said Jayaraj. “A similar pattern was observed in Windsor and Oakville, where the FPV-NOCT model achieved a prediction accuracy of 92.3% in one instance. What is particularly interesting is that the proposed model performed better than the standard NOCT PV cell temperature model for PV systems floating over a water body.”
The researchers presented their findings in “Water cooling effect in solar cell temperature estimation for floating photovoltaics modeling,” published in Solar Energy.
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Our special edition for Intersolar South America 2026 is here!
Discover the latest insights into the Brazilian solar market – in Portuguese.
The new issue of pv magazine Global is out now!
Available in print and digital – get your copy today!
Entries open in seven categories: Modules, Inverters, BoS, BESS, Manufacturing, Sustainability, Projects.
April 01 – August 31, 2026
A two-day conference in Austin, Texas, bringing together leaders in US solar manufacturing, equipment specification, and factory execution.
Tuesday, August 25, 2026
10:00 am – 11:00 am CEST, Berlin, Paris, Madrid
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Thursday, August 27, 2026
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pv magazine USA hosts its third multi-day virtual event on advancing U.S. solar and energy storage markets, covering financing, supply chains, and distributed energy’s role in grid resilience.
Thursday, October 7, 2026
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Researchers at Germany’s Forschungszentrum Jülich GmbH have found that heterojunction (HJT) solar cells using aluminum-doped zinc oxide (AZO) as an alternative to indium tin oxide (ITO) for the transparent conductive oxide (TCO) layer are more vulnerable to damp-heat conditions, potentially raising concerns about their long-term stability and reliability in humid environments.
“AZO grows in a polycrystalline structure that favors the rapid penetration of water molecules into the crystal boundaries, which leads to the degradation of the material’s electrical properties,” the scientists said, noting that moisture can reduce conductivity and optical transparency. “Therefore, in this study, we thoroughly investigated the changes in the optoelectronic properties and surface morphology of AZO-incorporated HJT solar cells under damp heat environmental conditions, comparing them with ITO references.”
The researchers fabricated bifacial HJT solar cells with either 70-nm ITO or AZO layers on both the front and rear sides. They also deposited standalone ITO and AZO films on glass substrates to investigate changes in the transparent conductive oxides independently from the cells.
The researchers integrated then the cells into 210 mm × 210 mm single-cell mini-modules. They investigated two module designs: a conventional glass/glass configuration and a lightweight front-sheet/back-sheet structure featuring an ethylene tetrafluoroethylene (ETFE) front sheet. The lightweight modules paired the ETFE front sheet with an aluminum-containing polyolefin back sheet, whereas the conventional modules featured 3.2-mm glass sheets on both sides.
Both module designs were fabricated with either ITO- or AZO-based SHJ cells, with two samples prepared for each configuration. All samples underwent accelerated damp-heat aging at 85 C and 85% relative humidity for 1,000 hours, in accordance with the IEC 61215 standard. Electrical performance and electroluminescence images were assessed every 200 hours, alongside external quantum efficiency and reflectance measurements.

The test results showed that, after 1,000 hours of damp-heat exposure, the bare AZO-based HJT cell showed a 16.38% relative decline in efficiency, driven primarily by a 9.84% relative reduction in fill factor, which was closely associated with rising series resistance (Rs). By comparison, the ITO-based cell proved considerably more stable, recording an efficiency loss of just 2.80% relative over the same testing period.
Electroluminescence (EL) imaging revealed pronounced defects in the AZO-based lightweight modules, attributed mainly to moisture penetration and corrosion of the AZO layer. By comparison, no equivalent defects appeared in AZO glass/glass modules or in the ITO-based devices, indicating better moisture protection from glass/glass encapsulation and greater intrinsic moisture resistance from ITO.
Chemical analysis also found increased hydroxyl-related species in AZO following damp-heat exposure, supporting the hypothesis of moisture-induced chemical modification. Scanning electron microscopy (SEM) imaging provided further evidence, revealing corrosion-related grooves on AZO surfaces after aging, while ITO maintained a uniform and dense structure.
To address this vulnerability, the researchers deposited a 110-nm magnesium fluoride (MgF₂) capping layer on the front surface of AZO-based cells.
With the MgF₂ layer, efficiency degradation was limited to about 7% after 1,000 hours, and electroluminescence defects were substantially reduced compared with uncapped AZO cells.
The researchers concluded that MgF₂ can retard moisture penetration and corrosion, although it does not provide a complete moisture barrier and AZO-based cells still remained less stable than the ITO reference.
“This comprehensive investigation provides substantial insight into the degradation mechanism of AZO-incorporated SHJ solar cells and modules under damp heat conditions, offering practical strategies to improve their durability and performance,” they concluded.
Their findings are available in “Unveiling the damp-heat-induced degradation mechanism of AZO-incorporated silicon heterojunction solar cells and modules,” published in Solar Energy Materials and Solar Cells.

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Our special edition for Intersolar South America 2026 is here!
Discover the latest insights into the Brazilian solar market – in Portuguese.
The new issue of pv magazine Global is out now!
Available in print and digital – get your copy today!
Entries open in seven categories: Modules, Inverters, BoS, BESS, Manufacturing, Sustainability, Projects.
April 01 – August 31, 2026
A two-day conference in Austin, Texas, bringing together leaders in US solar manufacturing, equipment specification, and factory execution.
Tuesday, August 25, 2026
10:00 am – 11:00 am CEST, Berlin, Paris, Madrid
Saudi Arabia is accelerating its clean energy transition—join the SunRise Arabia Clean Energy Conference 2026 in Riyadh to explore how solar PV and energy storage are powering its digital economy.
Thursday, August 27, 2026
5:30 am – 6:30 am CEST, Berlin, Paris, Madrid
pv magazine USA hosts its third multi-day virtual event on advancing U.S. solar and energy storage markets, covering financing, supply chains, and distributed energy’s role in grid resilience.
Thursday, October 7, 2026
11:00 am – 12:30 pm CEST, Berlin, Paris, Madrid

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Solar PV Market Size Key Dynamic | Forecast 2035  Business Research Insights
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“They likely won’t have the parts you need and it usually is not an easy / quick fix.”
Photo Credit: Getty Images
One Tesla Solar customer said their rooftop system stopped producing in July — what they described as the best month of the year for solar output — and that the earliest available service appointment was Aug. 14, leaving them relying on grid electricity during a peak period for solar savings.
The user said on Reddit that they had been relying on grid electricity for nearly a month and believed a panel might be the problem because the inverter showed a “2xB” code. 
They said, “System stopped producing in frickin JULY – the best month of the year to produce!”
Repair timing — especially during a high-production month — was the main theme of the discussion.
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Replies suggested the appointment could result in anything from a same-day repair to a much longer chain of diagnostics, parts orders, and return visits. 
One said, “I would expect either the system to get fixed, or at least diagnosed and hopefully not a long wait for parts to arrive.” 
Another said, “Moral of the story, don’t get your hopes up. They likely won’t have the parts you need and it usually is not an easy / quick fix.”
If a system goes offline during summer, homeowners may lose their best chance to offset heavy air-conditioning use with solar production.
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Even so, going solar remains one of the best ways to save money on home energy. Homeowners who are still shopping can explore EnergySage to get free solar installation estimates and compare quotes.
Users described waiting on parts, getting separate delivery notices, and dealing with repeat visits before the repair was fully finished.
Experiences differed widely. A user who had the needed part available said the inverter was “replaced within an hour or so.” Others reported receiving the wrong inverter, and another user said they were billed estimated payments under a power purchase agreement even while the system was showing zero production.
The OP also suggested that service may move more smoothly when the site is easy to work on, arguing that dirty roofs and heavy bird droppings can complicate repairs and lower a home’s priority.
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Taken together, the comments suggest a few practical steps: keep a record of the error code, confirm whether the technician is expected to arrive with the likely replacement part, and make sure the system is fully tested before the appointment ends. 
One user said, “Before they leave retest everything! eStop, go off grid, check the app etc.”
For shoppers, comparing providers and contract terms upfront may help reduce risk. Tools such as EnergySage’s solar map show the average cost of a home solar panel system on a state-by-state level, along with solar panel incentives available in each state. Together, those resources can help you get the best price for rooftop solar panels and access available incentives.
EnergySage‘s free services can also make the buying process less opaque when you’re comparing installers, equipment, and warranty terms. With EnergySage’s help, the average person can save up to $10,000 on solar purchases and installations. Adding battery storage to a solar setup is one of the best ways to protect your home during outages, save money on energy, and go off-grid. It can also help you use more of your own solar power when electricity prices spike or service is interrupted. Homeowners can explore EnergySage for information about home battery storage options, including competitive installation estimates.
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Solar farms have the potential to solve our energy problems. However, many subtly change the environment around them. Sometimes these changes are beneficial, such as a Chinese solar farm that is greenifying a desert. But changing the environment is always a risk, especially when endangered species are involved.
In 2025, a collection of conservation councils published a paper on the dangers of Overnight Solar, a projected solar farm in San Bernadino, California. According to the paper, the installation could pose a huge threat to the local desert tortoise, an animal that is considered endangered under the California Endangered Species Act. A study found that solar farms produce a “heat island” effect that increases the land’s surrounding temperatures. Ironically, the danger stems from the shade of these solar panels.
Although solar panels over canals can provide shade that reduces surface evaporation, in the desert, solar-panel shade temperatures are higher than normal shade temperatures. Here is where the tortoises come in. According to the study, these higher temperatures can make it harder for tortoises to retain water. This might not be a problem for fully grown desert tortoises, but it poses a severe dehydration risk to hatchlings and juveniles due to their small size and larger surface-to-volume ratio. Although the coalition of conservation councils isn’t opposed to the Overnight Solar Energy project per se, it would prefer the installation (or the tortoises) be relocated to minimize any potential threats to the population.
The desert tortoise, while endangered, can be found across the southwestern U.S. As its name suggests, anywhere there’s a desert in the U.S., you might find a desert tortoise. Unfortunately, Overnight Solar isn’t the only project trying to install solar panels in a desert, threatening the desert tortoises.
Earlier this year, the California Energy Commission approved a $700 million project to build a large solar farm next to (but not on) the Mojave National Preserve. This installation, dubbed Soda Mountain Solar, will stretch almost 3,000 acres, but it will sit right in the middle of migration paths of animals such as the desert tortoise and bighorn sheep. The planned location is problematic for both populations as desert tortoises have lost much of their natural habitat. Meanwhile, the bighorn sheep rely on this “migration corridor” to travel between mountains — a process that keeps their population healthy.
Although the California Energy Commission claims that Soda Mountain Solar’s final plan integrates ideas that reduce any potential threats to the habits of local animals to “less than significant,” many scientists who raised these concerns have their doubts. According to conservationists, the commission didn’t implement any of the measures they suggested. More importantly, the approval went over the heads of the Desert Renewable Energy Conservation Plan, which is supposed to have the final say in where to — and where not to — install solar farms in the desert. However, Soda Mountain Solar farm isn’t built just yet, because California’s Bureau Land of Management needs to give its approval before construction begins.

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Tesla stops selling solar roofs a decade after launch  Yahoo Finance
source

Organic Photovoltaic Market Size & Share Report 2026-2033  Grand View Research
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Tesla stops selling solar roofs a decade after launch  Reuters
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Musk’s “Solar Roof” Narrative Comes to an End as Tesla Fully Shifts to Traditional Photovoltaics and Energy Storage  NAI500
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Samudera advances sustainable operations with solar project  Container News
source

⚡ Quick Read
The Indian solar sector is currently undergoing a strategic transformation. Having established itself as the third-largest solar market globally, the industry is moving beyond the initial phase of rapid capacity expansion. With 150 GW of installed capacity as of March 2026, the focus is shifting toward building a sustainable value proposition centered on quality, reliability, and long-term operational excellence. This transition is essential to meet India’s ambitious target of 500 GW of non-fossil fuel power by 2030.
India’s manufacturing prowess has seen exponential growth. Domestic module manufacturing capacity has surged from 3 GW a decade ago to over 200 GW today. Furthermore, the Approved List of Models and Manufacturers (ALMM) now covers approximately 217 GW of module capacity. Projections indicate that by December 2027, total solar cell capacity will reach 100 GW, while module capacity is expected to exceed 165 GW. This growth is bolstered by the Production Linked Incentive (PLI) scheme, basic customs duties, and strategic localization policies. Notably, the government has mandated the compulsory domestic manufacturing of solar cells starting June 2026 to further strengthen the supply chain.
For EPC contractors and developers, the era of prioritizing the lowest upfront cost is ending. Poor lifecycle performance, often resulting from design flaws, improper cabling, and mounting issues, is increasingly seen as a risk to project bankability. Financial institutions are now evaluating projects based on long-term energy generation capacity and operational reliability rather than just initial capital expenditure. As the PM Surya Ghar scheme drives rooftop solar adoption, the demand for certified installers and high-standard EPC services is expected to rise significantly, rewarding firms that prioritize technical precision over price-cutting.
The industry is moving toward a more mature phase where traceability and quality assurance are paramount. The expansion of ALMM to include ingots and wafers represents a conscious effort to secure the upstream supply chain. As the India renewable energy sector continues to scale, the integration of high-quality domestic components with superior engineering practices will be the defining factor for developers aiming to secure long-term returns in an increasingly competitive market.
Aditya Pathre is the Founder of MVApulse and covers India’s renewable energy sector, including solar, wind, battery energy storage systems (BESS), green hydrogen, transmission infrastructure, renewable energy policy and competitive bidding. His reporting focuses on project developments, market trends, government policies and energy transition across India.
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The current grid infrastructure is causing marked energy loss during high-demand summer periods. To combat this, developers are integrating batteries to maintain a stable power supply throughout the day.
In India, renewables additions have been led by photovoltaic, causing a day-time supply glut, particularly during summers when radiation is stronger.

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Tesla (TSLA)’s Solar Roof Shutdown Raises Questions About its Energy Ambitions  Yahoo Finance
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Enviromena Begins Construction of Longpasture Solar Farm, Its Second-Largest UK Project, Targeting 2027 Energisation  SolarQuarter
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Notice: By accessing this site you agree that you will not copy or reproduce any part of its contents (including, but not limited to, single prices, graphs or news content) in any form or for any purpose whatsoever without the prior written consent of the publisher.

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Data Source Statement: Except for publicly available information, all other data are processed by SMM based on publicly available information, market communication, and relying on SMM's internal database model. They are for reference only and do not constitute decision-making recommendations.
Notice: By accessing this site you agree that you will not copy or reproduce any part of its contents (including, but not limited to, single prices, graphs or news content) in any form or for any purpose whatsoever without the prior written consent of the publisher.

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WTF?! Solar panels might be a clean-energy-producing technology, but there’s little we can do when the weather interferes – or is there? A startup backed by Y Combinator has plans to manufacture drones that fly inside clouds to disperse them so solar farm panels aren’t blocked from seeing sunlight.
Meteoric Technologies Inc., the creation of two engineers from the University of Cambridge, announced its plan to use drones as a way of increasing the efficiency of solar farms.
The proposal involves sending fleets of dozens or even hundreds of autonomous drones into low- and mid-altitude clouds (about 0.6 to 3.1 miles high) above solar farms and altering the water droplets that form them – without the use of chemicals.
“This reduces their reflectivity and brings back measurable amounts of sunlight to the panels below,” said Meteoric CEO Mete Karslioglu.
Karslioglu added that low- and mid-level overcast clouds cut incoming sunlight by 73% to 82% while overhead, a loss he says the drones can partially reverse.

“Our cloud-loss model shows that this process can increase annual generation from existing assets by 10-30% across major US grid regions, worth around $5,000-28,000/MW, without building any new infrastructure,” the CEO continued. “Our ultimate goal is to reduce the intensity of severe storms and hurricanes.”
Exactly how Meteoric plans to disperse the clouds is unclear, though the company claims its working prototype dissipated an artificial cloud by 13% in cloud-chamber tests. No details have been published on the chamber size, measurement method, repeated trials, or peer review. The 10% to 30% figure also comes from a cloud-loss model, not measurements at an operating solar farm.
Current cloud-dispersal methods mainly deal with fog around airports rather than large cloud layers above solar farms. Supercooled fog can be treated with dry ice dropped from aircraft or liquid propane sprayed from the ground. Both produce ice crystals that grow at the expense of surrounding droplets before falling out of the air.

Warm fog is more difficult to remove. Methods include releasing hygroscopic salts that absorb moisture, heating the air until the droplets evaporate, and using helicopter rotor wash to mix the fog with warmer or drier air.
The American Meteorological Society says these techniques work under specific weather conditions, while the World Meteorological Organization notes heating and mechanical mixing are often too expensive and impractical.
Meteoric says conventional aircraft-based operations cost $2,000 per hour or more, compared with $30 to $60 per hour for its electric drones.
The startup’s ambitions to weaken severe storms and hurricanes are raising even more eyebrows. The WMO says there is no generally accepted evidence that tropical cyclones can be modified. It also warns that technologies promising large-scale or dramatic effects lack a sound scientific basis.
The next major step for Meteoric is to prove its system actually works on a real cloud.
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Beyond High Efficiency: How N-TOPCon Technology and Backward Integration Are Shaping Saatvik’s Manufacturing Vision  SolarQuarter
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Awarded through Germany’s EEG tenders, Klevenow supported around 40 jobs during construction and was completed in under six months. The plant comprises approximately 42,300 solar panels. Two more solar plants and a BESS project are set to enter construction before the year is out.
With expected annual production of 28,700 MWh, Klevenow will help avoid around 9,500 tonnes of CO₂ emissions per year and support commercial and industrial energy demand in the nearby Pomeranian Triangle.
“Bringing Klevenow into operation is an important milestone for Zelestra in Germany” said Mathias Kuenicke, CEO Germany at Zelestra. “It demonstrates our ability to move quickly from development into construction and operations, while building a strong platform for further growth. With two additional solar projects and our first German BESS project expected to start construction in the coming months, we are on track to grow our capacity in the country to more than 200 MW. I would like to thank the entire team for delivering this project on schedule and helping establish Zelestra’s operational presence in Germany.”
The project forms part of Zelestra’s accelerated growth plan in Germany, following the acquisition of East Energy in October 2024. The company has moved quickly from project development into construction and operations, with a German pipeline now exceeding 2 GW of solar, hybrid, wind and BESS projects.
Zelestra has 70 employees in Germany, with offices in Berlin, Hamburg, Düsseldorf and Rostock, and a senior leadership team with decades of experience delivering clean energy projects in the country.
For additional information:
Zelestra

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One of the biggest issues centered on a 2021 payment for solar panels meant for three county buildings.
Photo Credit: iStock
A string of bookkeeping issues, including a stalled clean energy project, is drawing scrutiny in Arkansas after auditors found that Jefferson County paid $305,000 for solar panels that still had not been installed by the date of the audit report.
The audit also flagged nearly $900,000 in misclassified county judge expenditures, raising concerns about how public money is being handled and whether residents are being denied the savings and public benefits that infrastructure investments are supposed to deliver.
On Aug. 13, Jefferson County officials went before the Arkansas Legislative Joint Auditing Committee to respond to issues raised in the county’s 2024 audit, The Pine Bluff Commercial reported.
One of the biggest issues centered on a 2021 payment for solar panels meant for three county buildings; years later, the panels were still not installed.
Chief of Staff Lloyd Franklin II told lawmakers that auditors were aware of the issue but that it remained unresolved.
“This is just a repeat finding that we still have not resolved the issues,” Franklin said, adding that he believed the case was being handled by a special prosecutor and the Arkansas Attorney General’s Office, per the Commercial.
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Separately, the audit showed almost $900,000 in the county’s financial statements had been incorrectly recorded as county judge expenditures. “The fact of these errors constitutes a control deficiency in the process of preparing financial statements,” it stated.
Lawmakers questioned how a project intended to benefit public buildings could still be unfinished after payment was made Feb. 10, 2021. 
Solar installations can reduce electricity costs, cut pollution, and free up funds for other needs.
When a project stalls after payment has already gone out, residents can be left without the promised energy or financial benefits.
Auditors said the clerk’s office did not adequately maintain records such as lease-purchase agreements, service contracts, and bid documents, the Commercial noted.
Their report described additional oversight lapses, including a contract for Mack Trucks that was awarded and paid before court approval was received and a failure to properly report the disposition of a county-owned building to the Quorum Court.
Auditors also questioned vacation-leave payouts to two sheriff’s employees who did not meet the county’s continuous-employment requirement.
Weak controls can lead to delayed services, wasted tax dollars, and missed opportunities to invest in projects that could make public buildings cheaper and cleaner to operate.
After questioning Franklin, County Clerk Shawndra Taggart, and County Judge Ivan Whitfield, the audit committee voted without objection to file the Jefferson County report, the newspaper said.
Franklin said the solar panel matter remained open and under investigation.
Taggart said the issue involving sheriff’s office vacation payouts had already been addressed.
“It has been resolved,” she told the committee, per the Commercial. “I’ve gotten rid of that employee and the judge hired her.”
Rep. Cameron Cooper said, “So that’s been five and a half years ago and the panels are not installed. Did that company go out of business? What exactly is going on with [the project]?”
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Tax equity fund sponsor Foss & Company has closed an approximately $150 million tax equity investment supporting a distributed energy portfolio in Illinois owned by a joint venture between Summit Ridge Energy and Apollo Global Management. As a tax equity syndicator, Foss & Company pools capital from corporate investors, such as banks and insurance firms, and structures it directly into renewable energy projects that generate tax credits.
The transaction marks one of the solar industry’s first announced tax equity deals executed under the tech-neutral Section 48E Clean Electricity Investment Tax Credit (ITC) framework. The deal required the participating firms to establish a new diligence process to navigate Foreign Entity of Concern (FEOC) compliance requirements introduced under recent federal legislative updates.
Moving under the Section 48E regulatory regime introduces stricter supply chain tracing to satisfy FEOC provisions, which limit clean energy tax credit eligibility for equipment tied to designated foreign entities. Foss & Company built a custom FEOC diligence framework for the transaction, establishing a precedent for how capital providers and developers can structure 48E investments moving forward.
“Beyond the size of this transaction, it demonstrates our ability to move quickly and thoughtfully on a 48E deal in the community solar market, building a FEOC diligence framework that will serve as a model for future transactions,” said Bryen Alperin, Partner and Managing Director at Foss & Company.
The Illinois project portfolio maximizes its tax credit value by combining several federal bonus adders alongside strong state-level contract backing. The projects qualify for the Domestic Content bonus credit by incorporating U.S.-manufactured equipment, the Energy Community adder for siting in targeted legacy energy regions, and the Low-Income adder intended to deliver bill savings to underserved households.
Additionally, more than half of the assets in the portfolio will participate in Illinois’ Adjustable Block Program. This state initiative secures 15- to 20-year renewable energy credit contract streams anchored by commercial and low-income subscribers, providing predictable long-term revenue for project equity.
The investment marks the eighth tax equity transaction completed between Foss & Company and commercial solar developer Summit Ridge Energy.
“Successfully navigating the FEOC requirements under the new Section 48E framework on our eighth deal together speaks to the depth of that relationship,” noted Adam Kuehne, Chief Investment Officer at Summit Ridge Energy. “This capital allows us to keep expanding access to locally generated power for commercial subscribers and low-income households across Illinois.”
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Entries open in seven categories: Modules, Inverters, BoS, BESS, Manufacturing, Sustainability, Projects.
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Crosstalk between neighboring systems can happen, especially when homes share a utility transformer.
Photo Credit: iStock
A California homeowner thought they had finally solved an expensive energy issue — only to find their battery charging from the grid while their panels were still producing power.
The result, they said, was a one-day swing that turned a money-saving setup into an $8.50 headache.
According to Reddit, the latest issue began once the battery dropped to 35%.
Despite ongoing solar production, the system began importing power, drawing 21 kWh from the grid at roughly $0.40 per kilowatt-hour.
The homeowner said this came after they had already corrected a different problem that had been exporting battery power during peak-rate periods even though PG&E was paying only $0.03 per kilowatt-hour.
After that earlier change, sunny-day grid use had fallen to about 0.4 kWh.
At those prices, 21 kWh bought from the grid works out to roughly $8.40 to $8.50, while exporting 21 kWh at $0.03 per kilowatt-hour would bring in only about 63 cents.
If you’re considering adding storage, exploring EnergySage can help you compare home battery storage options and competitive installation estimates. Adding battery storage is one of the best ways to protect your home during outages, save money on energy, and even reduce your reliance on the grid. EnergySage has teamed up with the electrification brand Qmerit to guarantee you get the best price on home battery storage solutions.
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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?
The homeowner said Enphase support attributed the behavior to his microinverters communicating with a controller a few houses away.
One commenter replied, “Yes it’s possible, they use power line comms, and that is rated to around 300′.”
This kind of issue can quietly chip away at the financial benefits of rooftop solar and battery storage. A setup meant to lower utility bills can end up doing the opposite if export settings, battery profiles, or installer commissioning are wrong.
Commenters said crosstalk between neighboring systems can happen, especially when homes share a utility transformer, and noted that installers usually work with support to filter each site’s equipment so the systems stay separate.
Multiple users said the problem most likely pointed to an installation or provisioning mistake rather than a flaw in the panels or battery hardware.
The homeowner later said support’s explanation matched what commenters described about power-line communication. They added that support told them the microinverters may have continued supplying power even after communication failed, which could have caused the controller to count that output as grid usage.
If a whole-home system is not the right fit, Pila offers plug-and-play batteries priced at a fraction of the cost of a whole-home backup system.
As for the OP, they wanted more reassurance the fix would last: “In my case, the support person, who btw handled my frustration really well, claimed to have made ‘adjustments’ to the configuration that should avoid this in the future. I didn’t get any more detail than that, which makes me wary that it is a robust solution.”
“Something seems odd about this situation,” a commenter agreed.
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Quinbrook-owned project company Solquartz has signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with Townsville City Council to advance Australia’s first integrated quartz-to-silicon manufacturing complex at the Lansdown Eco-Industrial Precinct in north Queensland.
Australian-owned Quinbrook, through Solquartz, plans to build a state-of-the-art polysilicon manufacturing facility at Lansdown, powered by large-scale solar and battery energy storage projects it is developing nearby. The manufacturing facility is planned for the Lansdown industrial hub located about 40 kilometres south of Townsville.
The purpose-built Northern Quartz Campus will source silica quartz from the north Queensland region and process it to produce higher-value silicon products for domestic and international markets, with the potential to support downstream manufacturing including polysilicon wafers for use in solar panels, semiconductors and other advanced technologies.
Stage 1 of the project includes a 50,000tpa metallurgical silicon production facility, a biochar plant and about 550 MW of solar generation. It will also include the Supernode North battery energy storage system – a 780 MW system to be developed in stages. 
The council said the MOU establishes a pathway to finalise a project development and infrastructure agreement by the end of this year. The agreement would set out the council’s infrastructure delivery obligations and Solquartz’s contribution to infrastructure costs for the project’s first stage. The first stage of the Northern Quartz Campus is expected to cost about $4.5 billion (USD 3.21 billion) with the entire project expected to cost an estimated of $8 billion.
Townsville Mayor Nick Dametto said the new MOU is an important step in progressing the broader Lansdown development.
“After years of planning and groundwork, Lansdown is moving from concept to construction, with Solquartz now a step closer to getting shovels in the ground,” he said.
The Northern Quartz Campus was declared a ‘Prescribed Project’ by the Queensland government in 2024 and was awarded Major Project Status by the Australian government in February 2026.
The project is expected to commence commercial operations by 2030.
In addition to progressing the polysilicon manufacturing facility at Lansdown, Quinbrook is also progressing its co-located Lansdown West and Noth solar farms, and the Supernode North battery project at the site.
The solar farms are expected to deliver a combined 550 MW of PV generation while the Supernode North battery project is set to deliver 780 MW / 2,200 MWh of energy storage capacity.
Quinbrook Senior Vice President Vignesh Bandi said the Lansdown Eco-Industrial Precinct presents a unique opportunity to combine renewable energy generation and storage infrastructure with large scale manufacturing and critical mineral supply chains.
“Our ambition for Lansdown extends beyond any single project,” he said. “The Northern Quartz Campus, Supernode North and our renewable energy projects are complementary investments that can help establish Townsville and North Queensland as a hub for energy-intensive advanced manufacturing.”
“We see a compelling opportunity to combine Queensland’s renewable energy and natural resources to build more of the value chain here at home and manufacture higher-value products for domestic and global markets.”
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“Just get a second opinion, [don’t] trust what Tesla salesmen say.”
Photo Credit: Getty Images
A homeowner comparing payment options for a Tesla solar-and-battery setup came across a figure that could give just about any buyer pause: leasing appeared far cheaper than paying cash.
The debate centered on a wide gap between the two payment paths. In a Reddit thread in r/TeslaSolar, the poster said a Tesla quote for a 4.2-kilowatt solar array, one Powerwall 3, and two expansion packs came to $33,336 in cash. 
For context, the system was meant to back up a critical load panel serving one of the home’s three HVAC units, plus a water heater, some lights, and some outlets. 
The lease, meanwhile, required $600 up front, $164 per month with annual increases, and a five-year buyout price of $14,625, which the poster estimated would total about $25,673.
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Commenters suggested the difference may be tied to who owns the system during the early years.
“These days the tax credit has expired if you but if you lease for 5 years the commercial company that initially ‘owns’ it still gets the 30% tax credit,” a commenter explained. “So that’s them passing that tax credit on to you.”
That lower price only seemed to hold up if the homeowner planned to use the buyout option after the first five years, rather than letting the lease continue, per commenters.
Going solar is one of the best ways to save money on home energy costs, but the discussion also emphasized the need to carefully compare payment structures. Homeowners can explore EnergySage to get free solar installation estimates and compare quotes before choosing between a cash deal and a lease.
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The financing question was only one part of the discussion. Commenters also raised doubts about whether the proposed setup was properly matched to the home’s backup needs, especially given that both an HVAC unit and a water heater were included among the planned loads.
The caution in the thread was both practical and financial. One commenter advised the original poster to “just get a second opinion, dont trust what Tesla salesmen say.”
Battery backup is often marketed as both an emergency resilience tool and a way to cut utility bills. If the system cannot support the expected loads during a blackout or extreme weather event, the lower price on paper may not match the level of backup a homeowner expects.
Getting multiple quotes and asking installers for a detailed load analysis can show what the system can run and for how long. 
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KELTRON Invites Bids For Solar Power And Street Light Projects Across North And East India  SolarQuarter
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Texas solar farms are turning to sheep as a surprising solution to a growing maintenance problem. Across roughly 68,000 acres, sheep now graze beneath rows of solar panels, keeping grass under control without damaging expensive equipment. Goats can climb and chew wires. Cattle are often too tall for the rows. Sheep fit the space, eat the vegetation, and give Texas ranchers a new source of income from the solar boom.

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The Parliament of Moldova has adopted legislative changes to make it quicker for individuals and companies to install solar panels, storage systems and heat pumps.
The updated legislation is designed to eliminate administrative barriers hindering the development of renewable energy projects and modernization of energy infrastructure while reducing time and costs, according to an update published by the country’s Ministry of Energy.
Under the changes, urban planning certificates and building permits are no longer required for the solar panels, heat pumps and any related infrastructure installed on the roof and facades of buildings, residential blocks and individual houses.
Energy storage systems that are located in photovoltaic parks, or within other existing or under construction energy infrastructures, can also be installed without an urban planning certificate or building permit.
The new law also reduces the project documentation required for these installations and simplifies urban planning procedures for projects located outside built-up areas, while introducing timelines for when a detailed urban plan is required.
The legislation also maintains measures to protect cultural heritage, with approvals from authorities still required in historical and protected areas and the installation of solar panels on individual historical monuments still prohibited.
The changes were promoted by Moldova’s Ministry of Energy and the Ministry of Infrastructure and Regional Development.
The two departments say the legislative amendments are aiming to create a modern regulatory framework that facilitates the development of energy infrastructure and contributes to strengthening Moldova’s energy security without compromising standards regarding construction safety, environmental protection and cultural heritage preservation.
Moldova had a record year for solar deployment in 2025, installing 315 MW and taking total capacity to 710 MW. By the end of last year, the country had deployed 980 MW of renewables.
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The new issue of pv magazine Global is out now!
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By: Luis Reyes
Published: Aug 24, at 3:30pm ET
Solar panels are at their worst on exactly the day you want them at their best. Heat makes a panel’s voltage sag, so a blistering August afternoon can turn out less power than a cool, bright morning in April. Most of the industry treats that heat as a loss to be shed and forgotten.
A group at Stanford bolted a copper tube cold plate to the back of a panel and pointed the heat somewhere useful instead. The panel put out 59.3% more power, because the plate was cooling it.
The heat the plate carried away went into a small electrochemical reactor. That reactor was busy pulling ammonium sulfate fertilizer out of real human urine.
The result landed in Nature Water on August 19, 2025, under a title nobody was ever going to read at a bus stop: “Prototyping and modelling a photovoltaic–thermal electrochemical stripping system for distributed urine nitrogen recovery.”
A year on, the paper is not the interesting part. The interesting part is that the process behind it has walked out of the lab, picked up a Department of Energy program slot, and started shopping itself to slaughterhouses.
Start with the panel, because the panel is the machine here. Photovoltaic cells lose efficiency as they warm up, and according to Stanford, roughly 80% of the sunlight hitting a panel never becomes electricity at all. It becomes heat, and the heat then makes the panel worse at its only job.
The usual fix is to get rid of it. If you have panels on your roof, they are shedding that heat into the air right now and nothing at all is catching it.
Stanford’s rig catches it. A copper tube plate sits against the back of the module, coolant runs through it, and the panel runs cooler and stiffer as a result.
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So far this is ordinary photovoltaic-thermal engineering. It has been done in various forms for decades, usually to preheat somebody’s shower water.
The twist is where the warm coolant goes. It goes into a reactor that needs to be warm, and that reactor is separating nitrogen out of urine.
Against earlier versions of the same setup, with no heat transfer and no current control, the paired system produced 59.3% more power and recovered ammonia 22.4% more efficiently. Both numbers carry error bars, 3.6 points on the power figure and 7.4 on the recovery figure. That second band is wide, and worth keeping in view.
The chemistry is called electrochemical stripping, and it is older than the solar wrapper around it. Urine goes into a cell divided into chambers by membranes. Electricity drags the ammonium ions across, the chemistry flips them to ammonia gas, and the gas gets trapped on the far side in acid as ammonium sulfate.
Ammonium sulfate, for the record, is a boring, bagged, entirely normal fertilizer. Nothing exotic comes out the end of this.
The bottleneck is the gas step. Ammonia has to actually leave the liquid, and that is the part setting the pace for everything else.
Heat speeds it up. That is the whole reason the cold plate points where it points, and it is why this counts as a genuinely two-sided machine rather than a solar panel with a science project taped to the back of it.
The team also put charge controllers in the way, to stop the panel dumping excess current into the cell. That sounds like housekeeping and is not. Shoving more amps at an electrochemical cell than it can use burns energy without moving any more nitrogen.
The paper puts the saving at 2.24 kilojoules per gram of nitrogen for every excess milliamp per square centimeter avoided. That is a slope rather than a headline number, but it points the right way.
Lead author Orisa Coombs, a mechanical engineering PhD student at Stanford, framed the appeal in the university’s announcement: “You don’t need a giant chemical plant or even a wall socket.”
Some of the runs used synthetic urine. Several used the real thing, which matters, because real urine is a chemically messy input full of things that foul membranes.
The paper models net fertilizer revenues of up to $2.18 per kilogram of nitrogen in US markets, and up to $4.13 in African markets. Stanford’s writeup ties the higher figure to places like Uganda, where fertilizer is expensive and the grid is thin.
Those are modeled ceilings under the paper’s own assumptions, not sums anybody has been paid. Read them as the top of a range in a spreadsheet.
Here is what that range is sitting next to. DTN’s retail survey for the second full week of August 2026 put urea at $678 a ton and anhydrous ammonia at $964 a ton. Per pound of actual nitrogen delivered, that is $0.74 and $0.59.
Convert to the paper’s units and an American farmer is currently paying roughly $1.63 per kilogram of nitrogen bought as urea, and about $1.30 bought as anhydrous. The modeled ceiling clears both.
It clears them in a year when prices have been on a rollercoaster, too. Anhydrous hit $1,118 a ton in May before falling back. Urea ran from $611 in late February to $866 in April, then drifted down to where it sits now.
Those swings happen because industrial nitrogen is a natural gas product wearing a different name. The International Energy Agency’s ammonia roadmap puts ammonia production at around 2% of global final energy consumption and 1.3% of energy-system carbon dioxide, roughly 450 million tonnes of direct emissions a year.
At about 2.4 tonnes of CO2 per tonne of product, the IEA rates ammonia as nearly twice as emissions-intensive as crude steel, and four times as intensive as cement.
Against that, the nitrogen already dissolved in human urine worldwide comes to about 14% of annual fertilizer demand. Nobody is claiming a panel and a copper plate replaces the Haber-Bosch process. The claim is narrower and more interesting, which is that a decent slice of the nitrogen the world buys is being flushed away by the people who need it.
This is the part an anniversary write-up would miss. Electrochemical stripping was invented by Will Tarpeh during his PhD at UC Berkeley, and he spent years developing it in his own lab after that.
Tarpeh, now an associate professor of chemical engineering at Stanford, is the senior author on the Nature Water paper. In October 2025 he was named a MacArthur Fellow, which comes with $800,000 paid out over five years.
The lab work has since been spun into a company called Recovered Potential, run out of Menlo Park by two people who came straight from that lab. Kindle Williams, a former Tarpeh postdoc with a chemical engineering PhD from MIT, is CEO. Jinyu Guo, who did her Stanford PhD in the same lab, is CTO. Tarpeh is the founding scientific advisor rather than an operator.
The company says its system has hit better than 95% ammonia removal in real municipal and industrial wastewater, and has run continuously for more than 600 hours on real urine. It claims a working range from 50 to over 7,000 parts per million of nitrogen, and says it performs best at the high end.
Two outside markers back up the timeline. In October 2025 the Department of Energy’s advanced research arm announced ten winners under RECOVER, a nearly $25 million program aimed at pulling ammonia and critical minerals out of American wastewater.
Recovered Potential says it is one of them, working with Tarpeh’s Stanford lab and the Guest lab at the University of Illinois to recover ammonium, phosphorus and magnesium from anaerobic digestate. This summer, Williams and Guo were both named to Activate’s 2026 fellowship cohort, a 50-person class for hard-tech founders.
Read the company’s target list and the off-grid framing quietly drops away. It wants anaerobic digestate, meat and poultry processing waste, and fertilizer plant waste.
Those are high-strength streams, meaning the nitrogen arrives already concentrated. That is exactly the condition the chemistry likes, and exactly what a flushed toilet is not.
The business logic follows from there. Ammonia is a compliance problem for whoever has to discharge it and a product for whoever wants to grow corn with it, so the recovered fertilizer offsets part of the treatment bill rather than being the point of the exercise. The customer is buying a smaller nitrogen problem and getting a bag of fertilizer thrown in.
Which makes the solar version the long game rather than the near one. Bolting a cold plate to a panel is what you do when there is no grid and no plant, and Coombs is building a follow-up prototype with triple the reactor capacity to push in that direction.
The near version plugs into a pipe at a rendering plant and never sees the sun.
Waste heat off a panel is not a new idea, and the industry has spent years finding places to put it. We have covered Target’s roof panels that make zero watts and dump heat into space instead, and the seven miles of coolant pipe keeping a Maui solar telescope mirror from cooking itself.
Heat rejection is a solved engineering problem. Heat as a feedstock is not.
A copper plate bonded to the back of a module is also one more thing to fail on a component otherwise famous for lasting. Swiss data on panels still feeding the grid decades on, while their inverters were swapped five times, is a decent reminder that panels tend to outlive whatever gets attached to them.
The plate is the cheap part anyway. Membranes, sulfuric acid, and somebody willing to collect the urine in the first place are where distributed nitrogen has always gotten stuck, and none of that got solved in the last twelve months.
What changed is that the people who ran the experiment now have a company, a DOE program number, and a prospect list that starts with a slaughterhouse instead of a toilet.
Did we nail it or blow it?
Luis Reyes · Jul 26, 2026
Olivia Richman · Jul 29, 2026
Olivia Richman · Aug 23, 2026
Olivia Richman · Aug 20, 2026
Luis Reyes · Aug 23, 2026
Luis Reyes · Jul 31, 2026
Luis Reyes · Aug 24, 2026
Luis Reyes · Aug 24, 2026
Luis Reyes · Aug 24, 2026
Luis Reyes · Aug 24, 2026
Luis Reyes · Aug 24, 2026
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The British company Welink Energy Portugal 2 UK, which owns Solara4, the largest solar power plant in the country, has entered insolvency proceedings, according to a report published this month by consultancy BDO, cited by the weekly newspaper “Expresso” (source in Portuguese). The case concerns a large-scale project in the Algarve region with 219 MW of installed solar capacity, according to the Welink Group website (source in Portuguese).
Located in Alcoutim, Solara4 has been in operation for five years, having been inaugurated in 2021, but has been facing a series of setbacks. According to the same report, since quoted by several national media outlets (source in Portuguese), this solar plant “has been through a combination of operational and market challenges that have adversely affected its performance and cash flow generation”.
The document further states: “Electricity production has consistently fallen short of initial forecasts. At the same time, the Iberian energy market has seen significant growth in solar generation capacity. This increase in supply has driven down wholesale prices, which at times drop to zero or into negative territory.” Due to the confluence of these factors, “revenues have been lower than expected”.
However, as reported by “Expresso”, disputes between the British company and the contractor, China Triumph International Engineering (source in Portuguese), a subsidiary of a Chinese state-owned industrial conglomerate, as well as fires and other technical problems, have also hampered Solara4’s operations.
Despite this turbulent trajectory, the “Jornal Económico” (source in Portuguese) reported in 2024 that Welink had decided to “hybridise” the solar plant, through a €400 million investment to boost solar capacity while also adopting wind power and battery storage solutions.
The initial idea was to enable uninterrupted electricity production by installing a further 50 MW of solar capacity, 264 MW of wind power through 40 turbines and a 100 MW battery energy storage system (BESS), for a “total of more than 600 MW of installed capacity upon completion”, according to the Welink Group’s own website.
However, the ambitious project received an unfavourable opinion from the assessment committee led by the Portuguese Environment Agency (source in Portuguese) (APA), which considered that it would not be “compatible with safeguarding the environmental values present in the affected area”. The plan was later revised, cutting the number of planned wind turbines to just over half, and was put out to public consultation. However, the APA has not taken any definitive decision on the matter.
All this came after Solara4 had already been close to being sold. And indeed, within the insolvency process now under way, the priority, once again, is to find new investors willing to buy the asset, the weekly “Expresso” further reports.


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Robert Way
Tesla (TSLA) has ended sales of its solar roof tiles, bringing an apparent close to a product unveiled by Elon Musk almost a decade ago as the company sought to make rooftop solar more visually appealing.
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NU E Power Corp. Negotiates Acquisition of Hays Solar-Storage Project in Alberta  energynews.pro
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Sharp is rolling out a series of refreshes across its “Eee Connect” home energy solution portfolio. The company will launch the new “JH-WB2621” model of its cloud-connected storage battery system “Eee Storage” on September 8, followed by the “Full Fit” series of roof-fit solar modules under its “Eee Solar” residential photovoltaic system on October 9. The storage battery achieves both higher capacity and a smaller, lighter form factor, with AI-powered controls raising the self-consumption rate of solar generation to approximately 74%. The solar panels are engineered with shape innovations that allow greater installed capacity even on constrained roof spaces.
The JH-WB2621 storage battery offers 11.5 kWh of capacity at a price of ¥3,751,000. A separate power conditioner and other components are required. While capacity has expanded by roughly 21% compared with the previous model, a redesign of the main unit has reduced volume per kWh of capacity by approximately 55% and installation footprint by approximately 35%. The system is designed for installation in limited spaces, including compact urban homes.
Weight per kWh of capacity has also been reduced by roughly 35%, which Sharp says achieves an industry-leading level of lightness. The company also aims to improve ease of installation. The operating temperature range has been expanded to minus 15°C to 45°C, accommodating cold climates and high-temperature environments. Discharge power during outages has been raised from the previous model’s 3.0 kVA to 4.2 kVA, allowing more appliances to run simultaneously during emergencies. The main unit measures 458 mm wide × 360 mm deep × 777 mm high and weighs 95 kg, and can be installed either indoors or outdoors.
The storage battery is equipped with the AI control function “COCORO ENERGY.” The system learns household lifestyle patterns and solar generation conditions to control equipment, raising the self-consumption rate of solar power to approximately 74%. Sharp says this contributes to reducing household electricity bills.
Meanwhile, the Full Fit solar module series comprises five models with nominal maximum output ranging from 132 W to 230 W, priced from ¥91,300 to ¥152,900. The short-side length of the modules has been reduced by approximately 7% compared with previous models, improving installability on gable and single-slope roofs. On a south-facing gable roof with a frontage of 3.4 ken, depth of 4.2 ken, and a 5-sun roof pitch, one additional row can be installed on the ridge side compared with previous models, boosting installed capacity by approximately 27%.
For hip roofs, the corner module’s hypotenuse angle has been changed from the previous 52 degrees to 50 degrees. By moving closer to the typical hip roof hypotenuse angle of 48 degrees, the fit on sloped roof sections is improved. On a hip roof with a frontage of 5 ken, depth of 4.5 ken, and a 4.5-sun pitch, one more row can be installed than with previous models, increasing installed capacity by approximately 32%.
The minimum number of modules required to start the power conditioner has also been reduced from three to two, enabling more effective use of narrow roof spaces. An anti-glare version is also available, with textured glass that diffuses light to reduce directional reflection. With gloss levels below those of standard roofing materials, it can be installed on north-facing roof sections where consideration for reflected light is required.
The Full Fit series lineup is as follows:
Note: All prices are tax-inclusive suggested retail prices.
The trend of self-consuming generated electricity by combining residential solar power with storage batteries is spreading. In addition to reducing electricity purchases from utilities, demand for storage batteries is rising as a backup measure during power outages. With this product refresh, Sharp aims to make adoption easier for homes with roof shape or installation space constraints, expanding options for energy self-sufficiency.
The increased storage battery capacity and enhanced AI controls respond to the shift toward prioritizing self-consumption over selling power back to the grid, as more households reach the end of their feed-in tariff (FIT) periods. The smaller solar panel footprint and improved installed capacity address demand for maximizing generation from limited roof area. By marketing both products under the same “Eee Connect” brand, Sharp is expected to emphasize system-level integration as well.
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