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Recently, Solartech Universal made headlines as part of solar machine maker Meyer Burger's heterojunction (HJT) solar cell and SmartWire (SWT) hardware announcements. Meyer Burger announced their new hardware manufacturing lines using a Solartech Universal solar panel. The 'champion module' hit 334.9W – a 20.5% solar panel efficiency. The cells used in the panel hit as high as 24.02% – higher than JinkoSolar's 23.45% (albeit with a different cell type).
Solartech Universal says this panel should be available in 2018 as the company works through the challenges of integrating the new manufacturing hardware into the current line (see Solartech Universal panel assembly video at end of article). The specification page for the panel family is available on the website – it peaks at 330W models, and notes being available soon.
[...] Meyer Burger calls heterojunction 'the Solar Cell of the Future (pdf).' An actual heterojunction solar cell just hit 26.6% efficiency in November. Again, well beyond, Jinko's 23.45%. This greater efficiency is partially because of additional layers of solar material – amorphous silicon – that grabs a different wavelength of light to make electricity.
Source: https://electrek.co/2017/12/19/florida-company-solar-cell-of-the-future-500w-heterojunction/
(Score: 1) by trytoguess on Thursday December 21 2017, @03:27PM (4 children)
Oddly enough, solar panels are fairly popular in North Korea due to their chronic electricity shortages.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Thursday December 21 2017, @07:15PM (3 children)
Solar thermal installations are ubiquitous in Japan and Turkey, as well. Germany's energiewende is pretty far along, too; last I saw they were getting 23% of their power needs from renewables. Denmark is a few points ahead of that, too, thanks to their wind potential.
In the United States folks often think it's the most advanced society, but when it comes to renewable energy it's lagging the rest of the industrialized world by quite a lot at the moment.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by Aiwendil on Thursday December 21 2017, @11:21PM (2 children)
Right now Denmark is getting 2068MWe from wind and 1506MWe from thermal sources, and is exporting 489MWe.
https://www.svk.se/drift-av-stamnatet/kontrollrummet/ [www.svk.se] (chrome's "translate to english" works well enough on that page) in case you are curious about the nordic and baltic grid live status and split by sources. Scroll down to "produktion" (production) and click Danmark (denmark) to get the danish data (pretty much the only non-obvious words in that diagram is "Kärn-" (nuclear-) and "värme" (thermal-))
(SVK is Svenska Kraftnät which is the swedish power grid operator)
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Friday December 22 2017, @12:19PM (1 child)
Does "thermal" mean biomass, ground source heat pumps, or hot springs like Iceland?
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by Aiwendil on Friday December 22 2017, @02:20PM
Interesting question - no idea. But based on the data for Finland it seems like biomass is included in that category at least.