Latest Solar Industry News (May 2024)

European Consortium Aims to Streamline Agrivoltaics Design

A European team started a two-year research project this year with a €2 million budget to study crop yield, solar panel production, and water use on farms. They want to use the findings to create new models and software.

The study includes testing solutions in Europe’s Nordic region using both overhead solar panels and ground-mounted systems. They will look at placing solar panels between rows of crops in different ways. The research will also consider how much water is used.

They will make software that can mix different crops and solar panel setups. This software will have a map function for farming with solar panels and help estimate crop and energy production.

It will work with a platform made by Glint Solar from Norway, which developers use to plan and design solar projects together. Some research results will be shared publicly.

The group working on this project is made up of Glint Solar from Norway, Kilowattsol from France (a French expert in combining agriculture and solar energy), Danish Renewables from Denmark (a company that works on solar projects), and Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems (Fraunhofer ISE) from Germany.

Xavier Daval, the CEO of Kilowattsol, stressed that when using land for both solar panels and farming, it should help solve problems, not make them worse.

This project is one of the latest efforts in Europe to study how solar panels can be used on farmland. For example, in Germany, Fraunhofer ISE is trying out using solar panels to give shade to young trees. In France, they are working on improving profits for farmers by producing solar power alongside certain crops and using solar technology to improve olive farming.

Study Reveals High-Albedo Ground Reflectors Boost Bifacial Solar Plant Yield by up to 4.5%

Researchers at the University of Ottawa in Canada studied how using a special mirror on the ground can increase electricity production in big solar power plants with two-sided panels. They found that this mirror can make the plant produce up to 4.5% more electricity. The main researcher, Mandy Lewis, said it’s important to place these mirrors right under the solar panels for the best results. This research is especially important for Canada because cities like Ottawa and Toronto have snow covering them for many months each year.

The study was done using a 75 kW solar panel system that follows the sun’s movement in Colorado. They tested one row of special solar panels that can absorb sunlight from both sides, collecting data every minute for four months to see how much power they produced every 15 minutes.

They used a special mirror material from Germany that reflects a lot of sunlight and doesn’t get damaged by the sun. By testing five different ways of placing these mirrors, they found that covering the whole ground or part of it directly below the panels worked best, rather than putting them between rows.

By comparing how well the solar panels worked with and without the mirrors, they saw that adding these mirrors increased the yearly power from the sun by 8.6% and made the system produce up to 4.5% more electricity. They found that putting the mirrors right under the solar panels was the best way to get the most out of them, no matter their size.

After looking at how much money installing these mirrors would cost, they found that it could range from $2.50 to $4.60 for each square meter. They also said that making money from these mirrors depends on where you put them and how sunny it is, advising against using them in places where the solar energy might be too strong for the system to handle. This research is helpful for countries like Canada and places with cloudy weather, as it showed a bigger increase in power in cloudier cities like Seattle compared to drier areas like Tucson. Another study at the University of Ottawa introduced a new method to measure how well these special solar panels work by considering the type of ground they’re on.