The world’s largest solar research institute, Fraunhofer ISE, has designed a new solar reference cell built to improve the quality of cell measurements. Build according to the international standards of the World PV Scale (WPVS), Fraunhofer ISE’s new reference cell will allow test laboratories and cell and module manufacturers to significantly improve the quality of their measurements […]
Germany is arguably the leading renewable energy market in the world. It’s big in wind energy, biomass energy, and of course solar energy. Prof. Dr. Bruno Burger of the Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems ISE releases charts one a month on the Germany renewable energy market. The following are the latest, released just a few days ago. My […]
By Steve Hanley The Fraunhofer Center for Sustainable Energy, located in Boston, Massachusetts, is a nonprofit applied research and development laboratory whose mission is to foster economic development through the commercialization of clean energy technologies. It is part of the massive German organization Fraunhofer. Recently, the center announced a breakthrough in solar panel design and […]
A reader recently shared some great Fraunhofer reports on renewable energy in Germany with me. One of them I had already written a pretty long article about back in November, but the second I don’t think I’d seen. It’s an extensive look at electricity prices and production data in 2013. It’s got more charts on […]
A new solar cell conversion efficiency world record has been set — an impressive 44.7% conversion efficiency was achieved by a solar cell created by researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems ISE, with help from Soitec, CEA-Leti, and the Helmholtz Center Berlin. The new record surpasses the previous one of 44.4%, that […]
Need some solar energy facts or solar power facts? This page is aimed at becoming the best go-to source on the web for solar facts… if it isn’t already. The solar facts below are succinct and organized by categories and subcategories. To help improve the page, please feel free to add any solar facts you […]
Energy storage is a hot topic these days. While not a lot of it is needed to create a renewable energy–focused grid, a bit of it certainly is. Still a very nascent industry, research and development is going on at a frantic pace. A lot of researchers and firms are trying to “crack the energy […]
Black silicon solar technology is a fun one that I’ve been keeping an eye on for a long time. Black silicon solar cell technology offers some potentially very useful efficiency improvements for commercial solar panels… if the costs can be lowered enough. A handful of researchers have been working on this, and on other aspects […]