solar energy RSS

German renewable energy company Baywa r.e., the Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems ISE, and partners have built a 258 kW agrivoltaic system for apples in the north of the state of Rhineland-Palatinate to test whether such systems can provide plant protection against harmful environmental influences. The five-year research project is financed by the State Ministry of Climate Protection, Environment, Energy, and Mobility of the Land of Rhineland-Palatinate and the Federal Ministry of Food and Agriculture. The project occupies a surface of 9,100 square meters, and the agrivoltaic system covers a third of a plot. For the next five years,...

The research has been published in the journal Advanced Energy Materials and details how the researchers used leading innovations in next-generation ‘tandem’ solar cells, combined with advances in electrolysis techniques to achieve a solar-to-hydrogen conversion efficiency of greater than 20 per cent. The researchers used low cost silicon-perovskite ‘tandem’ solar cells optimised for the production of hydrogen, which combined two types of solar cells layered on top of each other to achieve a combined efficiency of 24.3 per cent – an efficiency higher than most conventional silicon solar cells. The team then combined the high-efficiency tandem solar cells with low-cost catalyst materials...