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Anup Premaraj Kamath, Research assistant at the Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems ISE and master’s student at Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg, received the 1st “Bruno Scrosati Award” for his outstanding approach to the field of electrochemistry and energy storage. The award for international master’s students enrolled at a non-Italian university is in honor of late Prof. Bruno Scrosati, a pioneer in the early development of Lithium-ion batteries.

Researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems ISE have succeeded in developing solar cells based on III-V semiconductors that can achieve an efficiency of over 40 percent indoors. By the optimized design and improved quality of the solar cell absorber material , the research team achieved remarkably high efficiencies even under very low light conditions of just 100 lux. This result makes this technology particularly attractive for autonomous Internet of Things (IoT) applications that operate indoors without an external wired power supply. The findings were published in the journal Applied Physics Letters.

In the first half of 2025, Germany and many other European countries generated more solar power than ever before. This was offset by lower electricity generation from wind energy. As a result, the share of renewable electricity in Germany's net public electricity generation was 60.9 percent, down from 65.1 percent in the first half of 2024. Within the European Union, public electricity generation from solar and wind fell from 358.1 terawatt hours (TWh) in the first half of 2024 to 344.4 TWh in the first half of 2025. This is according to the half-yearly data on public net electricity generation presented today by the Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems ISE. The evaluation is based on the data platform energy-charts.info.

Around the world, there is a lack of comprehensive medical care for people living in remote areas. Researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems ISE and the Fraunhofer Institute for Surface Engineering and Thin Films IST have devised a solution for this in the PreCare project: a flexible, modular health platform with solar power supply that can be installed on the bed of a pickup truck. It is already in use in South Africa and Namibia. The team was presented with the Innovations for a Better Future award from the Fraunhofer-Zukunftsstiftung (Fraunhofer Future Foundation) for this development.

In a joint research effort, scientists from King Abdullah University of Science and Technology KAUST and Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems successfully replaced spin-coating with blade-coating in the production of perovskite-silicon tandem solar cells. In a “hybrid route” combining evaporation and blade-coating to deposit perovskite solar cells on silicon bottom cells, they produced tandem solar cells with efficiencies approaching 28 percent. Their result opens a path to the large-scale production of this promising new solar cell technology.