News 2024

Representatives from the Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems ISE (Germany), the National Renewable Energy Laboratory NREL (USA), the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology AIST (Japan), as well as other leading solar research institutes and international participants from industry came together at the 4th Terawatt Workshop of the Global Alliance of Solar Energy Research Institutes (GA-SERI) from June 6-8 in Asilomar, CA, USA. The discussions focused on the progress of photovoltaic (PV) technology but also on the shared challenges of achieving sustainability and circularity in the rapidly growing multi-terawatt PV market. Approximately 70 participants from 14 countries attended the event.

Photovoltaic systems equipped with solar trackers show a 20 to 30 percent gain in energy yield compared to fixed ground-mounted systems. Besides this, the layout design and alignment can take other criteria into account, such as the light requirements of certain plant varieties underneath agrivoltaic and biodiversity-PV systems or also the grid feed-in at certain times of the day. In the research project "DeepTrack", Zimmermann PV-Tracker GmbH, part of the Zimmermann PV-Steel Group, and the Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems ISE are improving tracking algorithms with a digital twin that uses deep learning to calculate optimized control approaches. Among other things, the digital twin learns from the data of its “real” twin, a PV tracker built by Zimmermann PV-Tracker, which is located at the Fraunhofer ISE’s Outdoor Performance Lab in Merdingen near Freiburg.

Researchers from the Technical University of Berlin, Rena Technologies GmbH, and the Fraunhofer Institutes for Building Physics IBP and for Solar Energy Systems ISE have for the first time created a comprehensive model of the water flows in a solar cell factory with a production capacity of 5 gigawatts (5GWp) per year. Using this model as basis, they tested the introduction of two different strategies for circular water use. The results show that a reduction of up to 79 percent in the water consumption and up to 84 percent in the wastewater is already technically possible with today's production technologies. This would mean that the construction of new solar cell factories in locations with less water availability are also feasible. The study is freely accessible in the latest issue of Solar Energy.

The Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems ISE is the first European research institute to switch to large-area M10 silicon wafers. A TOPCon solar cell immediately achieved a very good efficiency of 24.0 percent. This result was presented for the first time at the 20th Photovoltaic Technology Advisory Board Meeting of Fraunhofer ISE.

In the foreseeable future, the majority of vehicles on European roads will be electric. Since the beginning of 2023 a European consortium of experts has been investigating to what extent the expansion of vehicle-integrated solar would affect the electricity requirements of an electrified vehicle fleet. Participating in the consortium are the Netherlands Organization for Applied Scientific Research TNO; the Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems ISE as well as three on-board solar technology system suppliers for vehicles; Sono Motors, Lightyear Layer and IM Efficiency. The SolarMoves project, commissioned by the Department for Mobility and Transport (DG MOVE) of the European Commission, aims to quantitatively assess solar electricity generation on vehicle bodies and its impact on the future charging infrastructure in Europe. As part of the project, some 20 vehicles that drive throughout Europe have been equipped with mobile irradiance sensors. They are to collect real data that will be used to validate the energy yield models developed by the researchers.

The digitalization of research opens up numerous opportunities for innovative, data-based R&D services, while at the same time requiring standardized data management. In the new Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft pilot project "BatterieDigital_real", various institutes are creating a research data space for battery research. The Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems ISE is collaborating with the University of Auckland to combine battery development and artificial intelligence.

A study by the University of Göttingen and the Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems ISE showed that the majority of farmers in Germany are open to agrivoltaics, the dual use of land for agricultural production and solar energy generation, and can imagine installing the technology on their farms. The research team conducted an online survey and analyzed the responses from 214 farmers. The results showed that 72.4 percent could imagine using agrivoltaics on their farm. The main motivations given were the additional source of income from self-generated electricity and the future-oriented development that agrivoltaics offers to the farm.

Electrolyzers make it possible to greatly expand the use of renewable energies by producing hydrogen, which can be used to store clean energy. In order to facilitate the high-volume production of competitive stacks for PEM electrolysis in the near future, researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems ISE are investigating scalable processes such as slot-die coating and screen printing for the production of catalyst layers for the membrane electrode assembly (MEA). They have now developed catalyst inks for both production processes that enable the production of catalyst layers with lower iridium loading and high throughput. This significantly reduces the material and manufacturing costs for PEM electrolyzers.

To ensure the stability of the distribution grid in critical situations, grid operators should be able to temporarily reduce the power of controllable consumers such as heat pumps and charging stations. The communication to enable this will operate via the so-called Controllable Local System (CLS) channel of the Smart Meter Gateway (SMGW). The joint research project "UtiliSpaces", funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF), is addressing the implementation challenges in the practice. The Fraunhofer Institute for Energy Economics and Energy System Technology IEE is project coordinator. The role of the Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems ISE in the project is to test hardware and software for complex system controls in its Digital Grid Lab.