It's Wednesday. Solar panel efficiency has climbed about half a point a year for a decade. One manufacturer would like to take the stairs two at a time.
In today's edition:
☀️ Big Story: Qcells bets on tandem solar at gigawatt scale
⚡ Quick Hits: wildfire sensors, Bangladesh's first reactor, Australia's batteries, a grid-forming retrofit, NYC plug-in batteries
💰 Capital: Epyr's firebrick heat, copper biomolecules, solar robots
📋 Policy Watch: the permitting bill's court limits, New Mexico geothermal grants, Georgia's PSC races
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The Big Story
Qcells plans a gigawatt-scale tandem solar factory for 2029
Qcells, one of the biggest U.S. solar manufacturers, plans to open a gigawatt-scale factory for perovskite-silicon tandem panels in 2029, Global Chief Technology Officer Danielle Merfeld told Canary Media. The company is already field-testing full-size tandem panels, and in July it said its tandem panel passed testing against UL and IEC quality standards.
"We don't need to raise money. We don't need to excite investors, except for our own internal owners." Danielle Merfeld, Global CTO, Qcells
Today's high-performance panels convert about 24% of sunlight; in 2024 an independent body confirmed a 28.6% efficiency for a standard-size Qcells tandem cell, about eight years of incremental progress at once.
Qcells runs a 40 MW pilot line in South Korea making full-size tandem panels; the factory site is undecided.
Its new vertically integrated factory in Cartersville, Georgia, is designed to upgrade easily to tandem fabrication, the company said.
Rivals include China's GCL, which opened a 1 GW tandem factory in Kunshan last year, and Tandem PV, which is targeting 2028 for a gigawatt-scale U.S. plant.
Source: Canary Media
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Quick Hits
Technology milestones from across the grid
Five items, from wildfire sensors to a reactor's first chain reaction.
Itron and PG&E are moving a grid-edge fault detection project for wildfire mitigation from proof of concept to a scaled pilot, starting with about 3,000 devices in high fire-risk communities and planning about 10,000 through 2027. GlobeNewswire
Rooppur 1, Bangladesh's first nuclear power reactor, built by Rosatom, reached first criticality on Oct. 11, with power start-up scheduled for Nov. 20. World Nuclear News
AEMO CEO Daniel Westerman said grid batteries set the price in Australia's main market about 49% of the time in the September quarter, up from 18% a year earlier, and supplied about 8% of evening peak demand, ahead of the full quarterly report. RenewEconomy
Neoen inaugurated the 92 MW/183 MWh Breizh Big Battery in Brittany, where an RTE-led trial will switch inverters from grid-following to grid-forming through a software update alone. pv magazine France
David Energy has installed 2 kW/6 kWh plug-in batteries at no cost at 21 Wonder food sites in New York City and says software dispatch saved about $20,000 over six months, 3% to 5% of energy costs. Utility Dive
The Capital Stack
Epyr raises €15 million to swap factory gas for hot bricks
Paris-based Epyr closed an oversubscribed €15 million Series A led by SlateVC, with AENU, Daphni, WEPA Ventures, OVNI Capital and Aurum Impact. Epyr sells firebrick thermal storage as "Heat-as-a-Service." Its unit at WEPA's Troyes paper mill, inaugurated in May, is described as France's first industrial thermal energy storage unit, and the new capital goes first to a planned 35 MWh unit at Papeco that is set to replace all of that site's gas use.
Source: Tech.eu
Also in the capital stack:
Giraffe Bio raised a $6.4 million seed round led by Orion Industrial Ventures, with BHP Ventures participating, for engineered biomolecules it says help mines recover up to 5% more copper. TechCrunch
ARENA committed up to AU$32.3 million (US$22.3 million) to Luminous Robotics and Built Robotics Australia to build solar installation and piling robots in Australia. PV Tech
Policy Watch
The Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act, the Senate permitting bill proposed last month, would stop courts from enjoining projects or vacating approvals after a successful NEPA or historic-preservation challenge, leaving agencies to fix the gap, Heatmap reported; that would sharply limit lawsuits as a tool for halting energy and transmission projects. Heatmap
New Mexico's Energy, Minerals and Natural Resources Department awarded $17.3 million from its new Geothermal Projects Development Fund to four projects, including $10 million for a New Mexico Tech stratigraphic test well in Socorro County, a state bet on de-risking geothermal exploration. ThinkGeoEnergy
Georgia's Public Service Commission races drew $250,000 in ads from American Power Forward PAC, a SEIA-affiliated group backing Democrats Peter Hubbard and Shelia Edwards; Canary Media reported that a flipped majority on the Republican-led commission could reshape Georgia Power's plans after last year's approval of 10 GW of new gas plants and batteries. Canary Media
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