7 Things Worth Reading This Week (8/18/23)

Caelux has secured a total of $24 million in funding to open a 100-MW perovskite-coated glass factory in California, just outside LA. The company is heralding this development as an oppt for the industry to have greater access to more powerful and efficient solar panels at relatively low cost.

The Buzz podcast looks at how to ease design woes for C&I installs. Aurora joins them to talk about installer pain points, how to avoid overpromising and under-delivering, the problem of under voltage vs. over voltage, accounting for EV and storage, tightening up design, and next steps for the market.

UbiQD, a thin-film solar manufacturer, and First Solar have created a joint development agreement to look at the potential use of fluorescent quantum dots in enhancing solar PV. The nanotech company already uses the tech in localized DC microgrids, smart building solutions (like integration with sensors for climate and ambient controls) and agrivoltaic installs.

SEIA has found that the IRA has resulted in over $100 billion in private sector investments in solar and storage. 51 solar manufacturing facilities have been announced or expanded as well. They estimate that these new and expanded factories will invest around $20 billion into US communities and will result in 155 GW of new production capacity across the solar supply chain.

SolarEdge is rolling out a new version of their Home Hub and Wave inverters for the American market. The new inverters will be integrated with PCS tech, enabling installs of systems that are more than 50% larger without requiring MPUs, mainly because they can monitor, balance, and control the currents on the main panel busbar.

In this video series Jon Bonnano and Kerim Baran interview MIT professor and Climate Change AI (CCAI) co-founder PriyavDonti regarding generative AI and machine learning. In this fifth of the ten-part series (and second portion of the 3 part series) they look at the fascinating realm of reinforcement learning, where machine learning models are trained to interact with dynamic environments and optimize complex systems. The video is below.

In this video series Jon Bonnano and Kerim Baran interview MIT professor and Climate Change AI (CCAI) co-founder PriyavDonti regarding generative AI and machine learning. In this sixth of the ten-part series (and second portion of the 3 part series) they explore the application and challenges of reinforcement learning in transmission and distribution companies. The video is below.