Sunday, 5 July 2026

Two community solar projects built by Nexamp and TurningPoint Energy are now running on a reclaimed coal mine site in Woodford County, Illinois. The Minonk site sits on a mine that worked the Colchester Coal Seam from the 1870s to the 1940s.

The two arrays can produce 9.8 megawatts and hold nearly 17,000 panels across roughly 40 acres. Output feeds ComEd's grid, and Nexamp says every solar module was manufactured in the US.

More than 650 participants have signed up, leaving the projects close to fully subscribed. About 450 residential customers take power from one array, while roughly 200 low-income households are served by the second. Rush University Medical Center and the College of DuPage together take 40% of the projects' electricity offtake, according to the developers.

The residential and low-income mix matches the community solar carve-outs Illinois built into its subscriber rules. Anchoring 40% of demand with two large institutional buyers gives the arrays a firm revenue base while smaller subscribers fill the rest.

All of that output now routes into ComEd's grid from a site that once shipped coal.

A team from Sun Yat-sen University and the China University of Mining and Technology has built a recycling route for retired crystalline silicon PV modules that pulls high-purity silicon, silver, and copper out of a single waste stream, according to a paper in the Journal of Cleaner Production. The method runs in three linked stages: heavy-liquid separation of mixed materials, solar-cell etching, and solder-strip etching, pv magazine reports.

The opening stage floats and sinks the shredded module fractions in a zinc bromide solution, with the density tuned to split the streams apart. That step captured more than 98% of the solar cells and nearly all the solder strips before any chemical treatment.

Etching then cleaned up the separated fractions. The authors report silicon at 99.997% purity and copper strips at 99.99% purity, alongside silver chloride at 99.64% purity recovered at 80.07% efficiency.

A life cycle assessment put the carbon footprint of the route at 80.42% below conventional treatment.

The economics split sharply across the three steps. Heavy-liquid separation runs at a slight loss of -$0.04/kg, while solar-cell treatment returns $7.76/kg and solder-strip treatment $4.81/kg, meaning the metal-bearing back end carries the value.

Eavor Technologies' flagship geothermal project began sending electricity to Germany's grid late last year, Canary Media reports.

The project runs on a closed-loop system that circulates working fluid through sealed underground pipes instead of drawing heat from naturally permeable hot rock. That design lets developers pursue geothermal outside the volcanic zones where conventional wells depend on shallow high-temperature reservoirs.

The company had completed the first of four planned loops at the site when the electricity started flowing, with the other three still to be built.

The German connection marks a commercial-scale grid feed-in from the closed-loop approach, which had run at pilot scale before this. Conventional geothermal output has clustered in places where hot resources sit near the surface, conditions Germany's deep sedimentary basins do not offer, pushing developers there toward engineered and closed-loop methods.

Canary Media links the milestone to what it calls a rocky start, saying the first loop reached the grid after execution problems. The report did not include output figures, cost, or a completion date for the remaining three loops.

Eavor has not disclosed the operating loop's capacity factor or delivered electricity volumes, nor a timeline for loops two through four. Those details would show whether the closed-loop design can scale against conventional geothermal and firm low-carbon supply competing for German offtake.

IPVF and TU Delft have reached 31% power conversion efficiency on a 4 cm² two-terminal perovskite-silicon tandem solar cell, according to pv magazine.

The two-terminal monolithic cell pairs nanotextured silicon heterojunction bottom cells built at TU Delft with perovskite top cells that IPVF deposited using ambient air slot-die coating, a route both teams see as friendlier to high-volume manufacturing than vacuum-based methods.

The figure lifts the same team's earlier mark. It had reported 24% efficiency on 10 cm² monolithic tandem devices that used planar silicon heterojunction bottom cells from France's CNRS - École Polytechnique.

Gilles Goaer, chief technology officer at IPVF, tied the 31% result on the 4 cm² two-terminal cell to manufacturing steps that are "compatible with industrial scale-up".

IPVF is also working with French solar manufacturer Voltec Solar on perovskite-silicon tandem solar panels.