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					</table><p>Researchers at <a href="https://www.ncsu.edu/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">North Carolina State University</a> have demonstrated techniques that improved day-ahead solar power forecasting by up to 13% compared with the most consistently performing individual model.</p>
<p>The findings were published in the <em>Journal of Cleaner Production</em> in a paper titled “A Hybrid Machine Learning Framework for Enhanced Day-Ahead Solar Forecasting in Large Scale Systems.”</p>
<p>The research showed that combining multiple machine-learning models can yield more robust predictions and enhance the reliability of solar integration into power systems.</p>
<p>Yen-Hsi Chou, a postdoctoral research scholar at NC State and corresponding author of the paper, said no single model performed best in every case. Combining forecasts from different individual models improved forecasting performance by more than 10% in some cases.</p>
<p>The two ensemble approaches were weighted averaging, which combines forecasts from separately trained location-specific models and gives greater weight to better-performing models; and multi-input, which allows each model to use weather data from multiple locations.</p>
<p>The results showed that forecasting performance depended on regional characteristics and season favourability. Weighted averaging improved forecasting accuracy by up to 11% for the Imperial Irrigation District dataset during favorable seasons, while the multi-input approach improved forecasts by up to 13% for the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power dataset during favorable seasons.</p>
<p>The researchers selected the bidirectional long short-term memory model as the baseline because it delivered the most consistent performance among the individual models.</p>
<p>The models were tested using weather and power generation data collected from 2019 to 2022 from two California utilities: Imperial Irrigation District (IID) and the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power.</p>
<p>The researchers concluded that no single forecasting strategy performs equally well across all regions. They said ensemble forecasting methods have the potential to improve prediction accuracy compared to individual models, provided the methods are tested and tuned for the regions where they will be deployed.</p>
<p>Chou said ensemble methods could outperform an individual model, but their effectiveness must be tested and fine-tuned for the region where they will be deployed.</p>
<p>Anderson De Queiroz, an associate professor at NC State and a co-author of the paper, said understanding regional characteristics and using information from multiple models and locations were critical to developing accurate forecasting tools for real-world grid operations.</p>
<p>Accurate forecasting is becoming <a href="https://mercomindia.com/cea-guidelines-propose-weather-stations-in-renewable-energy-projects">increasingly</a> important for power-system planning and operations as solar accounts for a growing share of electricity generation. To reduce deviations in power dispatch through improved forecasting, the Central Electricity Authority in India proposed installing one automatic weather station for each renewable energy project with a capacity of 50 MW.</p>
<p>According to Solargis, a satellite-based approach to monitoring irradiance allows for quality control and error detection and <a href="https://www.mercomindia.com/india-witnessed-below-average-solar-irradiance" target="_blank" rel="noopener">helps</a> calculate the performance ratio. Another smart resource investment in studying irradiance would be pyranometers which give information about solar irradiance in a particular geography by measuring the flux density in solar radiation.</p>


New Research Improves Day-Ahead Solar Forecasting Accuracy by 13%


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					</table><p>Researchers at the <a href="https://www.ncsu.edu/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">North Carolina State University</a> have developed RoboMapper, a robot designed to identify new perovskite materials with enhanced stability and solar cell efficiency.</p>
<p>While perovskite materials are being studied as the potential substitute for the largely used silicon, perovskite tend to degrade when exposed to continuous intense sunlight. With an aim to maintain the stability in perovskite materials, the researchers, through their new work, enabled RoboMapper to perform experiments that could yield a range of new semiconductor materials.</p>
<p>The researchers designed their robot to make alloys using specific elements and conducted tests to identify whether an alloy was suitable for tandem solar cells.</p>
<p>The study titled ‘Sustainable Materials Acceleration Platform Reveals Stable and Efficient Wide Bandgap Metal Halide Perovskite Alloys’ was published in the journal <a href="https://www.cell.com/matter/home" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Matter</a>.</p>
<p>The researchers were looking to determine whether the alloy comes with a crystalline structure similar to that of a perovskite material and if it had a bandgap. The robot also performed experiments to understand the degradation level of the alloy when exposed to intense light.</p>
<p>Based on the encoded instructions, RoboMapper created samples of 150 varying alloy compositions and then conducted optical spectroscopy and X-ray structural assessments on these samples.</p>
<p>Using the data collected during these experiments, the researchers developed a computational model to derive a particular alloy composition that they claimed to be the best combination of desired attributes.</p>
<p>Aram Amassian, corresponding author of the paper and a professor of Materials Science and Engineering at North Carolina State University, said, “The material we identified using RoboMapper turned out to be more efficient at converting light into electricity in solar cell devices. Our conventional techniques validated the results from RoboMapper. The robot also automates the process but places dozens of samples on each chip by miniaturizing the material samples with the help of modern printing. It still performs each step of the data collection process but does so for multiple materials in parallel, saving time and energy.”</p>
<p>Environmental economist Lucía Serrano-Luján, co-author of the paper and a researcher at Rey Juan Carlos University and the Technical University of Cartagena, said, the RoboMapper’s ability to streamline the data collection process by placing dozens of materials on the same chip reduced greenhouse gas emissions tenfold.</p>
<p>In another study, scientists at the National Centre for Photovoltaic Research and Education of the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay claimed to have <a href="https://www.mercomindia.com/iit-26-efficiency-perovskite-silicon-solar-cell" target="_blank" rel="noopener">achieved</a> a record power conversion efficiency of over 26% for a 4-terminal silicon-perovskite tandem solar cell.</p>
<p>Earlier this year, researchers at the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology <a href="https://www.mercomindia.com/efficiency-perovskite-silicon-tandem-solar-cells" target="_blank" rel="noopener">developed</a> a perovskite-silicon tandem solar cell with a record energy conversion efficiency of 33.2%.</p>


Researchers Develop Robot to Study Degradation in Perovskite Solar Cells


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					</table><p><u><a href="https://www.ncsu.edu/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">North Carolina State University</a></u> scientists have discovered that channeling ions into defined pathways in perovskite materials improves the stability and operational performance of perovskite solar cells.</p>
<p>The discovery paves the way for a new generation of lighter, more flexible, and more efficient solar cell technologies suitable for practical use.</p>
<p>The study titled ‘A multiscale ion diffusion framework sheds light on the diffusion–stability–hysteresis nexus in metal halide perovskites’ is published in <u><a href="https://www.nature.com/nmat/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Nature Materials</a></u> journal.</p>
<p>In the experiment, the scientists studied the grain boundaries in perovskite materials. They found that while ‘growing’ a perovskite, the material forms a series of crystals or grains.</p>
<p>The generation of charges for electric current and absorption of light is possible in perovskite through these grains.</p>
<p>However, they observed that the positioning of grains is much more likely to be disoriented in the material, and such an area where grains touch each other is termed to be grain boundary. They found that perovskites are ionic materials and the migration of ions results in certain chemical and structural changes in the material itself.</p>
<p>According to Aram Amassian, the corresponding author of the study, strengthening the grain boundaries helps understand what needs to be done to make perovskites more stable and efficient.</p>
<p>The first author of the study, Masoud Ghasemi said, “What we’ve found is that grains are better protected from impairment when the ions move predominantly along the grain boundary. Designing stronger grain boundaries that protect the grains is essential to block migrating ions and other harmful species like oxygen from entering the grains, mitigating problematic chemical and structural changes in the material.”</p>
<p>The researchers discovered that when a voltage is applied to a perovskite, ions migrate through the material and an increase in this activity makes the material unstable and inefficient.</p>
<p>The team claimed that the migration of ions could be one of the potential reasons stopping the achievement of long-term operational stability in perovskite solar cells.</p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://mercomindia.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/Perovskite-1.png"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignnone wp-image-50048 size-full" src="https://mercomindia.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/Perovskite-1.png" alt="Perovskite 1" width="602" height="417" srcset="https://mercomindia.s3.ap-south-1.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/Perovskite-1.png 602w, https://mercomindia.s3.ap-south-1.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/Perovskite-1-300x208.png 300w, https://mercomindia.s3.ap-south-1.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/Perovskite-1-600x416.png 600w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 602px) 100vw, 602px" /></a></p>
<p>Figure 1: Migration of ions in perovskite material. Source: NC State University</p>
<p>“This is an important insight because there are established techniques we can use to engineer perovskite materials and their grain boundaries. Observing the grain boundaries opens the door to a host of new technologies, such as flexible, lightweight solar cells, or layered solar cells (known as <a href="https://mercomindia.com/researchers-claim-solar-cell-shows-27-4-efficiency/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">tandems</a>) that can be far more efficient than the solar harvesting technology used today in so-called solar farms,” Amassian said.</p>
<p>The work may also inform the development of more efficient energy storage technologies.</p>
<p>In an experiment performed by experts at Germany’s Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin, experts claimed to have <a href="https://mercomindia.com/tandem-solar-cell-achieves-world-conversion-efficiency/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">achieved</a> 32.5% conversion efficiency in tandem solar cells, the highest ever for this technology.</p>
<p>Researchers at the Indian Institute of Technology, Roorkee <a href="https://mercomindia.com/iit-roorkee-claim-17-efficiency-perovskite-solar-cells/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">developed</a> a prototype of a low-cost, high-quality perovskite solar cell that achieved a stable conversion efficiency of 17.05%. The experts said that their perovskite solar cell leads to the optimum phase distribution, enlarged grain size, and comes with enhanced crystallinity.</p>


Channeling Ions into Defined Pathways Boosts Perovskites’ Performance

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