In UNSW Scientia Professor Martin Green's COP31 presentation, he explains that solar’s dramatic cost reductions have transformed its potential to mitigate climate change. Rapid adoption is already changing electricity generation, while continued technological advances offer further opportunities to reduce costs and emissions.

UNSW's Verity Tan is seeking input for her PhD investigation into end-of-life decision making for utility scale solar farms to find out what forces are driving decisions to upgrade, extend, repower or decommission a plant.

Can the new silicon solar technology currently dominating global manufacturing also provide the foundation for the next generation of high-efficiency solar cells?

The Australian Centre for Advanced Photovoltaics invites all interested parties to our free half-day conference from 9:30am –1pm, Monday 30 November, 2026, at ANU.

With ACAP suuport, UNSW reserachers Alireza Yaghoubi and Professor Xioajing Hao are expanding the toolkit to help move promising materials like CZTS towards the higher efficiencies needed for more efficient tandem solar cells.

By Alison Potter for the Australian Centre for Advanced Photovoltaics The Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA) has extended its support of Australia’s flagship solar research program, the Australian Centre for Advanced Photovoltaics (ACAP), to 2032, driving development of next generation, ultra low-cost solar. The funding will support early career fellowships and collaboration, as well as new state-of-the-art infrastructure across ACAP’s seven research institutes. Ultra

Research impact is best understood through these stories and this year's ACAP Annual Report is built around that principle. Rather than just reporting achievements and milestones, we’ve combined program highlights with case studies that showcase the people, technologies and discoveries shaping the future of solar energy.

“There’s a huge opportunity to internationalise our curricula and to collaborate with alumni and partners who are already embedded in these new growth hubs,” Wang says. “We can cultivate the skills and relationships that enable both students and industry to thrive through the energy transition.”

In 2025, ACAP-supported research at ANU materially shaped how governments, utilities and developers plan long-duration energy storage. The Pumped Hydro Energy Storage (PHES) Atlases , led by Professor Andrew Blakers and supported by ACAP, are now embedded in national strategies and commercial pipelines across multiple continents – accelerating the pathway to ultra-low-cost solar (ULCS). Solving solar’s storage constraint Ultra-low-cost solar depends on one critical fact

The modelling shows that ultra-low-cost solar fundamentally changes the economics of Australia’s energy transition.

The Australian Silicon Study (AusSi) has identified that a 50,000 tonnes per annum solar-grade polysilicon facility represents the minimum commercially viable scale for production in Australia – aligned with projected global demand of approximately 1.2 terawatts of new solar PV installations annually by 2030. Funded by the Australian Renewable Energy Agency under the Solar SunShot Program, AusSi assesses the technical, commercial and investment feasibility of establishing a l

As the global solar industry accelerates toward terawatt-scale manufacturing, it faces a critical bottleneck: silver. Today’s high-efficiency silicon solar cells rely on screen-printed silver contacts, and in 2025 alone, photovoltaic manufacturing consumed roughly 25% of global silver supply, highlighting the material risk of scaling solar without redesigning how critical resources are used. With the support of the Australian Centre for Advanced Photovoltaics, Associate P

UNSW’s Daylight Photoluminescence (DPL) Imaging Group, led by Professor Thorsten Trupke and Dr Oliver Kunz, with ACAP support, continues to develop their drone-based imaging solutions which have the potential to transform how solar farms are assessed, monitored and maintained. Their pioneering DPL technology allows operators to ‘see’ hidden defects in solar panels in broad daylight, providing rapid, high-resolution diagnostics.

At UNSW, Professor Bram Hoex and his research group are leading the international effort to understand, quantify and standardise how UV-induced degradation (UVID) should be tested and mitigated in modern silicon solar cells, suppported by the Australian Centre for Advanced Photovoltaics.

UNSW-ACAP researchers tackle corrosion in TOPCon and HJT solar cells, strengthening reliability and long-term performance in next-generation PV.

In 2025 UNSW successfully completed commissioning of ACAP’s new Tandem Cluster, a major research infrastructure and the first of its kind in Australia. This integrated suite of sputtering, evaporation, ALD and in‑situ characterisation systems now provides ACAP researchers with a unified platform for fabricating next‑generation tandem solar cells.

CSIRO’s globally accredited PV testing lab leads development of international standards for perovskite solar cell measurement.

Supported by the Australian Centre for Advanced Photovoltaics, researchers at ANU have developed an industrially compatible method for perovskite deposition on large textured silicon wafers, tackling one of the major barriers to market for perovskite -silicon tandem solar cells.

Supported by ACAP, Professor Xiaojing Hao (UNSW) and her team have played a leading role in engineering pathways for kesterite solar cells beyond 15% efficiency, a milestone that repositions the technology as a credible, scalable alternative to less sustainable thin-film options. At the heart of this advance is precise control of the kesterite formation pathway using molecular ink chemistry, as reported in Nature Energy, with international collaborators.

By combining high-throughput manufacturing-style experimentation with machine learning (ML), researchers from CSIRO and Monash University have achieved both unprecedented data scale and record device performance,