2016 Intersolar AWARD winners announced

This week, Germany’s Messe München played host to Intersolar Europe 2016, an annual exhibition for the solar industry and its partners. The show saw the presentation of the Intersolar AWARD for solar innovations.

The 2016 award received a record number of submissions, with 149 projects from exhibiting companies taking part. Applicants could only put forward products, projects, services and solutions which were undergoing testing or which were already in use (and were making their first appearance) or which showed significant developments to existing technologies at the time of submission.

2016 also saw the award expanded to include the category of Outstanding Solar Projects. This new category recognised projects from around the world that make an exceptional contribution to driving forward the energy transition. For the first time, owners of solar projects were also able to take part.

The winners have been listed below.

Photovoltaics

• LG Electronics Deutschland was awarded for its bifacial solar module LG NeON 2 BiFacial, which is said to boost energy yields by around 10%.
• M10 Industries was awarded for its Kubus multitray stringer, claimed to be the only stringer in the world able to solder up to 5000 solar cells per hour.
• SolarEdge Technologies was awarded for its HD-Wave technology, which has enabled the development of a compact, lightweight inverter with record-breaking efficiency of up to 99%.

Outstanding Solar Projects

• Jakson Engineers was awarded for a project that sees the Indian village of Baripatha (Odisha) powered completely by solar energy through centralised and individual installations.
• ME SOLshare was awarded for setting up the smart PV DC village microgrid in Shariatpur, Bangladesh, said to be the world’s first peer-to-peer network to allow energy to be shared between private solar installations.
• Schneider Electric SE was awarded for its project in Lagos, Nigeria, which has seen diesel generators replaced by solar technology on a large scale.
• SMA Sunbelt Energy was awarded for its large-scale hybrid project for solar power generation and storage on St Eustatius Island — the first of its kind and size in the Caribbean.
• SOLID Gesellschaft für Solarinstallation und Design designed the largest solar cooling system of its kind at Mountain High School in Scottsdale, Arizona. The installation heats a single-effect lithium bromide adsorption chiller.