Japan started implementing a national Feed-In Tariff (FiT) mechanism on the 1st July 2012, which included specific payment tariffs for solar photovoltaic (PV) installations. This marks a new era in the renewable energy landscape in Japan. This paper aims at analysing the solar PV prospect in Japan, particularly in both residential and non-residential sectors. The paper presents, first, an overview of energy trends in Japan prior to the Fukushima event. This is followed by a short review of solar PV progress in the country, highlighting the major policies and programmes that have been implemented as well as the installations that have been carried out over the past two decades. Next, the financial impact of the new FiT scheme on consumers is evaluated. The financial analysis investigates the total profit, the average annual return on investment and the payback period. For a comparison purposes, a similar financial analysis is also conducted with selected countries around the world – namely Germany, Italy and the United Kingdom. The results from this analysis indicate that the new Japanese FiT rate generates a good profit, a moderate annual return on investment and an acceptable payback period, suggesting an increasing trend of solar PV uptake over the next years

This paper describes a novel type of solar concentrator – a mirror symmetrical dielectric totally internally reflecting concentrator (MSDTIRC). This new concentrator type has been designed to satisfy the following objectives: (i) to provide optimum gain in two different planes, therefore increasing the electrical output of a solar photovoltaic (PV) system, and (ii) to reduce the amount of the PV cell material needed, hence minimising the cost of the system. The concentrator is capable of having two different acceptance angles on different planes. The procedure of designing an MSDTIRC is explained and the geometrical properties are analysed in detail. In addition, the optical concentration gain is presented for various angles of incidence. Through simulation results, it is demonstrated that the MSDTIRC provides significant optical concentration gain within its acceptance angle, as high as 13.54× when compared with non-concentrating solar cell. It can be concluded that the MSDTIRC can be a way to produce a low cost solar PV system and can be chosen as an alternative design for the BIPV systems

The harmful effects of carbon emissions and carbon dioxide caused by over dependence on oil is a global issue, which is currently being addressed by encouraging renewable energy (RE) resources contribution to the energy mix. Encouraging RE is important in order to solve the unsustainable nature of electricity generation especially in the sub-Saharan African countries. One of the REs that have vast potential especially in sub-Saharan Africa is the solar energy. This paper provides an overview of the solar photovoltaic (PV) developments in selected countries of sub-Saharan Africa – in terms of research, installed capacity, solar radiation level, RE policies and the percentage of solar PV in the future energy mix of these countries. Finally, this paper identified the barriers to RE deployment and proposed scaling-up solar PV as one of the solution in the development of energy mix in these countries