The temptation, for any R&D driven company, is to occasionally cut back on the expenses and focus on income-generating services. But to do so in today’s accelerating market would be a backwards step, argues Klaus M. Schulte, Managing Director of respected industry PV-Engineering GmbH. We’re delighted to welcome him back to the magazine.
PES: Welcome back to the magazine. For the benefit of new readers, would you like to introduce the company and explain a little more about how you serve the solar industry?
Klaus M. Schulte: My colleague, Prof. Andreas Wagner, has been active in the photovoltaic (PV) industry since the early 80s, when he built PV power supplies for small villages on the Philippines and in Senegal for several years.
In those days, where experience with PV was rare, he gathered a lot of know-how and new ideas, how to solve layout and analysis problems in PV plants. In the late 90s, during his doctoral thesis, he finally formulated his ideas and created the “Method of the Effective Solar Cell Characteristic”, which was patented later on.
Since these ideas make the work of a PV engineer easier, we considered how to realise a product for rapid on-site check of PV generators and we constructed the PVPM IV-curve tracers. Although there were already portable IV-curve tracers available, these were very complicated to operate and required a very good knowledge of the PV physics even before measuring. The PVPM devices were the first which were constructed for easy use by the installers from bottom up.
