TÜV Rheinland moves away from Yokohama facility

TÜV Rheinland, which maintains a large solar testing center in Yokohama, has shifted its workload to other regional centers. It will also be redeploying equipment and personnel temporarily, according to pv-tech.org..

The company VP of global solar/fuel cell technology, Matthias Heinze said that the Yokohama staff was safe and the facility undamaged, but that the interruptions in the power supply had led to the decision to start shifting assets around to other locations in Asia, North America, and Germany.

The lab gets its power from Tokyo Electric Power Co., whose coverage area—including Kanagawa prefecture, where Yokohama is located—have seen electricity supplies suspended for a few hours according to a schedule devised by the utility.

A completely reliable, brownout-free power supply is critical to TÜV’s operations. Any interruption of temperature cycling, humidity-freeze, damp-heat, solar simulators, light-soaking, and other tests would invalidate ongoing results for use in IEC certification efforts and force a complete restart of the evaluation process.

Many tests in progress at the company’s Solar Energy Assessment Center, some of which had been running for weeks, have had to be scrapped because of the power outages, Heinze said.