Women in Solar+ Europe highlights this week the insights shared by industry leaders during the panel “Impact Leadership in Solar & Storage: securing the energy transition through people, purpose and systems thinking,” organised by the leadership ecosystem Solar+ Leaders at Solar & Storage Live London. Bringing together voices from across the value chain, the discussion explored how leadership is evolving in response to growing system complexity, skills gaps, and the need for greater alignment across the industry.

In a new weekly update for pv magazine, Solcast, a DNV company, reports that April 2026 brought mixed solar irradiance conditions across South America, with above-average GHI along Colombia’s Pacific and Caribbean coasts and parts of southern Argentina, while eastern and northern temperate regions — including Buenos Aires to Bolivia — saw reduced irradiance due to persistent cloud cover and wetter-than-average conditions.

Escalating Middle East tensions and global energy supply risks are accelerating Europe’s shift toward solar and storage, particularly in commercial, industrial, and utility-scale segments where energy security, resilience, and price stability are becoming central investment drivers. At the same time, expanding manufacturing capacity in China and India is redirecting surplus solar and storage supply toward Europe, creating a highly competitive and increasingly selective market where long-term success depends on quality, reliability, ESG alignment, and strategic market positioning.

Over a 30-year asset life, corrosion can evolve into a structural, electrical, and fire safety issue. Corrosion drives up operations and maintenance (O&M) costs, reduces resilience to extreme events, and in some cases, can force premature decommissioning or complete structural replacement Intertek CEA’s Nicholas Hudson and Ankil Sanghvi advise on best practices.

For years, the battery energy storage (BESS) story has followed a familiar script: costs fall, deployment accelerates, economics improve. Even when cell costs rose and system prices briefly flattened during the 2021-22 lithium price spike, the narrative largely held. Paola Perez Peña, senior principal analyst at S&P Global Energy, examines why the latest jump in lithium prices has only had limited impacts on overall BESS costs so far.

GE Vernova has secured an order from Megha Engineering & Infrastructures Ltd (MEIL) to deliver nine 150 MW pumped-storage units for the 1.35 GW Upper Sileru hydropower plant in India.

The new policy has already applied, and impacts billions in funding from the European Investment Bank on renewable projects including standalone and co-located storage.

Enphase Energy has detailed the architecture of its IQ Solid-State Transformer (IQ SST), a distributed power conversion system designed to supply regulated 800 VDC power to AI data center infrastructure.

The solar minigrids, to be developed by five renewable energy service companies, are expected to facilitate over 494,000 new electricity connections in Nigeria.

Residential heat pump sales increased 17% across 11 European countries in the first quarter of 2026, following a sharp rise in gas and oil prices after Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz in March, says the European Heat Pump Association (EHPA).

The project is integrated into a larger 2 GW first-phase build-out combining solar, wind, and storage, and uses dedicated transmission lines plus market trading to match renewable supply with data center demand.

Madagascar’s state-owned utility Jirama and the country’s rural electrification development agency have signed 46 memoranda of understanding for new solar projects with a combined capacity totalling 932 MW.

Solvéo Energies has expanded its Bélesta-en-Lauragais solar plant to 3 MW with a new 300 kW unit, using a decentralized low-voltage “mini solar field” design.
The model enables faster permitting and grid connection while minimizing land use, despite slightly higher upfront costs.

The 204 MW Edenvale Solar Park in Queensland’s Western Downs region has been identified by energy consultancy Rystad Energy as the best performing large-scale PV asset in Australia last month.

Brazil’s solar sector is entering a new phase marked by curtailment, grid constraints, and regulatory shifts, with growth increasingly tied to new business models and market dynamics. Industry leaders say storage will be central to this transition, enabling system integration, mitigating risks, and unlocking future demand.

Japan’s New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization (NEDO) has opened a supplementary call for proposals on mass production of next-generation single-junction perovskite solar cells, with submissions due by June 3.

A King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) researcher whose lab has demonstrated up to 100% accuracy using a single hardware counter tells pv magazine that firmware-level detection of inverter attacks is technically viable – but today’s communication standards do not transmit the firmware‑integrity signal to operators.

Qatari researchers found that bifacial 2P horizontal single-axis tracking PV systems in desert conditions produced up to 13.5% more electricity than fixed-tilt systems over long-term field testing in Qatar. The study also showed strong seasonal and technology-dependent performance, with tracker advantages varying with irradiance and weather conditions.

An international research team has proposed a perovskite solar cell architecture incorporating a thin tetraphenyl-porphine zinc interfacial layer to enhance surface potential, passivate defect states, and improve charge transport. The strategy leads to improved device efficiency and operational stability, enabling power conversion efficiencies exceeding 13%.

Researchers at the University of Queensland have developed a scalable, lead-free perovskite solar cell manufacturing process that achieves record indoor-light efficiency while avoiding toxic materials and enabling flexible consumer electronics applications.

The upcoming Solar Manufacturing USA 2026 conference in Austin will focus on real U.S. solar manufacturing progress, shifting attention from capacity announcements to actual production, costs, yields, and technology choices across the full value chain. It will also examine how policy changes and tariffs are driving domestic expansion in ingots, wafers, cells, and modules, while highlighting competing technologies like back contact, heterojunction and TOPCon.

Soluxtec has entered provisional insolvency proceedings as declining module prices and international competition continue to pressure European solar manufacturers. The company said it plans to restructure operations, maintain module deliveries, and preserve jobs while seeking investors.

Researchers in Austria found that unusually high photovoltaic efficiency in lead-halide perovskites can be explained by internal electric fields generated at strain-induced domain walls, which separate charge carriers and enable long-range transport. Their experiments indicated that these effects arise from mesoscopic structural inhomogeneities rather than a uniform crystal structure, providing a general mechanism for charge separation in these materials.

The divestment, already partially secured via escrow, reflects regulatory pressure from U.S. FEOC policy changes. Boviet Solar also continues negotiations to sell a separate U.S. cell project.

Rosi has raised more than €20 million in a Series B funding round to scale its photovoltaic module recycling business and build a new 10,000-tonne-per-year facility in Teruel, Spain. The company uses pyrolysis-based technology to recover high-purity materials including silver, silicon, copper, aluminium and glass from end-of-life solar modules.

The African Development Bank (AfDB) has launched a hydrogen funding call for African projects, while the European Commission has registered 265 supply opportunities under its Hydrogen Mechanism.

Researchers in Canada designed an air-source heat pump integrated with an air-based solar collector and radiant floor heating for cold climates, showing that the proposed system configuratuon could improve the coefficient of performance from 2–4 to 2–6 and reduce significantly annual energy consumption.

ESS Tech is complementing its iron flow storage offering, which is engeeneered for the 8–24 hour long-duration segment, with sodium-ion battery products aimed at short and medium-duration applications.

The system features AI-driven energy management, 10,000-cycle battery life, and scalable expansion up to 126 kWh.

The first operational round of the EU Hydrogen Facility matched 265 supply-side opportunities with 45 demand projects, with 87% of offers receiving at least one expression of interest and half attracting multiple buyers.