2019

The Taiwanese PV manufacturer said the project will be the largest solar installation on the island. Construction is scheduled to being near the city of Tainan in the second half of 2020.

A group of scientists is proposing a new metric – the value of efficiency – to calculate the maximum allowable cost to increase a cell’s efficiency and improve the levelized cost of electricity (LCOE). The researchers expect that more regional diversification may be seen at the global level in the years to come, with the proposed metric offering higher values in North America, Central and Northern Europe, Japan, Australia, and New Zealand.

The Tokyo-based renewables developer has successfully launched its second solar investment fund, which will include roughly 216 MW (DC) of solar capacity across five sites in Japan.

The transformation of South Australia’s energy system has taken another step forward with early site works at a green hydrogen facility near Adelaide. The plant will integrate what is billed as Australia’s biggest electrolyzer of its kind.

Black Hills Energy is seeking 200 MW of solar power or wind plus energy storage capacity as part of a request for proposal, driven by summer 2019 bids for solar+storage of $0.024/kWh and $0.036/kWh and looming cuts to the 30% investment tax credit.

Ather Energy, an Indian electric scooter maker, has signed a memorandum of understanding with the government of the Indian state of Tamil Nadu to open a new production facility for lithium-ion batteries and electric vehicles.

Newly installed PV capacity hit 3.33 GW in the first 10 months of this year. Feed-in tariffs will drop in December by another 1% and the 52 GW subsidy cap looms, but for the first time, FITs for all project types are now below the €0.10/kWh mark.

The new concept of the Desertec initiative, which was presented at the Energy Transition in the Arab World Conference in Berlin last week, is still based on the idea that large-scale solar and wind energy can be developed and used in the deserts of the Middle East and North Africa. It also includes, however, that hydrogen and other synthetic emission-free energy carriers can also be developed throughout the region with clean energy and then exported to world markets.

Researchers at the U.S. Argonne National Laboratory have applied a combination of machine learning and artificial intelligence to help narrow down a list of 166 billion molecules that could be used to form the basis of a battery electrolyte. The technique, say the researchers, offers a way to greatly reduce the cost of narrowing down such an enormous data set, while still providing a precise understanding of each molecule and its likely suitability.

The 50 MW project is a joint initiative of the country’s Ministry of Energy and the United Nations Development Program.