Solar & Storage Live UK 2025 took place over three days from September 23 to 25 at the NEC venue in the outskirts of Birmingham, the UK’s second largest city. pv magazine spoke to hundreds of industry players keen to optimize existing solar and storage capacity and be at the forefront of the nationwide rooftop PV expansion.

Global energy company EcoFlow’s latest product, Gateway, is a wall mounted hardware system that can be installed indoors or outdoors and is compatible with third-party inverters and diesel generators as well as EcoFlow’s own extensive product suite.

Ireland’s fifth onshore renewable energy auction provisionally allocated 860 MW of solar with the final average price for PV coming in at €0.10063/kWh. ($0.12/kWh).

Three US manufacturers actively working to commercialize their respective perovskite-silicon tandem technologies make the case for tandem modules. CubicPV, Caelux and Swift Solar argue a commercial future for perovskites is inevitable, and they tell pv magazine the current policy environment could work in the technology’s favor.

Data centers’ energy demand is well-documented. Hyperscale AI data centers owned by big-tech companies are placing acute strain on energy infrastructure in the United States, the global data center capital, and many more are expected to come online. There is ongoing debate about how policymakers, grid operators, regulators and the energy industry – renewable or otherwise – can respond to the situation. Battery energy storage systems (BESS) can provide grid-balancing solutions, but not all are convinced they can fully replace gas.

A paper by King’s College London scientists suggests that space-based solar panels (SBSP) could cut Europe’s land-based renewable energy needs by up to 80%, including reducing battery energy storage usage by more than 70%. The authors are now in contact with leading companies such as Space Solar.

Commenting on its report on Ireland and Great British renewable energy curtailment, Montel Energy’s Fintan Devenney described Great Britain’s solar curtailment as “negligible” during the first six months of 2025. Solar curtailment in Ireland has increased sevenfold since 2022, the report found.

Wood MacKenzie predicts that Ireland will meet its 8 GW 2030 solar target but wind, heat pumps, and electric vehicles (EVs) are all lagging behind theirs. Ireland’s current installed solar capacity is just under 2 GW, but this could be increased thanks to favorable policy, grid investments, and energy storage.

Swiss startup Sun-Ways inaugurated its railway PV project in April in Neuchatel, Switzerland, after more than two years of planning. Joseph Scuderi, founder of Sun-Ways, tells pv magazine that the pilot is attracting international attention.

Arctech will supply its SkyLine II tracking system to Shanghai Electric’s 2.3 GW Sadawi Solar Project in Saudi Arabia under a new deal.