Highlights

The development entity driving the first stage of a planned 60 MW solar plant has announced a doubling in the amount of borrowing secured for a project which was supposed to be operational in 2018.

The Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairs and Climate Policy is now reviewing 54,109 renewable energy projects totaling 5.17 GW in the first round of the SDE+ program for 2021. Solar accounts for around 80% of the total submitted capacity.

A surge of Italian PV project activity is soon expected if the local authorities get out of the way. With the market, financial and policy settings in place, the market is set to see a return to bustling PV project activity, with regulatory reforms clearing the way forward, reports Sergio Matalucci in Milan.

Meanwhile, on the Iberian Peninsula, H2 Green Steel (H2GS) and Iberdrola plan to establish a 1 GW green hydrogen production facility, and Acciona and Plug Power want to deploy green hydrogen facilities across Spain and Portugal.

The Taiwanese solar manufacturer has raised US$22 million through a private placement of shares and will use the funds to support its solar capacity expansion plans.

An above-average employee sickness absence is forcing the Switzerland-based solar panel manufacturer to slow down production until the end of January. Meyer Burger has also informed customers that the prices for its solar modules will rise in the coming year.

A German-Italian research team has designed an inverted perovskite solar cell with a short-circuit current of 1.184 V and a remarkable fill factor of 85%. The device was built by modifying its interfaces with large organic cations.

Scientists in the United States turned to artificial intelligence to speed up their search for new materials for use in a flow battery. The group developed a machine learning algorithm that could search a dataset of potential materials and identify those with the ideal balance of different characteristics that make it suitable for use in a flow batteries. The group says its algorithm could be applied to other battery technologies, and even in other fields.

Taiwanese module manufacturer Inventec Solar has accumulated about $70.2 million of debt.

Intersolar India 2021, a three-day solar exhibition, kicked off this week in Gujarat. Companies such as Indian solar manufacturers Adani Solar, Pixon, and Saatvik spoke to pv magazine about their plans to ramp up production and launch new technologies.