Installations

Pexapark says that prices for power purchase agreements (PPA) fell 11% in Europe in May. Germany and Spain were the largest markets for PPAs, with deals totaling 245 MW and 317 MW, respectively.

Rezolv Energy, a UK developer, has bought Bulgaria’s largest PV project. The company plans to start building the 227 MW PV facility by the end of this year. It will sell power to unspecified clients under power purchase agreements.

Scientists in India have proposed a new classification of energy sources that is intended for the adoption and definition of emerging technologies, which they said conventional taxonomies fail to achieve.

Malaysia has increased the green energy tariff for residential and industrial consumers through the Green Electricity Tariff (GET) program. The government is offering 4,500 GWh of power to residential and industrial customers each year. These customers will be charged an additional MYR 0.281 ($0.062) for each kilowatt-hour of renewable energy that is purchased.

France’s new feed-in tariffs (FITs) for the second quarter range from €0.2395 ($0.2653)/kWh for installations below 3 kW in size to €0.1268/kWh for arrays ranging in capacity from 100 kW to 500 kW.

Botswana Power Corp. has launched a tender for the development, financing, construction, operation and maintenance of three solar power projects in Maun, Lobatse and Ghanzi.

Clever-PV has developed a manufacturer-independent energy management solution for homes. The app is free to download from app stores and can be connected to PV systems, wall boxes, heat pumps, and other smart devices. This allows users to optimize the use of self-generated solar power.

Scientists in Italy have developed a 5 kW direct-expansion solar-assisted heat pump that uses alternatively two different evaporator technologies. The cooling of the PV module unit by CO2 evaporation increases power production by 8%.

The hail storms that occurred recently in northern Italy damaged several photovoltaic systems. pv magazine Italy retrieved a report from the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam from 2019 which tried to shed light on the damage caused to solar installations by hail by analyzing the effects of a severe hailstorm that occurred in the Netherlands in 2016. According to their assessments, damages to PV modules are mostly derived from hailstones of at least 3 cm in diameter.

Researchers in Canada have found that nearly zero-energy buildings (NZEBs) with on-site solar energy generation should not exceed an energy use intensity (EUI) of 50 kWh/m2a, which they said corresponds to a maximum of 10 floors. They also ascertained that the maximum permitted EUI by net-zero energy status is 17–28 kWh/m2a.