Installations

Local planning committees have given a go-ahead to a £2.5 billion gigafactory in the English West Midlands. The facility will be powered by 100% onsite solar and storage and equipped to both manufacture new batteries and recycle used ones.

The research institute has upgraded its REopt web tool to include ground-source heat pump technologies. US homeowners will now be able to simulate the impact of converting conventional heating and cooling systems to geothermal heat pumps.

The first green bond issued in Bangladesh is attracting investors and funding Beximco Group’s large-scale, Chinese-backed solar PV projects with a combined capacity of 230 MW. The government may soon use bonds to similarly finance infrastructure projects.

Of this new capacity, 8.9 GW may come from distributed generation and 3.2 GW from utility scale solar. By the end of December 2022, the country’s installed solar power should reach 25 GW, according to new figures from Brazilian trade body ABSolar.

Cornell Researchers have found that upstate New Yorkers prefer rooftop solar to community solar under 50 acres, but opinions are split 50/50 over large-scale ground mounts. The distaste for utility-scale solar is strongest when converting forests, public land and productive farmland.

The world’s largest coal seaport is now powered by 100% renewable energy, following the confirmation of a new deal between the Port of Newcastle, Australia, and the Australian unit of Spanish energy group Iberdrola.

A worsening price shock, felt to different degrees across Europe, has now seen renewable power purchase agreement tariffs climb for three consecutive quarters. Despite that, however, developers and energy buyers are still signing contracts, with non-standard agreements on the rise, according to renewable transaction infrastructure provider LevelTen Energy.

Spanish researchers have developed a new modeling technique to assess the performance of semi-transparent PV systems for greenhouses. Their novel approach considers the broadband and spectral content of the irradiance, the solar cell technology and its performance metrics, and the relationship between the photosynthetic rate and the effective photon flux that falls on the crops.

The 162MW (AC) Columboola Solar Farm in the Western Downs region of Queensland, Australia, has been successfully connected to the transmission network. Queensland government-owned CS Energy has agreed to purchase 100% of the 440GWh of annual capacity over the next 10 years.

With Emergency Ordinance no. 143/2021, the Romanian government has restored legal certainty for bilateral power purchase agreements and has created more favorable conditions for solar power generators under net metering regime.