Installations

A Chilean startup is using solar energy to produce high-quality drinking water from the humidity in the air. The first plant is located in Chile, but there are plans in the works to expand to Colombia and Peru.

The contest is over. Faster, cheaper, more flexible than gas turbines – battery energy storage must be the future peaking energy service provider of choice, according to a new paper by Australia’s Clean Energy Council.

India had installed 6.8 GW of cumulative rooftop PV capacity by the end of 2020, with consumer-owned systems accounting for about 72% of the total, according to Bridge to India.

The nascent hydrogen economy has seen a good amount of developments in a week that showed an increasing number of players taking part in the game. In the UK, British Airways has invested in hydrogen-electric aircraft developer ZeroAvia with a focus on hydrogen-electric power solutions for 50-plus-seat aircraft. In Brazil, Petrobras has joined forces with Siemens to develop green hydrogen solutions. In Portugal, the government and the European Investment Bank signed a non-binding memorandum of understanding for hydrogen cooperation.

Canadian mining company Trevali will buy power from a solar plant located near its Rosh Pinah mine under a 15-year power purchase agreement.

An energy community in northern Italy will integrate a PV installation with a storage system to power 48 households of a social housing project and a fleet of rented electric vehicles. It is a collective effort that could be replicable as soon as 2023.

Indian scientists tested four kinds of phase change materials (PCMs) for solar module cooling in building-integrated photovoltaics. The PCMs were encapsulated with the PV system and the building envelopes and were also found to be beneficial to the thermal comfort inside the buildings.

Australian public transport operator Transdev will use a “green mobility megawall” comprising 250 solar modules and 10 Tesla Powerwall units to charge two new electric buses in Brisbane.

A homegrown technology developed by the University of Newcastle and Southern Green Gas has seen the development of a novel green hydrogen fuel and carbon-neutral green methane. The fuel was demonstrated in Hyundai’s Nexo hydrogen fuel cell SUV in Sydney.

The new plan comes on top of a scheme launched in late March to deploy solar using railway infrastructure. The Korean government expects private developers will build solar plants on the highways’ idle sites for a combined capacity of 243 MW by 2025.